Tunisia: Understanding Conflict 2012 - Johns Hopkins School of ...

Tunisian Civil Society Before and After the Revolution
Daniel Lawner
What do the Tunisian Union of Industry, Commerce and Artisans (UTICA) and the
Tunisian Association for Development and Education (ATED) have in common? In most
ways, they could not be more different as organizations. UTICA represents the interests
of large business and industry in Tunisia. Their elegant corporate headquarters in Tunis
was built using funds from the authoritarian government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and
their concerns include representing Tunisian business interests within the country and
helping to attract foreign investment. ATED, meanwhile, is a local organization based in
the inland city Kairouan that offers educational programming to promote local
development and student participation in the city’s civic life. ATED is headed by a
committed teacher whom I met at a computer station at a web and social-media training
center in Kairouan while he was tweaking the organization’s bare-bones website (SAIS
Group Meeting, Kairouan, 28 January 2012). In the loosest sense of the term, however,
these organizations are both “civil society organizations”—both represent the collective
interests groups of citizens larger than the family unit, and neither are governmental
bodies or political parties. And, as this paper will explore, both are operating in an
environment which is hopeful but uncertain: civil society in Tunisia can, for the first time
in Tunisia’s history, operate uninhibited by tight government control and the paranoia
that results from persistent repression.
Before we investigate the state of civil society in Tunisia, however, we must
specify what we mean by civil society. In her 1995 assessment of civil society in Tunisia,
Eva Bellin described “civil society” as an “exquisitely ambiguous term…elastic enough
to accommodate a wide variety of political ambitions but historically weighty enough to
imbue each with a deep moral resonance” (Bellin 1995, 120). Civil society can be
defined narrowly as the roster of registered NGOs in a country or broadly as all forms of
“associational life” ranging from local soccer clubs to multi-billion dollar corporations.
Regardless of the inclusiveness of our definition, civil society organizations should serve
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