10 years since Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s flight to Jeddah

14 January 2021 marked 10 years since Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s flight to Jeddah. Despite strict lockdown orders imposed to prevent long-expected protests, people in Tunis’s working-class neighbourhoods have taken to the streets since the anniversary of Ben Ali’s flight in January.
This anniversary has been marked by a flurry of online conferences and publications, some of which are highlighted below. The Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT) has made three conferences/interviews around the topic available through their Maghrib in Past and Present podcast:

Elsewhere, Mounir Saidani and Thierry Brésillon explore hopes of a new revolution through large-scale popular movements, and fears of a counter-revolution by the state’s elites, while Khdadija Mohsen-Finan and Olfa Mamoun wonder about the legacies of the revolution.

Widening its focus to the wider region, the latest special issue of Confluences Méditerrannée brings together research on “revolutions and counter-revolutions” focusing on political transformations in Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Lybia.

The DREAM research project (DRafting and Enacting the Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean. In Search for Dignity – from the 1950’s until today) has made their recently published L’Esprit de la révolte: Archives et des révolutions arabes (edited by Leyla Dakhli) available on their website. Contributors Kmar Bendana and Elena Chiti discuss the project and questions around the Tunisia revolution and its archives on Le Cours de l’Histoire.

Podcast NIOD REWIND ep. 3 Natalya Vince

Anne van Mourik spoke with historian Natalya Vince of the University of Portsmouth. Natalya has carried out extensive field research in both Algeria and France since 2005 including interviewing Algerian women who participated in the War of Independence (1954-1962) about their experiences in post-colonial Algeria and their memories of the conflict. Her monograph Our fighting sisters: nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954-2012 was published by Manchester University Press in May 2015 and was winner of the Women’s History Network Annual Book Prize in 2016.