On the surface, the 2011 Tunisian Revolution seems attributable primarily to economic causes, social media, and the army’s refusal to back the regime of President Zine El-‘Abidine Ben ‘Ali. A deeper look reveals that its success depended on the interaction between the structural brittleness of a regime that had alienated many key civilian constituencies and the emergence of sustained, cross-class, geographically widespread, mass demonstrations. These demonstrations were facilitated by Islamist moderation, secularist-Islamist rapprochement within the opposition, and the actions of the Tunisian General Union of Labor (Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail, or UGTT). In the wake of Ben ‘Ali’s departure, Islamist moderation and the fruits of secularist-Islamist rapprochement facilitated the holding of elections and the drafting of a new constitution.
This article explores how the Tunisian revolution was articulated on Twitter; it does so through a detailed analysis of a sample of more than 100,000 tweets posted between 18 December 2010 and 15 January 2011 with the hashtag #sidibouzid. In addition to this analysis nine active #sidibouzid users were interviewed. This examination shows that #sidibouzid constituted a global communication space in which different public audiences were strategically addressed through a variety of languages. How key users employed the different languages and the platform itself depended very much on their particular position in the Arab diaspora network.
Schmitt insists that the sovereign decision is unavoidable, that even an anarchist is caught in the trap of sovereignty when he tries to ‘decide against decision’. This article begins to think about a critical legal vocabulary that might suspend the necessity of the will to constitute, while emphasising the creativity of the constituent moment. The terms inoperativity, disenclosure and dissensus are developed and deployed in order to think about certain aspects of the Tunisian revolution. In particular, the article focuses upon the refusal of the state of the situation, the subtraction of loyalty and the insistence of a form of life beyond Ben Ali’s sovereign order.