Charis Boutieri (King's College London). Speaking Freedom: The Tunisian public sphere between revolution and democracy
| Dates: | 8 December 2025 |
|---|
| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
|---|
| What is it: | Seminar |
|---|
| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
|---|
| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
|---|
| Speaker: | Charis Boutieri |
|---|
|
This talk will present my forthcoming book, which interrogates the historical formations and contemporary reconfigurations of the Tunisian public sphere. While profoundly delimited under the French Protectorate (1861–1956), the nationalist single-party regime of Habib Bourguiba (1956–1987), and the authoritarian police state of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987–2011), the public sphere nonetheless underwent a striking resurgence during the 2011 revolution and the institutional transformations that followed. It became both an object of reflection and a vehicle for systematic intervention by Tunisians across social, political, and generational divides. Through the analytic lens of ethnography, the book examines how deliberative practices among diverse constituencies generated shifting imaginaries of collective life and popular sovereignty. In doing so, it complicates the normative parameters of the Habermasian model of dispassionate rational exchange among formally equal citizens. Rather than replicating liberal-democratic ideals, Tunisian practices of deliberation reveal a democratic project marked by instability, contestation, and the continual renegotiation of its terms and registers. The book advances the argument that instability is not merely symptomatic of democratic fragility but constitutive of democracy itself. It posits that revolution and democracy are experientially, discursively, and conceptually entwined, providing overlapping frameworks within which Tunisians articulate peoplehood, negotiate freedoms, and redefine the scope of political belonging
Charis Boutieri is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at King’s College London. She is author of Learning in Morocco (IUP 2016) and co-editor of special issues on contemporary North Africa (JNAS 2018) and Public Reason (JRAI 2025). A former Leverhulme Trust and British Academy fellow, she researches public life and politics.
Speaker
Charis Boutieri
Organisation: King's College London
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Boardroom (2.016-17)
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
