Policy Brief

Dec 22, 2016

Tunisia’s Postcolonial Identity Crisis

A Key to Understanding the Lure of Extremism

In Tunisia today, the hotly debated question of national identity opens up a vacuum for radical groups to fill. After years of repression, the post-2011 period of democracy and freedom of speech has allowed Tunisians to conduct grass-roots discussions of what they identify with. As political groups play different identity cards, and as jihadists cast a wide net for disaffected youth, defining what it means to be Tunisian turns out to be a divisive practice indeed.

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