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On 14 January 2011, what has become known as the Jasmine Revolution forced Tunisia's dictator of 23 years, President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, to give up power and leave the country. After just 28 days of protests that even lethal police repression could not quell, senior Tunisian military officers resolved that Ben Ali would have to go because they found themselves asked to turn their guns on the Tunisian people- which they refused to do. As the winter evening fell, he found himself boarding a plane bound for exile in Saudi Arabia.
A spontaneous and secular popular uprising, driven by young Tunisians using social media such as Facebook and Twitter, had revealed a civil society intent on securing the Arab world's first democracy. The uprising also prompted a regionwide domino effect, as prodemocracy demonstrators began to confront dictators across the Middle East and North Africa. In the "Arab Spring" of 2011, Tunisia is "case zero." Understanding how that case unfolded-and where it might lead-should be of interest to all students and friends of democracy in this so far most democracy-resistant of all world regions.
To say that Ben Ali's sudden fall caught specialists by surprise would be an understatement. His mukhabarat (intelligence-based) police state had turned back an outbreak of popular unrest as recently as 2008, and at age 74 he remained, if not youthful, at least aware and seemingly in charge. Ben Ali was only the second president that Tunisia has had since it won independence from France in the mid-1950s. He gained that office by means of a 1987 constitutional coup against 84-year-old Habib Bourguiba, whose erratic behavior during his later years had damaged his revered status as one of the founding fathers of modern Tunisia.
Defying early hopes that he would prove a liberalizer after packing Bourguiba off into involuntary retirement, Ben Ali had instead built an authoritarian regime that some considered impervious to change owing to the creation of a "strong neo-corporatist state" or the "force of obedience" or an "authoritarian syndrome" in Tunisian society.1 The new regime adopted "le changement" (change) as its mantra, and marked the November 7 anniversary of Ben Ali's putsch every year with much fanfare celebrating Tunisia's "democratic transition." As Mark Gasiorowski concluded in these pages...