Our research fellow will present the paper titled "Covid-19 and shrinking space for civil society mobilisations in hybrid regimes and fragile democracies. The cases of Algeria and Tunisia"
Published on 22 August 2022
This paper explores how has the pandemic transformed the political opportunities of civil society and social movements in two countries characterised by a revolutionary process - the Hirak movement in Algeria and a bumpy democratization process in Tunisia. In other words, how the power relations between national authorities and their internal opponents have changed in two countries classified as a faltering democracy (Tunisia) and a hybrid regime (Algeria) after the outbreak of the pandemic? More broadly speaking, how the reconfiguration of power relations given by the pandemic, including the countries turning in on themselves, has affected the state of democratisation in the two countries? By answering these questions, this article sits at the intersection of the literature on contentious politics and democratization studies. Finally, the analysis contributes to broaden the investigation of the impact of global challenges on the reconfiguration of domestic power relations from a theoretical and empirical perspective.
The paper will be presented by the BIT-ACT research fellow in the panel Civil Society Protests and the Pandemic: A View from the (Global) South.