Mounir Saidani

The opportunity given by Global Dialogue to Maghrebian sociologists to disseminate insights into their work and process of scientific production is a great occasion to shed light on an “invisible” sociology. To be fair, “native” sociologists as well as their Diaspora colleagues scattered all over the world have so far made little effort to be visible. This is true even if the situations in Anglophone and Francophone worlds...

Over the past few decades, Tunisia has widely been analyzed in positive terms as a changing society. No more than ten years following the 2010-2011 Tunisian Revolution, however, analysts are less optimistic, developing stories of failure and crisis. Over the last year, the health crisis has become a social one, plunging nearly a quarter of the population into poverty. The crisis Tunisia is witnessing is threefold: it is at the same time economic, political...

At the end of February, 2011, Sari Hanafi emailed me asking if I can help him find translators for the Arab version of Global Dialogue. I saw this as one of the happy consequences of the Tunisian Revolution, only some weeks after the fall of Zein Al-Dine Ben Ali. Nevertheless, I wondered whether my English was good enough to do it personally. My attempts to find translators failed, so I decided to do it myself, yet via the French version which was...

Three contradictory aspects of the current Tunisian situation are shaping the work of sociologists: tremendous political change, an expanded freedom of expression, and the advent of a new wave of social movements. Given the rapidity of social change, Tunisian sociologists have largely responded in individualistic ways. Post-Revolutionary Context The Ben Ali dictatorship ended on January 14, 2011...