This event has been co-organised by the LSE Middle East Centre and the Society for Algerian Studies.
This lecture by Dr Charis Boutieri explores how Tunisian citizens, free to deliberate in public after the political upheavals of 2011, laboured to build a better society through the frameworks of revolution and democracy.
Boutieri will chronicle how, within a burgeoning public sphere, both revolution and democracy unfolded in a unique way, which was unrecognizable to many other scholars of the region who have approached Tunisia looking for the predetermined track of liberal transformation.
The Tunisian revolution and democracy have been comparatively understudied and poorly understood despite having inspired a wave of political contestation in the SWANA region and anti-establishment movements from the South Mediterranean to North America. Much of the scholarship has viewed the Tunisian case as an approximation to a political and social ideal, prescribing interventions where it hasn’t measured up. By attending to practices of public deliberation happening across Tunisia since the 2011 revolution, this talk escapes both idealism and prescription and gives space to Tunisian citizens to teach us how to view revolution and democracy anew.
Meet the speaker
Charis Boutieri is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at King’s College London. She is the author of Learning in Morocco: Language Politics and the Abandoned Educational Dream (Indiana University Press, 2016). From 2018-2023 she served as associate editor for the Journal of North African Studies. Articles that relate to her talk can be found in the American Ethnologist (2024), History and Anthropology (2023), and the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology (2021).
This event will be moderated by Hugh Roberts.
Hugh Roberts is a Visiting Professor at the LSE Middle East Centre. He is is a specialist on North Africa and has carried out in-depth research, including extensive fieldwork, on Algeria in particular. He was the Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University from 2012 to 2022. Roberts is the author of The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002. Studies in a broken polity (Verso, 2003; p/b 2015); Berber Government: the Kabyle polity in pre-colonial Algeria (I.B. Tauris, 2014; p/b 2017); Algérie-Kabylie: Études et interventions (Éditions Barzakh, 2014); and Gouvernement Berbère: La Cité kabyle dans l’Algérie précoloniale (Éditions Barzakh, 2023).
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