National Security and Free Speech in Tunisia

Abstract

Chapters 6-8 interrogate how journalists react when critical features of democracy are at stake and the first issue is the balancing of national security and civil liberties. Tunisia and Lebanon face real and home-grown problems of violent extremism, but security is also evoked to justify infringements on citizen rights. The chapter discusses how Tunisian journalists handled the tension between a heightened sense of insecurity and the country’s frail democratic opening in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum. It shows that prominent commentators fell back on interpretive schema from the Ben Ali era when they tried to make sense of the terrorist attack, thus facilitating the authoritarian drift of the Tunisian government at the time. The fraught relationship between the right to free speech and appeals to national security has characterized press-politics dynamics since. Paradoxically, the real losers in the aftermath of the Bardo attack proved to be not the Islamists who were so roundly condemned, but liberal civil society activists and journalists.