Tunisia’s migration politics throughout the 2011 revolution: revisiting the democratisation–migrant rights nexus

Abstract

How does democratisation affect the politics of migration? This paper analyses Tunisian immigration and emigration politics in the decade before and after the 2011 revolution, drawing on 57 interviews with Tunisian high-level civil servants, as well as representatives of civil society and international organisations. It shows that the democratisation of policy processes and the expansion of citizens’ political freedoms did not result in pro-migrant rights reforms, but instead led to the continuation of restrictive migration policies inherited from Tunisia’s authoritarian past. The paper explains this by dissecting the ambiguous effects of democratisation on political legitimisation, as well as on inter-institutional and transnational dynamics of migration policymaking. It demonstrates that despite the unprecedented dynamism of Tunisian civil society and efforts of various institutional actors to reform Tunisia’s security-driven migration policy, there were both domestic and international forces that put brakes on migration reform. By focussing on the intricacies of Tunisian migration policymaking, this analysis allows to advance theory-building on the link between political regimes and migration politics, to revisit regime transformations from the inside and to overcome the still-dominant Eurocentrism in scholarly debates on North African migration policies.