Urban resilience and migration governance in Tunisia’s unstable political environment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tunisia is discovering a new migration pattern, with new arrivals staying rather than transiting, given the agreements between the EU and Tunisia to secure their borders. And this is happening in an extremely unstable environment that oscillates between democracy and autocracy. In this scenario, Tunisian cities are becoming catalysts for migration governance resilience. Drawing on the extensive literature on urban resilience but applied to pressures caused by human factors, this article proposes in the first section to use this category of analysis in the under-researched field of urban migration governance. In the second section, the main sources and methodology of the fieldwork conducted in July 2021 will be briefly presented before reviewing the Tunisian context from a city perspective. Then, in a third section, we will turn to the main findings that establish that migration governance and urban resilience go hand in hand for the ongoing transformative democratic process in Tunisia, or its stagnation. Concluding remarks will assess the empirical potential of the urban resilience approach for the analysis of similar processes in this Mediterranean sub-region.