Round Table 9 March, 7:15 pm at Sciences Po
▸ Register 

with

Co-chair : Shreya Parikh (Sciences Po, CERI-CNRS) and Mhamed Oualdi (Centre for History at Sciences Po)

• Huda Mzioudet, activist and researcher at University of Toronto
• Mahmoud Kaba, Chargé de programme-migration, EuroMed Rights
• Hela Yousfi, maître de conférences HDR, Université Paris-Dauphine-PSL
• Nadia Marzouki (Sciences Po, CERI-CNRS), 

Face to face and online seminar. French and English 

POPULISM, MIGRATION POLICIES, AND RACISM IN TUNISIA

On 21 February 2023, Tunisia’s president Kaïs Saied called a meeting with the National Security Council to take urgent measures “to address the phenomenon of the influx of large numbers of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to Tunisia.” He claimed that certain parties “received huge sums of money after 2011” in order to make Tunisia “a purely African country with no affiliation with the Arab and Islamic nations.” This Great Replacement-type discourse unleashed a state- and civilian-supported violence from Tunisians against ‘Africans’ – Black and dark- skinned folks of both sub-Saharan and Tunisian origin, who were seen as foreigners, “uncivilized”, “illegal”, prone to all forms of vice and needing to be controlled.
The round-table will bring together academics from different fields and civil-society members to reflect on three sets of interrelated questions, one about how the current affirmation of “white” nationalism and populism in Tunisia is related to a broader politic around migration in Europe and throughout the Mediterranean; the other about the current outburst of anti-Black racism and how it expresses an older and more structural form of anti-Blackness in Tunisian history. Finally: what do these events and the arrestation of political opponents tell us about the political and economic crisis and the survival of democracy in Tunisia?