The Democracy-Promotion Metanarrative as a Set of Frames: Is There an Indigenous Counter-Narrative?

Abstract

The Tunisian uprisings projected an elusive surrealistic scene that was an aberration in a part of the world where Islamic ideology had been considered the only rallying force and a midwife for regime change. However, this sense of exceptionalism was short-lived, as the religiously zealous Islamist expats and their militant executive wings infiltrated the power vacuum to resume their suspended Islamization project of the 1980s. Brandishing electoral “legitimacy”, they attempted to reframe the bourgeoning indigenous democratization project, rooted in an evolving Tunisian intellectual and cultural heritage, along the neocolonial ideological underpinnings of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative, which proffers the thesis that democracy can be promoted in the Muslim world through so-called “Moderate Muslims”. This paper challenges this dominant narrative by offering a counter-narrative about the political transition in Tunisia. It takes stock of the multidisciplinary conceptual and analytical frameworks elaborated upon in postcolonial theory, social movement theory, cognitive neuroscience theories, and digital communication theories. It draws heavily on socio-narrative translation theory. The corpus analyzed in this work consists of disparate yet corroborating narratives cutting across modes, genres, and cultural and linguistic boundaries, and is grounded in insider participant observation. This work opens an alternative inquiry into how the processes of cross-cultural knowledge production and the power dynamics they sustain have helped shape the course of the transition since 2011.

1. Introduction

The Tunisian uprisings of January 2011 showcased the profound power of creative expression in challenging authoritarianism and envisioning a new socio-political reality. The absence of Islamist ideology, i.e., political doctrines that seek to establish a state governed by Islamic law and religious authority, and the gendered symbolism of the slogans articulated by its principal actors, including the predominantly unveiled Tunisian women, claiming equal rights for “Employment, freedom, and dignity”, were accentuated by the captivating voice of underground singer Amel Methlouthi. Her protest hymn “My Word is Free” resonated in the Tunisian public squares, rallying thousands of protestors around her before they took on a more openly international bent, inspiring movements across the (Arab) world. By intertwining art with activism, the female artist’s protest anthem and the strikingly reverberating voice of the Tunisian men and women, who jointly and melodiously echoed the universal message of her words, offered an extremely powerful cross-cultural counter-narrative to the time-honored Orientalist accounts about the region and its people. They showcased the shaky foundations of Western reductionist assumptions about the impermeability of the MENA region to democratic ideals and peaceful regime change, and women’s social marginality and invisibility in the public square and decision-making processes in the Muslim world.

Contrary to dominant Orientalist expectations, the Tunisian uprisings unfolded without the imprint of Islamist ideology, that is, political movements or actors seeking to institute governance based on Islamic law or religious authority. From a Western perspective, the absence of religious slogans, clerical leadership, or calls for an Islamic state was striking. This distinguishes the Tunisian uprisings from other historical revolutionary movements in the Muslim world, where Islamic ideology served as a central mobilizing force. Most notably, the Iranian Revolution (1979) still represents a powerful example of how religious ideology (clerical leadership, Shi’a symbolism, and Islamic eschatology) can shape and drive political upheaval in the Muslim world and play a unifying and legitimizing role. In contrast, the Tunisian uprisings were conspicuously free of explicit religious or Islamist slogans, figures, or frameworks. There were no references to Islam, the Islamic state, or religious slogans such as “Islam is the solution”, which historically characterized Islamist political platforms, particularly those of the Muslim Brotherhood, and informed the Islamic activism which gained ground in Tunisia in the 1980s and 90s when movements such as Ennahda, the leading offshore opposition party, openly pursued the establishment of an Islamic state. Indeed, in his study of the Ennahda’s ideological orientation and political objectives, Tunisian scholar of political Islam Aziz Enhaili (2010) states that “inspired by the Iranian Revolution, Ghannouchi, the leader of the MTI (the former name of Ennahda) declared ‘During this century [the fifteenth Muslim century which was about to begin] Islam will go from defense to attack. It will reach new heights. It will be the century of the Islamic state’” (p. 396). However, the visual and symbolic landscape of the early phases of the Tunisian uprisings did not resemble that of Islamist-led movements.

In the months straddling the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and the elections of October 2011, Tunisians saw themselves as one “people” endowed with agency, as expressed in the uprising’s slogan “the people want” and the Tunisian poet al-Shabbi’s most compelling and influential (anticolonial) couplet “If the people will to live; Destiny must respond”. Immortalized in Tunisia’s national anthem, the enduring belief in the power of collective will to overcome oppression and shape a better future was captivating. It struck a chord with global and regional constituencies longing for freedom. The surrealistic scenes emanating from Tunisia were manifestations of an upsurge of deep cultural and political democratic wherewithal that had been distributed through a robust universal civic education system. The latter has given Tunisia an exceptionally high literacy level, particularly among women, which is the highest both in the region and beyond and is widely admired (UNDP 2010). It might not be too contentious to argue that the unleashed repository of democratic and democratization practices; and the bottom-up, grassroots, and non-collective forms of political agency that took the Western observers and constituencies by surprise were sustained and consolidated by the insurgency of various cultural practices; a Tunisian common sense nurtured by endogenous dynamics shaping the country’s postcolonial history.

Much of what might have added to the caliber and longevity of the image of Arab “exceptionalism” emanating from Tunisia during the early days of the uprisings were the astounding democratic mechanisms that were put in place by Tunisian constitutional law experts and an intrepid civil society which filled out the political vacuum after the fall of the regime and dissolution of Parliament. Never before had the will of the civil society of an Arab country, for so long stigmatized for its impermeability to peaceful democratic change, lived up to its latent potential and set up a model of direct democracy, paving the ground for a seamless transition towards an institutionalized democracy, unmatched even by exemplary Western democratic standards. The Higher Authority for the Realization of the Objectives of the Revolution, Political Reform, and Democratic Transition (HIROR), established on 15 March 2011 two months after the regime’s fall, was a temporary form of direct democracy. It offered a platform that brought together civil society’s most prominent experts and actors, representatives of political parties, professional associations, national organizations, and independent national figures, including women’s rights activists, to adopt the statutory instruments necessary for the state to operate following the dissolution of Parliament. The HIROR provided a stable temporary platform for Tunisians to follow their better angels and chart their path, developing a unique model rooted in their deeply ingrained democratic culture and tradition of dialog reflective of their national identity and aspirations.

What gave the Tunisian democratic transition an overtone of uniqueness in the lead-up to the 2011 elections was that within the HIROR and the other provisional commissions, which were led and dominated by men, female voices rang out loud and clear to carve a space for the promotion of gender equality, a founding constitutional ideal since 1956 which has been at the heart of the country’s democratization journey. Unsurprisingly, despite the steadfast opposition of the returning Islamist expats, male activists and women’s rights advocates successfully fought for gender equality in the electoral law of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) adopted by the commission, ensuring women’s representation in drafting Tunisia’s new social and political pact. Their efforts culminated in the 10 May 2011 Decree, with Article 16 mandating parity and alternation in electoral lists, a milestone for Tunisia, the region, and the uprising’s legacy. Another exemplary moment in which the public space was claimed back from the returning Islamist expats to testify to the correlation between the transition to democracy and the promotion of gender equality in the subconscious socio-cultural norms of the majority of Tunisians was when the interim government lifted all of the Tunisian state’s reservations to the UN Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) under pressure from the male and female activists. The latter orchestrated a sit-in at the Prime Ministry following the return of the Islamist movement’s leader, a moment whose timing and global media coverage evoked parallels with Khomeini’s return from exile in 1979. Despite skepticism from international observers and Western scholars (Derichs and Fennert 2014; Borovsky and Yahia 2012), who often dismissed Muslim societies as inherently patriarchal and resistant to women’s rights, Tunisia defied expectations. The state fulfilled its 2011 promise to the activists and officially lifted key reservations on the CEDAW on 23 April 2014, following the fall of the Islamist-majority government under popular pressure (the departure sit-in and the suspension of the NCA during the summer of 2013).

By placing gender equality at the heart of their democratic aspirations, Tunisians demonstrated that their progress was the product of a shared vision for a just and equitable society, challenging stereotypes and setting an example for the region and the international community. With hindsight, it is evident that the majority of Tunisian men and women had embraced the conviction that women’s historical rights, which were enshrined in the Tunisian Code of Personal Status of 1956, were inalienable birth rights. This shared belief drove their collective efforts to ensure that women’s rights were not only preserved but also integrated into the core principles of Tunisia’s democratic identity during the constitution-drafting process. This crucial phase of the transition was (un)surprisingly led by the returning Islamist expats who leveraged the efforts and achievements of the endogenous democratic actors to brandish a dubious electoral “legitimacy” to coopt the democratic and economic aspirations of the Tunisian people (Ben Hadj Salem 2024), disrupting the spontaneous overflow of the endogenous transformative dynamics. These dynamics represent a good example of what American political theorist Wolin (1994) means by “Fugitive democracy”. It is “a project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action of realizing them” (p. 1). It was not a form of government or a type of politics characterized by its experimentalism, as the transition period was framed by the West, the international community, and the political actors in Tunisia.

Most retrospective narratives of the uprisings and their aftermath, which cut across linguistic and cultural borders and were promoted by Western academia (and media), emphasized the absence of Western intervention in the uprisings that led to the fall of the dictatorship. They substantiated this thesis by studying the bottom-up nature of civil society’s engagement (Gerges 2013; Gana 2013; Alexander 2013) and the pivotal role grassroots organizations, professional associations, and trade unions played during the uprisings (Bellin 2012). Scholars, like Howard and Hussain (2013), capitalized on the liberating role of social media, while others celebrated the end of postcolonialism and the rise in a new socio-cultural order (Dabashi 2012). The introductory chapter of Nouri Gana’s comprehensive examination of the factors that led to the uprisings, The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects (Gana 2013), captures the fugitive moments of democracy during the uprisings. The book uniquely includes contributions from scholars across cultural borders, incorporating insights from Tunisian and Western academics, and Tunisian voices within Western academia. This collection of essays examined the historical and political backgrounds of the uprisings, including protracted authoritarianism, which the contributors underscored was at odds with the democratic spirit showcased by the ideologically unanchored masses during the uprisings and their aftermath. It also explored the economic and social factors, the role of the media and digital activism, and how cultural resistance contributed to the revolutionary consciousness of the Tunisian people. The contributors also scathingly criticized the US and the International Community’s unwavering support for one of the most protracted dictatorships in the region.

While the diverse array of perspectives that the anthology offers enriches the analysis, providing a multifaceted understanding of the uprisings that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries, the thesis that the anthology proffers is at odds with the distinctive socio-cultural and historical dynamics informing the endogenous democratic project and its pro-gender-equality overtone. The concept of ‘collaborative revolutionism,’ coined by the Tunisian–American scholar, aimed to persuade a global English-speaking readership that the Tunisian ‘Revolution’ had no master narrative. The scholar presented this argument with insider authority. However, this finite rhetorical framework quickly gave way to a series of narratives that portrayed the actions of Ennahda, the majority Islamist party in the National Constitutional Assembly, and its leader, Rached Ghannouchi, in a democratic light. This shift was surprising. As noted in Enhaili’s study (Enhaili 2010), Ghannouchi openly advocated for the establishment of an Islamic state in Tunisia during the 1980s and 1990s. His project not only lost traction with Western audiences, particularly in the global “war on terror” context, but also led to his being denied entry to the United States for over two decades on terrorism-related grounds (Kramer 1994). In the same vein, some (Western) contributions to the anthology sought to rebrand Ennahda as a democratic political force by ideologically reconfiguring an Islamist spectrum that was neither historically entrenched nor popularly recognized within Tunisia. Rather, this spectrum is a newly constructed and unfolding framework, one that began to emerge only after being largely suspended since the early 1990s, and which remains unfamiliar to most Tunisians. These narratives strategically positioned Ennahda at the center as a moderate Islamist movement, while placing Salafist groups on the far-right end of the spectrum. In doing so, they simultaneously associated all progressive aspects of the Tunisian postcolonial societal model with secularism and Westernization, thereby manipulating the country’s complex socio-cultural history. A striking example of this ideological maneuvering, indeed, a triumph of ideology over historical fact, is found in the introduction by the editor of the volume, who challenges long-held Tunisian assumptions about the society’s historical and cultural impermeability to Salafi-Jihadi doctrines. In a self-congratulatory tone, he introduced Chapter 11, authored by Fabio Merone and Francesco Cavatorta, which attempted to construct a genealogy of Salafism in Tunisia, divided into non-violent scientific, politically engaged, and violent jihadi strands. These categories are ideologically framed and often difficult for Tunisians themselves to distinguish or navigate. Among the various factors the authors put forward to explain the rise in these non-indigenous, radical forms of religious expression, they explicitly suggested that such developments emerged as a reactionary counter-response to decades of authoritarian secularism. Even more revealing is Monica Marks’ contribution (Chapter 10), which rewrites the history of women’s rights in Tunisia by casting women in Islamist movements (Ennahda and the Salafist orbit) as agents of emancipation, portraying them as liberating Tunisian women from the alleged shackles of Western models and reinstating their Islamic identity (Gana 2013). These reinterpretations not only distort historical realities but also reframe Islamist ideology in a more palatable light for a global/Western audience. In doing so, they help bolster the legitimacy of Islamist movements while delegitimizing the former regime by associating it with authoritarianism and atheistic secularism. This discursive shift ultimately recasts Islamist actors as authentic, moderate alternatives that fit within Western frameworks of identity and diversity.

This study focuses on the period between January 2011 and January 2014, when the majority Islamist party was endowed with the central role of leading both the political transition and the constitution-drafting process. Rather than exploring the potentialities of ordinary Tunisian citizens, their common concerns, and their modes of action to realize their long-overdue and unique democratic project during the post-uprising moments, for the most part, the narratives on this phase of the Tunisian transition turned their attention elsewhere. (Un)Surprisingly, they directed their lens towards the returning transnational Islamist expats and their emerging Salafist orbit, highlighting their pivotal role in the success of an exemplary democratic experiment in the region. The appeal that such a thesis found within the echoing global media was impressive, as reflected, for instance, in their coverage of the transition and the constitution ratification ceremony in January 2014. The global media unabashedly manipulated the local narratives, which framed the ceremony as a celebration of the victory of the Tunisian men and women who fought a protracted battle against the regressive, undemocratic constitutional project championed by the Islamists and forced them to step down under another wave of popular uprisings in the summer of 2013. Their coverage helped flesh out a global democratization narrative that was at odds with the indigenous dynamics and the aspirations of the Tunisian masses during the constitution-drafting process, painting with an Islamist brush every single article promoting human rights and women’s rights in the new constitution, which they marketed as the first of its kind in the “Islamic world”. This stance was at odds with the well-established metanarrative of the War on Terror that had painted everything Islamic with a terrorist brush, which stimulated deeper research and inquisitive inquiry into a possible paradigm shift in Western strategic thinking about the region and transnational Islamic movements.

Against this backdrop, the following questions warrant consideration: What magic had hypnotized the Western media to abandon the time-honored Orientalist lens, which had conflated all expressions of Islam and Islamic-inspired political movements with extremism, anti-Westernism, and anti-Americanism (Said 1997), and to embark on alleviating Western anxiety about the so-called “moderate Islamists”, marketing them as the only political force in Tunisia that could play the democratic game and put the country on a democratic track? How does the ideological framework of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative differ from that of the War on Terror narrative, particularly in their respective portrayals of agency, democracy promotion, and regional transformation? What are the key ideological constructs embedded within the “Arab Spring” metanarrative, and how do they shape perceptions of political change in the Middle East? What role did academia and U.S. centers of strategic studies play in shaping the ideological foundations of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative, and how did their contributions influence the framing of the uprisings in the global media, policy, and public discourse? What role did neo-Orientalist experts and native co-authors, translators, and interpreters play in the construction and dissemination of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative? Did they help reinforce or subvert hegemonic power structures? How did the “Arab Spring” metanarrative influence the political transition in Tunisia, and what implications did it have for the indigenous vision for democratization?

To answer these questions, this work assumes that the global media narratives reinforce, and are reinforced by, the structure of power relations between the MENA and the United States (and the Western world). Accordingly, they represent sites of neocolonial encounters between the West, led by the US, and Tunisia, which was singled out to serve as a marketing model for the wave of regime changes that hit the region in 2011, known as “the Arab Spring”. As such, they carry the neocolonial power’s values, assumptions, and ideologies and help normalize them. This study also builds on the postcolonial theory’s assumption that coloniality is a permanent phenomenon that takes various forms, including the instrumentalization of religion (Islamism(s) and Islamists in this work) as a colonial construct. It shares the critical stance toward the “Arab Spring” metanarrative as that emerging from Western academia. James Petras’ The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack (Petras 2012), for instance, offers a significant counter-narrative to the dominant Western framing of the “Arab Spring”. Petras argues that the “revolts” were quickly instrumentalized by imperialist forces and local elites, particularly through the strategic alliance between the United States and so-called “moderate Islamist” movements of the region. He considers the West’s embrace of these Islamist actors not as a democratic gesture but as a calculated move “to ‘co-opt’ popular pro-democracy movements in order to derail them from ending their country’s client relationship to Washington” (p. 107). Petras’ analysis is particularly significant for this work, as it offers a critical lens through which to understand the religious identity of Islamist movements that aligned themselves with imperial interests during the “Arab Spring” in exchange for US backing in securing political authority following the fall of the worn-out secular dictatorships of the region. According to Petras, unlike earlier imperialist Islamist alignments led by Saudi Arabia during the Jihadi Afghan recruitment campaign under the Carter administration, the “moderate Islamist” coalition was led by Qatar. Among the primary building blocks of the transnational “moderate Islamist” orbit that expressed a readiness to act as reliable allies in suppressing pro-democracy movements that threatened the existing socio-economic status quo and the long-standing military-imperial ties were Al-Nahda in Tunisia, the Freedom and Justice Party (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood since May 2011) in Egypt, and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco (Petras 2012, p. 109). This global coalition was ideologically shaped by Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi, the chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, who served as the “spiritual guide” of the transnational “moderate Islamist” orbit (p. 118). His analysis of the pivotal role played by the “moderate Islamist” coalition leadership in invoking the Quran to rally support for the NATO-led aerial bombardment of Libya and for Jihadi armed intervention in Syria to overthrow the secular Assad regime provides an early and instructive example of how the “Imperialist–moderate Islamist” alliance, according to Petras, was effectively deployed to stymie anti-imperialist democratic movements in the region.

Petras’ perspective laid the groundwork for critical voices in Western academia that challenged the geopolitical manipulations, ideological distortions, and post-uprising diversions that shaped the trajectory and discourse of the “Arab Spring”. In “Pax Arabica?: Provisional Sovereignty and Intervention in the Arab Uprisings” (Bâli and Rana 2012), Aslı Bâli and Aziz Rana critically examine how the intervention of the United States and its imperialist allies during the “Arab Spring” helped undermine genuine democratic aspirations in the region. The authors argue that the international community, led by the US, imposed a model of “provisional sovereignty”, considering Arab “sovereignty” legitimate only when aligned with external strategic interests, preserving a US-led regional order: pax Americana. They contend that such an approach risks perpetuating instability and eroding the prospects for “authentic self-determination”, as it conditions sovereignty based on compliance with international expectations, rather than based on internal legitimacy or popular support. The authors call for a new “pax Arabica”, grounded in local legitimacy and popular demands for autonomy and social justice, challenging the postcolonial order sustained by external powers. “Crucially”, the authors conclude, “this new pax Arabica need not be understood as “anti-American” (p. 350). In the same vein, Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Popular Resistance and Marginalized Activism beyond the Arab Spring (Gerges 2015), edited by Fawaz A. Gerge (a Lebanese-American Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science), offers valuable insights into the dynamics of marginalized groups and neglected forms of grassroots resistance that are often overlooked in dominant media or policy framings of the “Arab Spring”. The scholarly contributions to the volume highlight the role of the non-Islamist and non-violent elements of civil society, such as the Ultras in Egypt and the Amazigh in North Africa, during the uprisings. Gerges also critiques the instrumentalization of the so-called “moderate Islamists” by the U.S. and Europe to advance their agendas, arguing that these alliances often undermine democratic processes and empower counter-revolutionary forces (Gerges 2015). In the same vein, “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (Wedeen 2013) questions the linearity of the “Arab Spring” as a democratization narrative from another angle. In this ethnographic study of the Syrian uprisings, Lisa Wedeen, an American Professor of Political Science and anthropologist at the University of Chicago, challenges reductionist interpretations of the forms of resistance channeled by the Syrian (Arab) people. Rather than focusing on overt political action or protest, she examines how ordinary Syrian citizens responded to the violence and absurdity of authoritarian rule through satire, irony, and dark humor. However, what gives Wedeen’s study particular significance is her critique of the widely held assumption regarding digital media’s inherently liberating role.

The current study, focusing on Tunisia by examining the transitional period that extended from January 2011 to January 2014, culminating in the ratification of the new constitution, engages with this critical trend in Western scholarship. It particularly addresses their skepticism toward the coherence of the grand narrative that frames the Arab uprisings as linear transitions to liberal democracy and their scathing criticism of the strategic alliance between imperial powers and “moderate Islamist” actors in the post-dictatorship landscape to promote neocolonial agendas in the region. Yet, this study diverges sharply by challenging the assumption that the uprisings were entirely spontaneous and that Western actors, including the US, were caught off guard. It challenges the claim that “there is no uniform script for how the different contentious episodes will play out” (Gerges 2015, p. 5). It argues, instead, that the “Arab Spring metanarrative” was weaved in and promoted through Western institutions long before 2011 to offer the ideological arsenal for the post-uprising neocolonial agendas for the region. Moreover, often celebrated as the spark that ignited the wave of uprisings across the Arab world or framed as an exception, Tunisia remains underexamined in much of this literature. It is rarely given the analytical depth afforded to other countries like Egypt. This work attempts to fill that gap. What makes this work also distinct in terms of its scope and argument is that it positions the “Arab Spring” not as a break from the postcolonial paradigm, but as an episode within its continued reconfiguration.

In a seminal study examining the continuation of this broader geopolitical calculus in the aftermath of the Tunisian uprisings of 2011, Ben Hadj Salem (2014) argues that the returning “moderate Islamist” expats were instrumentalized to dismantle Tunisia’s culturally mined postcolonial societal model, which hinged on the promotion of gender equality, under the guise of reinstituting the Islamic roots of Tunisian family law, severed under Westernizing dictatorships. She highlighted the historical and geopolitical significance of the concepts, underscoring the foreign origins and externally imposed cultural load of the returning expats’ constitutional and para-constitutional Islamization project. Focusing essentially on the neocolonial discourse on women’s rights in Tunisia after 2011, this work refers to the deliberate importation of foreign religious practices, often at odds with the country’s historical Sunni Maliki traditions of Islam. In the absence of local cultural roots for their project, the returning “moderate Muslim” leadership invited a battery of Gulf preachers to the country, granting them logistical support for nationwide tours to spread alien doctrines amongst the “heathen”. They advocated for controversial and alien practices such as female circumcision, full-body covering, jihad nikah (sexual jihad), polygamy, and orfi marriages, all of which were either illegal or socially unfamiliar to the Tunisian people. The author further illustrated the colonial nature of these doctrines through historical precedents. A case in point was the invocation of the time-honored response of Tunisian religious scholars, led by Sheikh Ibrahim Riahi, to the threats issued by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 19th century following the emergence of the Wahhabi Movement in the context of imperial expansion (Dreyfuss 2006). The latter demanded that the Tunisian Bey abandon the local Sunni Maliki tradition and adopt Wahhabism as the official religion of the state. Under threat of invasion, Sheikh Ibrahim Riahi and the Zaytouni ulema responded with a foundational critique exposing the un-Qur’anic nature of Wahhabism, positioning it as a radical departure from historical Islam rather than an authentic continuation of Islamic tradition. This research adopts and supports these concepts by building on both Western scholarship on the colonial origins of (non-indigenous) political Islamist ideologies (Bergen 2002; Dreyfuss 2006; Kramer 1994) and Tunisian experts on Islamist movements and counter-movements (Charrad 2001; Charrad 1997; Enhaili 2010) who have argued that the political Islamist spectrum infiltrated Tunisia’s Zaytouni institutions and Tunisian society during the Cold War, serving as a tool to counter leftist opposition both domestically and globally. This claim was further corroborated by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in March 2018, when he made a landmark statement in a globally disseminated interview with the Washington Post acknowledging that Saudi Arabia actively spread Wahhabism, an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam that laid the ideological groundwork for today’s Salafist spectrum, at the behest of the United States to combat communism during the Cold War. He further clarified that while the Saudi government had distanced itself from this project, Saudi-backed NGOs continued to play a role in its dissemination. By integrating these historical and contemporary perspectives, this study offers a critical lens to examine the political, ideological, and colonial underpinnings of the imported neocolonial Islamization project, positioning it within broader and shifting structures of global power and neocolonial influence, as will be demonstrated later in this work.

Accordingly, the polydirectional exploration of ideological constructs, power relations, and the interplay between local and global narratives in the context of the “Arab Spring” and its aftermath, upon which this work hinges, demands an integrative theoretical and analytical framework. This work takes stock of the multidisciplinary conceptual and analytical frameworks elaborated upon in postcolonial theory, social movement theory, cognitive neuroscience theories, and digital communication theories. It draws heavily on socio-narrative translation theory to interrogate the ideological underpinnings and implications of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative. As the purpose of this work is not linguistic analysis, but to uncover the ideological imports of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative, content analysis will provide a toolkit to sift and marshal the data, as it offers a multidimensional look at the narratives and allows for further qualitative analysis of their ideological imports as well as their normalizing effect both in the hegemonic and dominated culture.

This work, aware of the conditions of its own making as a counter-narrative, takes the necessary critical distance to open an alternative inquiry into how the processes of cross-cultural knowledge production and the power dynamics they sustain have helped shape the course of the transition since 2011. While acknowledging the fugitive democratic moments that marked the uprisings and the lead-up to the 2011 elections, their intertwined cultural and political genealogies, and the “liberating” role of social media platforms, this work challenges the assumption that there is no master narrative for the Tunisian uprisings. It provides a nuanced critique of social media platforms’ “liberating” force. It builds upon groundbreaking research (Ben Hadj Salem 2014, 2016, 2017, 2021a, 2021b, 2022, 2024) demonstrating that the Tunisian uprisings and the ensuing transition have a theory of origins. This work extends its scope by further exploring the ideological underpinnings of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative, the preset power structures and hegemonic views of the world it promotes, and the processes of cross-cultural knowledge production and dissemination that helped normalize it from several diverse but cohesive angles of inquiry. The logic of the argument evolves organically in a continuum of interlinked and complementary reflections that shed light on paradoxical democratization dynamics that shaped the uprisings and their aftermath till 2014: those that are dialectical and emanate from within the Tunisian socio-cultural context and others that are external and informed by Western ideological constructs, serving to advance neocolonial agendas in the region with the mediation of transnational (Islamist) actors.

2. Theoretical Framework: Unpacking the Ideological Underpinnings of the “Arab Spring” Democracy-Promotion Metanarrative

Exploring the constructed nature of the “Arab Spring” global narrative, unmasking its ideological underpinnings, and understanding its normalizing effect across linguistic and cultural borders necessitates a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that can critically engage with its complexities. This study draws primarily on conceptual and analytical tools from postcolonial theory (Said 1978; Spivak 1988; Bhabha 1994; Hall and Gay 1996) and socio-narrative translation theory (Baker 2006), which serve as the foundational pillars of the analysis. It also engages with social movement theory (Zald and Useem 1987; Tarrow 2011; Derichs and Fennert 2014), digital communication theory (Castells 2009; Pariser 2011; Zuboff 2019), and neuroscience (Cerise 2016; Alter 2017; Floridi 2014; O’Neil 2016) in a secondary capacity, not as standalone frameworks, but rather to expand, nuance, and adapt the core theories in a dialog with qualitative data and in light of evolving socio-political dynamics, contextual shifts, and historical development. Inspired by grounded theory, this work does not apply the two core frameworks as static or predetermined frameworks; it engages with postcolonial theory and socio-narrative translation theory dynamically and adaptively, allowing theory to develop in light of contemporary shifts in discourse and context. Indeed, incorporating and integrating emerging trends in transnational activism, digital mobilization (digital colonialism), and neurocognitive processes (neural hacking the mass mind) within established frameworks offers a more comprehensive understanding of the complex dynamics at play. These evolving theoretical approaches, which remain underexplored in mainstream scholarship about the “Arab Spring”, provide significant potential to uncover the intricate interplay between digital communication, cognitive processes, and cross-cultural knowledge production and dissemination dynamics, particularly as this study focuses on how narratives surrounding the “Arab Spring” were constructed, disseminated, and normalized globally and within Tunisia’s socio-political landscape.

Grounded in the works of Said (1978), Spivak (1988), and Bhabha (1994), postcolonial theory unpacks the complexities of Orientalist discourses, the silencing of marginalized voices, and the hybrid cultural spaces where global and local dynamics intersect (colonial encounters). Said’s Orientalism (Said 1978) provides crucial insights into how power, identity, and historical legacies help shape the dynamics of knowledge production and exchange between the West and the Orient. His contribution to understanding the process of stereotyping and “American Orientalism” as America’s ideological arsenal for global conquest since World War II was immense. By incorporating perspectives from media studies, cultural studies, and history, Said’s Covering Islam (Said 1997) traces the major steps in the development of “American Orientalism” as a colonial discourse on the “Other”. Said argues that the cultural war thesis, dominated American epistemologies (narratives) on the Middle East in the 1990s (Lewis 1990; Fukuyama 1992; Huntington 1993), revived prevalent age-old views of Islam as a competitor to the Christian West. It was proffered to fill the supposed intellectual vacuum following the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise in Islam as being the Foreign Enemy Number One of the US and the West instead. American think tanks, policymakers, academia, and the media and film industry lent support to this thesis. They offered the ideological arsenal for America’s global War on Terror after 9/11 in 2001, which was packaged as a righteous mission (Crusade) to bring democracy to the Middle East through militaristic aggression.

Mona Baker’s socio-narrative translation theory complements postcolonial critique by emphasizing the role of narratives, traveling across linguistic and cultural boundaries through acts of translation, as active agents in shaping social realities and perpetuating hegemonic ideologies. In Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (Baker 2006), Baker argues that translation is never a neutral process; rather, it is deeply embedded in socio-cultural and political contexts, where dominant narratives influence how other cultures and identities are represented. She draws on a wide range of disciplines, frameworks, and intellectual genealogies to explore how translation actively constructs and disseminates narratives within and across cultures. Drawing on the works of theorists such as Jerome Bruner, Paul Ricoeur, and Hayden White, Baker examines the role of storytelling in shaping collective identities, ideologies, and social realities.

Baker (2006) offers two sets of conceptual tools to analyze the ideological imports of narrativity in broad terms. They represent the main corpus analysis toolkit of this study. These are narrative typology and narrative features and frames. Baker identifies four main types of narratives that mediate our experience of the world and influence translation and discourse. The first is personal narratives. These are individual stories that shape personal identity and experience. Examples of these narratives include testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and similar narratives where an individual and their own experience, not an event, are at the center of the narrative. They are essential for dominant social institutions to underpin the social order, as they intersect with public narratives. The latter are defined as stories elaborated upon by and circulating among social and institutional formations larger than the individual, such as the family, religious or educational institutions, the media, the nation, and the literature. They play a pivotal role in creating pseudo-histories and national mythologies. Their survival and further elaboration, according to her, are contingent on them being articulated in other non-local dialects, languages, and contexts. Therefore, they represent important sites of ideological manipulation. This process has been studied by Ben Hadj Salem (2017, 2021a, 2022, 2024), where she demonstrated how Tunisian women’s rights narratives and national mythologies were ideologically manipulated by neo-Orientalist academics to align them with what she defined as “gender neo-Orientalism”, a Western discourse on the promotion of women’s rights in the region associated with the “Arab Spring” ideological arsenal. Ben Hadj Salem tracked this women’s rights ideological package in a series of what Baker categorizes as conceptual or disciplinary narratives (Coleman 2010; Ottaway and Carother 2005). These are the stories and explanations that scholars in any discipline construct for themselves and others about their subject of study (Baker 2006). While some disciplinary narratives remain limited in scope to the immediate community of scholars in the relevant field, others penetrate the public space and shape public narratives during a specific period of history. Baker’s study zooms in on Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 1993) as one of the most influential in providing the ideological arsenal for the, then rising, “War on Terror” metanarrative. According to her, a meta- or master narrative is a narrative in which we are embedded as contemporary actors in history (Baker 2006). Metanarratives are disseminated across linguistic and cultural boundaries through a variety of channels to shape and influence the lives of individuals globally and impact international relations, owing to the economic and cultural dominance of a superpower and its control over global media.

What is interesting about Bakers’s narrative typology is that the four types of narrative can intersect, influence, and help flesh each other out in a very fluid and subtle way, lending weight and psychological salience to one another, and creating a layered and cohesive discursive structure. A pertinent example of this is how the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration portrayed the War on Terror as a war between the Judeo-Christian World and Islam by invoking well-established religious narratives such as the Crusades. This interdependence, or “collaborative narrativity”, as the author refers to it heuristically in this work, would have been more salient had Baker defined her typology around a single master narrative. By focusing on how the “Arab Spring” democracy-promotion metanarrative was fleshed out by myriads of intersecting conceptual, public, ontological, and other well-established metanarratives, this work takes a separate track. Moreover, despite Baker’s significant contributions to understanding the complex processes that coalesced to help flesh out the “War on Terror” metanarrative and give it the global salience that it had enjoyed to justify US military ventures in the Middle East since 9/11, her study did not consider the binary course of the public, conceptual, and ontological narratives, which gave the “War on Terror” its post-9/11 global halo, leaving a gap that this study seeks to fill.

This study builds on ongoing research conducted by the author to address patterns of change and continuity in “American Orientalism” as a discourse on “the other” since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Expanding on the contributions of Baker and postcolonial theorists, this work suggests that a less obvious accommodationist metanarrative was gestating in the throes of the “War on Terror” metanarrative. The thesis that this narrative permeates is that the Muslim world is not impermeable to democracy and that democracy has a chance to flourish in the Middle East if the US withdraws its unconditional support of the worn-out secular dictatorships (Lynch 2008; Leiken and Brooke 2007; Krebs 2008; Khan 2007; Heffner 2005; Hawthorne 2003; Hamid and Kadlec 2010). Following the 2003 conundrum in Iraq, the American administrations were advised to direct US capacity-building programs towards supporting the so-called “moderate Muslims” to reach power. As indicated through a recurring pattern across analyzed sources (Rabasa et al. 2007; Atwood 2008; Feldman 2003; McCabe 2007; Weisman and MacFarquhar 2004; Leiken and Brooke 2007; Krebs 2008, for example), this abstract category refers mainly, not exclusively, to branches of the Universal Muslim Brotherhood (UMB) across the Muslim world, where Tunisia’s Ennahda offers a salient example (reiterated later in Petras (2012)). This thesis builds on the post-Orientalist assumption that the escalation of terrorism in the Muslim world since 9/11 was due to the exclusion of the “moderate” Islamist movements from the political game in the region. As succinctly articulated in Rabasa et al. (2007), which offered the American decision-makers an extensive directory of so-called “moderate Muslim” organizations to collaborate with globally following the fall of the secular dictatorships, “radicals (as well as authoritarian governments) have been successful in intimidating, marginalizing, or silencing moderate Muslims—those who share the key dimensions of democratic culture—to varying degrees” (p. xi). In Chapter 5 of the study, titled “Road Map for Moderate Network Building in the Muslim World”, the authors present the key tenets of the “moderate Islamist” creed this global “moderate Muslim network” is supposed to embrace in return for receiving US support to reach power in their respective countries. These include “support for democracy and internationally recognized human rights, including gender equality and freedom of worship, respect for diversity”, and, particularly alarming and ominous for the Tunisian indigenous democratization project, “acceptance of nonsectarian sources of law”, and “opposition to terrorism and illegitimate forms of violence” (Rabasa et al. 2007, pp. 66–70). Therefore, by helping them reach power, the “moderate” Muslims would contain the religious extremists by engaging them in the political game (Leiken and Brooke 2007; Rabasa et al. 2007). Based on a series of interviews conducted with exiled Islamists falling within this constructed category, the accommodationist intellectual elite at leading American Centers for Strategic Studies assured the American administrations (2004–2011) that what they referred to as the “political pragmatism” of these movements would ultimately make them accept being key promoters of US hegemonic interests in the region (Leiken and Brooke 2007; Heffner 2005; Krebs 2008; Atwood 2008; Lynch 2008). Accordingly, unlike Orientalism, which painted with a terrorist brush Islam and the Muslim world, providing the ideological arsenal for America’s military ventures in the Muslim world since World War II, neo-Orientalism locks Islam and Muslims within two antithetical poles of “moderates” and “terrorists”, singling out the former as America’s new allies in its “democracy-promotion” mission carried out by proxy in the Muslim world. It marks a paradigm shift in US geostrategic thinking about the region. Thomas P.M. Barnett, a prominent American strategic thinker, took pride in articulating this shift in his famous Pentagon briefing, serving as a catalyst for this new direction (Barnett 2004).

This work contends that as a Western political elite construct, the “Arab Spring” public narrative acquired the status of a global narrative in 2011. It derived currency from a stream of conceptual, public, and ontological narratives, which had been disseminated in the West during the decade straddling the American invasion of Iraq and the Tunisian uprisings. Since 2011, these Western narratives have served as frames according to which the ontological, public, and conceptual narratives of and about Tunisia have been reconstructed to reinvent it for a global audience, as it was singled out to serve as a marketing model for the “Arab Spring” metanarrative. As such, the uprisings ushered in a new paradigm shaping neocolonial encounters between Americans and Tunisians, regulated through a rule-governed system of cross-cultural knowledge production premised on the assumptions and worldviews of the dominant power. Baker’s analytical framework is invaluable in this respect as it also engages with the concept of framing and reframing through translation. She explores how the presentation of information affects perception and interpretation and its intersection with power, emphasizing how translators and interpreters mediate these processes. She argues that, in systems dominated by colonial knowledge hierarchies, translators are not neutral conveyors of information but active agents in sustaining or subverting the ideological underpinnings of the dominant narrative. One way to challenge hegemonic narratives and the patterns of domination they promote is to mount countervailing narratives that reflect the voices of marginalized groups or subalterns (Spivak 1988).

Baker also draws on Stuart Hall’s work on cultural representation, which examines how cross-cultural knowledge production is often entangled with power structures, perpetuating stereotypes that reduce complex identities to simplistic, homogenized ideological constructs. These representations reinforce dominant narratives, especially those emerging from Western perspectives (Hall and Gay 1996). Baker deepens the analysis of how translated cultural narratives reinforce structures of dominance and inequality by aligning with postcolonial historian Robert Young’s perspective, which suggests that in colonial contexts, translated narratives (the colonial copy) often hold greater power and authenticity than the indigenous original. Like Young, she contends that the conventional view of translation as a lesser imitation of a superior original is inverted in colonial settings. In such contexts, “the colonial copy gains more authority than the devalued indigenous original, and it may even be asserted that the copy rectifies flaws present in the native version” (quoted in Baker 2006, p. 25). Along the same lines, Baker expands on the thesis presented by Franz Fanon in his seminal work Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 1952), a cornerstone of postcolonial studies. Fanon examined how colonized cultures and individuals internalize self-perceptions shaped by the colonizer’s values, histories, and discourses. Baker builds on this by arguing that colonial representations and narratives circulate back into the languages and consciousness of the colonized societies. Over time, these societies begin to accept and believe the narratives imposed on them by the colonizers. This phenomenon creates a compelling dynamic with significant implications for how cultures construct and perceive their identities. These narratives shape the behavior of individuals in both dominant and subordinate cultures, illustrating the normalizing power of narrativity in publicly spreading constructed realities or accounts over time. Through this process, such narratives come to be seen as self-evident, harmless, unquestionable, and free from controversy. This was evident in the case of the narratives surrounding the “Arab Spring”, “moderate Islamism”, and “Islam and democracy”. These narratives circulated for nearly a decade prior to the fall of the Ben Ali regime and the subsequent rise to power of Islamists, gaining traction within Western academic circles, the publications of American think tanks, and American political discourse (Ben Hadj Salem 2014, 2021b, 2024; Mishra 2006).

An interesting question that has not been addressed in the literature about the Tunisian transition as part of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative is how these narratives traveled back to Tunisia in real-time after 2011. As this work proceeds with a detailed examination of the reframing of the Tunisian democratization narratives, it will shed light on the distinctive mechanisms that helped normalize the “Arab Spring” metanarrative in Tunisia, which were not encompassed in the core theoretical frameworks. It incorporates emerging theoretical perspectives to engage with the core theoretical and analytical frameworks dynamically, in dialog with recurring patterns in data strands, and in light of current shifts in discourse and context. This expansion is not simply additive but analytically generative, aiming to offer a more nuanced understanding of the phenomena under investigation. Accordingly, this study will broach the issue of how social media platforms helped influence the thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, socio-political dynamics, and self-image (the local narratives) of Tunisians in real-time, not only through the traditional global dissemination tools at the hands of the superpower (painstakingly explored in Baker’s study of the “War on Terror” metanarrative) but also through algorithmic manipulation and filtering. The superpower’s control of cyberspace and the Tunisian population’s remarkable embeddedness in the global digital ecosystem by regional standards (Howard and Hussain 2013; Bellin 2012; Dabashi 2012; Gana 2013; Gerges 2013; Masri 2017) reflect a radical change in the normalization mechanisms of colonial narratives. As will be demonstrated later in this work, recent studies exploring the subtleness of the tech giants’ soft power control over the global mass mind and the intricate transnational dynamics shaping the processes of social and political change globally in the age of AI invite in-depth exploration of cognitive neuroscience theories, digital communication theories, and recent developments in social movement theories to explore the subtleties of the normalizing mechanisms and epistemic circularity in the age of digital colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2019). Indeed, cognitive neuroscience theories contribute an understanding of how narratives and ideologies are cognitively processed, internalized, and emotionally charged, shaping public perception and behavior through neural hacking of the mass mind (Cerise 2016; Alter 2017; Zuboff 2019). Digital communication theories, on the other hand, illuminate the role of social media and digital platforms in disseminating and amplifying the metanarrative across cultural borders, perpetuating neocolonial epistemic hierarchies. While no explicit studies have framed the “Arab Spring” democratization-promotion metanarrative as an example of neural hacking, this study engages with some of the conceptual insights of this field to analyze the data and draw conclusions about the normalizing effects of narrativity. This work recognizes that this underexplored research area, which lies beyond the scope for being probed extensively, merits further investigation in future research to advance the understanding of the paradoxical dynamics that have been shaping the course of the political transition in Tunisia, giving it successive counterintuitive undemocratic twists shrouded in a spectrum of transplanted religious ideologies which are at odds with the cultural, religious, and intellectual heritage of the Tunisian people.

3. Data and Methodology

By connecting various analytical and conceptual frameworks and theories, this work attempts to unpack the ideological imports of the “Arab Spring” democracy-promotion metanarrative in a corpus of disparate yet corroborating narratives that cut across genres, modes, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. It aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the role of narratives (storytelling) as a site of cross-cultural knowledge production, facilitated by acts of translation, interpreting, and interpretation, in helping reconstruct Tunisia for a global audience. It examines how the local narratives of democratic transition were reframed, forcing them to fit within the ideological mold of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative. It probes extensively into how, through “collaborative narrativity”, i.e., reproduction and repetition in interconnected types of narratives, an Islamist coat is cast on every step towards democratization fought for desperately by the indigenous population, giving salience to the neo-Orientalist thesis that confers on the so-called “moderate Islamists” a key role to play in the superpower’s “democracy promotion mission” by proxy. It also assigns to women in these movements the mission to spearhead a revolution in women’s rights in the Muslim world (Ben Hadj Salem 2021a, 2022, 2024). Building on this perspective, the interdisciplinary theoretical models gleaned from the theoretical frameworks on which this study draws provide a structured way to examine these dynamics. They inform the content analysis by guiding data collection and corpus selection, coding categories (the coding scheme), thematic identification, and discourse examination. Incorporating interdisciplinary theoretical models also offers a multidimensional view that helps enhance the validity and credibility of the findings and reduces bias. Indeed, triangulating multiple theoretical lenses strengthens the findings through cross-verification, ensuring that various lines of evidence support the findings and that the results reflect patterns in the data rather than individual interpretations.

As narrative theory “treats narratives—across all genres and modes—as diffuse, amorphous configurations rather than necessarily discrete fully articulated local stories” (Baker 2006, p. 4), this work analyzes a chain of corroborating conceptual, public, and ontological micronarratives sketched through disparate threads that, dawn together, may help advance the understanding of how the “Arab Spring” as a neocolonial “democratization-promotion narrative” was elaborated upon and interpreted across time, geographical locations, and textual and non-textual modes. The first thread consists of conceptual narratives published by American think tanks since 9/11 to provide the philosophical foundations of the Tunisian (Arab) uprisings, which have been marketed as revolutions without philosophers or foreign intervention. As such, this research ventures into an uncharted intellectual terrain, breaking new ground by unsettling a long-cherished myth that has taken on an almost sacred dimension: the notion that the Tunisian uprisings were devoid of foreign ideological underpinnings. It engages with a wide array of secondary sources written by Western strategic studies scholars, including, but not limited to, Heffner (2005), Feldman (2003), Hawthorne (2003), Khan (2007), Krebs (2008), Leiken and Brooke (2007), Lynch (2008), McCabe (2007), Hamid and Kadlec (2010), Atwood (2008), Ottaway and Carother (2005), Coleman (2010), and Rabasa et al. (2007). These conceptual narratives, alongside an extensive body of corroborating narratives developed in Western media and academia (secondary sources) in the lead-up to 2011, illuminate the philosophical dimensions of the Arab Spring democracy-promotion metanarrative. These generic narratives about the region, where Tunisia was either ignored or treated as an exception, served as frames against which the post-2011 Western narratives about Tunisia were triangulated to identify and highlight reframing strategies.

The second thread consists of a set of conceptual and public narratives that reframe the local narratives of the transition period in an unabashedly distortive way. It incorporates a primary data set that consists of newspaper articles published in English and collected through the LexisNexis Academic database, surveys conducted by Western academic institutions about Tunisians, recorded lectures that focus on the Tunisian transition, and visual artifacts, such as staged photo opportunities taken by statesmen. These images, often meticulously crafted for public consumption, provide insight into the strategic use of visual media to shape public perception during key historical moments. This second thread also incorporates a secondary data set which consists of a body of literature produced in Western academia after 2011, aiming to rewrite the postcolonial history of Tunisia for a Western audience and knit the Tunisian transition and concomitant processes of social and political change (from a social movement theory perspective) along the ideological lines set in the pre-2011 conceptual and public narratives analyzed in the first data thread.

This work also examines another strand of narratives that reflect insider perspectives. It consists of a primary data set, including ethnographic field notes, direct observations of protests and events, government reports, protest videos, and videos of public meetings held by leading political actors and NCA debates. It also includes local newspaper articles which provide firsthand accounts of events, opinions, and perspectives at the time of publication, including interviews with key figures, editorials, and opinion pieces reflecting local viewpoints (showing ideological framing or cultural attitudes); and eyewitness testimonies of social or political events. This third strand also incorporates a set of secondary sources that consist of local narratives written for a global readership through an “insider’s” lens. These include, in addition to works contributed by Tunisian scholars and activists from across the ideological spectrum of the (anti-dictatorship, pro-Islamist) opposition, Gana’s anthology The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects (Gana 2013), which encompasses a range of articles written by Tunisian scholars affiliated with Western academia (some of them had close links to the Presidency under the Islamist-led Troika). Western mediation finds its best expression in Ghannouchi (2023); Ghannouchi (2022); and Ravanello and Ghannouchi (2015), where Western intervention was urgently needed to rebrand and market the latter to global audiences as a figurehead of “moderate Islam” in the absence of credible scholarly support in his earlier writings in Arabic. Indeed, many of his earlier writings are rooted in regressive and exclusionary interpretations aligned with thinkers such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Sayyid Qutb, and are marked by overt misogyny, most notably in his book on women in Islam, in which Tunisian women are widely ridiculed. Ben Achour’s 2018 and 2021 books were written in French. They reflect the ideological debates inside Tunisia during the transition. Through examining these narratives, this research offers a preliminary exploration of the subtle ways in which neocolonial narratives have influenced internal perceptions, reshaped local identities, and altered indigenous democratization narratives as they circulate back into local cultural contexts. However, this aspect warrants further in-depth research and examination to uncover its complexities.

Because the emphasis in the framework adopted here is on the power and function of narratives rather than their structural make-up, and in the absence of the source texts in the native language, content analysis, as outlined by Krippendorff (2018) and Neuendorf (2017), is used to sift and marshal the data. This study conducted a qualitative content analysis of selected narratives, which helped to construct Tunisia after the uprisings for a global audience and were produced across linguistic and cultural boundaries (the second data strand of the corpus). By integrating interdisciplinary theoretical models, this study situates the findings within a broader socio-political framework. This approach ensures a comprehensive analysis that accounts for both the textual and contextual dimensions of the translated texts. Indeed, while the primary analysis focuses on narrative shifts and reframing strategies informed by Bakers’ theoretical model, secondary and primary sources from the first and third strands of the corpus helped situate these ideological constructs within broader socio-political developments, providing contextual insights. To further contextualize and triangulate the findings, the local scholarly analyses and primary sources served as a core of verifiable facts (from a historiographic perspective) that helped investigate how power dynamics and ideological positioning helped shape the Western democracy-promotion “Arab Spring” metanarrative. This method allows for a deeper exploration of how lexical choices, framing techniques, and intertextual references contribute to the propagation (or contestation) of the dominant democracy-promotion metanarrative.

The interdisciplinary theoretical framework adopted in this study also informs the content analysis by guiding coding categories, thematic identification, data categorization, and analytical processes. This coding scheme helps to uncover recurring patterns in the ideologically manipulated democracy-promotion narratives and explore how they are normalized through algorithmic real-time dissemination and repetitive exposure, or adapted, contested, or subverted in the local culture. This study primarily uses a deductive approach to code the data into predefined categories while emerging themes are also identified inductively during analysis. The deductive coding scheme applies initial codes and predefined categories from existing interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical models. Socio-narrative translation theory guides the identification of codes related to narrative shifts, ideological framing, and reframing strategies, such as the manipulation of narrative features (selective appropriation of content, labeling, positioning of participants, temporal and spatial framing, patterns of causal employment, etc.). Social movement theory informs the codes for goal framing, inter-movement dynamics, and resource mobilization strategies. Postcolonial theory provides the codes for analyzing power asymmetries and linguistic (de)colonization, focusing on terminology adaptation and rhetorical (de)colonization. Digital media theory contributes to identifying rapid, widespread dissemination factors; memetic adaptation; and algorithmic visibility and manipulation. Additionally, insights from neuroscience and neural hacking inform the codes for persuasive linguistic patterns, cognitive triggers, and the impact of repetition on normalizing the ideological constructs of reality, fostering an understanding of how these constructs come to be perceived as self-evident, benign, uncontestable, non-controversial, and emanating from within.

To ensure a comprehensive analysis, thematic categorization and pattern identification were conducted by cross-referencing coded data with the sources in the first and third strands of the corpus to validate ideological trends. This process also involved identifying correlations between narrative construction, ideological reframing through acts of translation, epistemic circularity facilitated by real-time algorithmic dissemination mechanisms, and pre-set power structures. This multi-theoretical approach enabled a nuanced exploration of how translation can function as a cross-cultural knowledge-production tool, sustaining and promoting neocolonial patterns of domination both globally and locally. Therefore, leveraging multiple frameworks, this study identified recurring patterns and themes across different perspectives. The convergence of these frameworks on the same pattern, as will be demonstrated in the “Research Findings” section, enhances the reliability and validity of the findings and offers a solid foundation for future research to build upon. It prompts a further exploration of the intersection between translation, ideology, and narrative construction in understanding the “Arab Spring” democracy-promotion metanarrative.

4. Research Findings and Discussion: The Democratization Narrative as a Set of Frames

4.1. The Neo-Orientalist Frame

The dominant narrative that permeates the stretches of text analyzed in this work casts an Islamist coat on the “democratic” transition phase covered by this study (2011–2014). Whether reflecting internal or external perspectives, all narratives coded under “Causes of the Uprisings” reveal a consistent thematic pattern: the uprisings are constantly framed as spontaneous events with no uniform Western or domestic script or ideology shaping their inception and the course that the ensuing transition has taken. This convergence across sources reinforces the perception of the uprisings as endogenous phenomena, deeply rooted in Tunisia’s internal socio-political and economic dynamics. Petras (2012) notes with particular emphasis that the omnipresent and omnipotent “CIA and Mossad” were caught by surprise by the Arab uprisings and could not save their “willing collaborator”, referring to Mubarak of Egypt as an illustrative example (p. 26). In the same vein, but with an insider’s epistemic authority, Gana (2013) asserts that “[t]here is no master narrative of the Tunisian revolution and certainly no theory of its origins that might explain adequately, let alone justifiably, what happened between 17 December 2010 and 14 January 2011” (p. 2). This framing validates the assumption that Western powers, who had long underestimated the population’s capacity for political agency, were caught off guard by this sudden eruption of bottom-up, collaborative action that sparked in Tunisia. It bolsters the narrative that the US/Western powers were not prepared and struggled to formulate coherent responses, particularly as Islamist parties swiftly rose to power in the aftermath of collapsing authoritarian regimes, rather than acting from a well-thought-out or pre-planned strategy. The phrase “the unexpected electoral victories of Islamist parties” recurs across multiple sources in the coded data describing the post-uprising elections, reinforcing a dominant narrative about Western powers’ surprise and lack of preparedness, and the lack of Western intervention in the processes of social and political change unfolding in the region writ large. Through repetition and reproduction in different genres and modes across the studied data, the very idea of foreign intervention, let alone the pivotal role of Islamist ideology as a midwife of regime change in the region, remains either adumbrated or dismissed altogether. This framing overlooks two foundational epistemic assumptions common in strategic and geopolitical analyses of the Middle East: first, that Western involvement is a prerequisite for any substantial socio-political transformation; and second, that Islamist actors do not merely participate in such transformations but are the ideological catalysts that ignite and direct them.

This pattern, revealing the absence of a clear strategic Western framework for engaging with the new political landscape, stands in stark contradiction with the pattern that dominates the pre-2011 strand of narratives analyzed in this work, where deep policy-oriented research had been conducted in academic circles and American Centers of Strategic Studies, providing paradigm-shifting ideological foundations for democracy-promotion in a post-nationalist, post-authoritarian Muslim world through the so-called “moderate Muslims”. Feldman’s After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Feldman 2003); Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map (Barnett 2004); Hefner’s Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, contestation and Democratization (Heffner 2005); Rabasa et al.’s Building Moderate Muslim Networks (published by RAND Corporation in 2007, Rabasa et al. 2007); Attwood’s “Engaging the Moderate Muslims” (published in Foreign Service Journal in Atwood 2008); Kreb’s “Rethinking the Battle of ideas: How the United States Can Help Muslim Moderates” (published in Orbis in Krebs 2008); Hamid & Kadlec’s “Strategies for Engaging Political Islam” (published by the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) in 2010); and a wide range of narratives analyzed in this work unequivocally reveal that the pact between the Islamist actors and the Superpower had already been in place before 2011. These studies provide irrefutable evidence that the so-called “moderate Muslims” had effectively paid the oath of allegiance and acquiesced to a political arrangement that legitimized Islamist leadership in exchange for protecting Western/US neocolonial interests in the region: the strategic blueprint was already in place; the events of the uprisings merely activated it.

What is particularly surprising in the analyzed narratives is that even the most critical accounts of the Arab Spring metanarrative, such as Petras’s The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack (Petras 2012), which expose the alliance between the so-called “moderate Muslims” and the imperial powers after the uprisings, fail to capture, let alone decipher, the significance of Ghannouchi’s follow-up “sign of the times visit” to the US in November 2011, as represented in the coded data sourced from the websites of the Centers of Strategic Studies that invited him to the US following his party’s victory in the October 2011 NCA elections. This visit was meant to enhance the international standing of his Islamist party, endowed with the daunting historical mission of executing the pre-2011 pact by brandishing (dubious) electoral legitimacy. Under the code of being a ‘Moderate Muslim,’ an interesting attribute was associated with Ghannouchi during his visit to the offices of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy to address a seminar of the Institute’s senior research staff and their guests: his designation as the second man after Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, “his superior in the International Association of Muslim Scholars”. This reinforces the assumption that the “Ennahda party, long associated with the Brotherhood’s line of thinking” (Gana 2013, p. 293) has consistently remained theologically anchored, directing its ideological compass towards the Universal Muslim Brotherhood (as opposed to the Saudi Muslim World League associated with “extremist ideologies”), which further reinforces the thesis of the pre-2011 conceptual narratives that positioned the Universal Muslim Brotherhood ideology at the core of the “moderate Islam” ideological orbit.

Rather than inquiring into the genealogy of the “moderate Muslims” as an ideological construct that inevitably disrupts the prevailing assumption of unprompted, organic mobilization, most narratives that uphold the spontaneity frame construct a genealogy for this spontaneity, situating the uprisings within a broader historical framework. Acknowledging the narrative power of cross-cultural academic interpretation, Gerges (2015) admits that “[w]e also act as translators and offer one particular translation of what happened in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, though our translation is anchored in direct engagement with agency and a deep appreciation of the historical and sociological context that has fueled these recent waves of contentious episodes” (p. 2). Probably the most authoritative and well-crafted cross-cultural accounts that focused exclusively on these dynamics within the Tunisian context can be found in the anthology edited by the Tunisian-American scholar Nouri Gana, The Making of the Tunisian Revolution (Gana 2013). In several chapters, the analysis stands out for its depth and first-hand accounts. However, this framing is not ideologically innocent. By emphasizing the spontaneity of the uprisings and grounding them in a historical lineage that downplays shifts in American geostrategic thinking and transnational dynamics, these narratives (implicitly and explicitly) convey the message that there was no form of external (especially American) intervention and discard the idea that a master narrative might have shaped or influenced the course of the events. This serves to reinforce a specific ideological perspective, one that prioritizes internal agency while sidelining the potential role of external forces, framing the uprisings and their aftermath as a counter-narrative emanating from within a part of the world that had, for the most part, lost agency in shaping the course of human history and international politics. Framing the protestors as heroic was critical in unifying disparate groups under shared goals and reviving the attractive, time-honored national myth of “Tunisian exceptionalism”. This (inter)national glitter and admiration further entrenched the dominant narrative, making it difficult for Tunisians to think outside the neocolonial framework, which acquired, from a Western socio-political perspective (Bellah 1975), the status of an immutable civil religion myth in the aftermath of the uprisings.

With the return of the Islamist expats, however, the spirit of desacralization, unity, and homogeneity that characterized the early narratives of the uprisings soon gave way to division and Islamization. The local narratives were, consequently, forced to fit within the general Islamist mold of the region. The return of Ghannouchi, anabaptized the leader of the “moderate” Islamist movement in the West, was significantly facilitated by the global media, particularly France 24 Arabic and Al-Jazeera. They provided round-the-clock coverage of his return wearing a Western suit, vividly documenting his journey from England to Tunisia. This media portrayal framed him as a prophetic figure and the historical victim of the “secular” dictatorship, who was welcomed by the masses as a savior and harbinger of a returning Islam to the land of the “heathen”, amplifying his legitimacy on the global stage. Indisputably, this global media spotlight enabled him (and the West-shielded battery of transnational Islamists of Tunisian origin) to re-enter the country without facing legal accountability for the crimes that had been committed by the Islamist movement in the 1980s and early 90s (Enhaili 2010), further entrenching the transplanted Islamist movement’s impunity and reshaping Tunisia’s historical and political narrative.

Through the manipulation of the features of the local culture’s narratives, especially the heavy reliance on selective appropriation (eliminating elements of the original story while including others), the Western narratives have systematically erased from Tunisia’s modern history the bloody chapters documenting the violent means through which the transplanted Islamist movement attempted to seize power in the 1980s and early 1990s. These included bombing hotels, political assassinations, and masterminding coups (Wolf 2017), and were admitted by Hamadi Djebali, the first Islamist Prime Minister (December 2011–March 2013), in the first press conference held by the Islamist party under the watchful eyes of the Islamist party leadership and the Tunisian media and public. He unabashedly qualified the acts of terror committed against the Tunisian people and state and foreign tourists as “Insignificant on the surface, revolutionary at heart”. Similarly, the Islamist groups have hardly been held responsible for any terrorist crimes, including turning Tunisia, historically an abode of peace and moderation, into a leading exporter of Jihadi terrorists and sexual Jihadi women in the region, as laid bare in the studies conducted by Rosenblatt (2016) and Benmelech and Klor (2018), whose data vividly underscores the scale of the crimes committed by what was bandied about in the local media as the “Islamist secret apparatus”. On the contrary, in an attempt to clean the “moderate” Islamist leadership’s glaring record in promoting Western proxy wars in the region through providing an unremitting flow of trained terrorist fighters from Tunisia, Western academia witnessed the emergence of a new scholarly branch dedicated to constructing historical and cultural roots for Jihadi Salafism in Tunisia. This development was enthusiastically welcomed by Tunisian-American scholar Nouri Ghana, who celebrated Fabio Merone and Francesco Cavatorta’s contribution to his anthology as a groundbreaking shift in the academic study of Islamist movements in Tunisia. He presented this ideologically laden academic endeavor as a direct challenge to the long-held assumption among Tunisians (their local narratives) that Tunisia had been culturally immune to transnational Islamist ideologies.

By constructing origins and influences for Jihadi Salafism within Tunisia, these scholars sought to force the country to fit in the general transnational Islamist mold of the region. These extremist doctrines stood in stark contrast to the local Zeytouni Maliki Islam, whose cultural influence was marginalized in the neocolonial narratives to position the postcolonial Tunisian state within the abstract category of “secularism”. According to some accounts of transnational Islamist networks from the preceding decade, these transplanted Islamist doctrines were actively promoted by the intelligence services of successive Western colonial powers as a means to advance their colonial agendas in the region (Dreyfuss 2006; Mamdani 2004; Bergen 2002). Quoting Eqbal Ahmed, a prominent Pakistani scholar known for his scathing criticism of Imperialism, Mamdani asserts that the tradition of jihad, understood as a just war with religious sanction, was non-existent in the Muslim world for more than 400 years. He argued that the CIA revived jihad in the 1980s by spearheading global Jihadist recruitment and training campaigns across the Muslim world, promising support to jihadist fighters in establishing Islamic states in their home countries after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (Mamdani 2004). By sidelining the colonial agendas, centered on the establishment of an ‘Islamic State’ promoted by Islamist actors aligned with global jihadi networks and operating within a Western-led geopolitical project, the neo-Orientalist thesis that Western experts in Salafist groups in Tunisia and the local editor proffer is that “Salafism was for some the only means to cope with and channel the anger excited by decades of compulsory secularism, its resurgence is a vivid reminder that any renewed repression of salafis would be counterproductive in the long run” (Gana 2013, p. 29). This thesis sustains a key frame that emerges from the coded data strand, including the pre-2011 corpus of conceptual narratives, that lent ammunition to the ideological arsenal of ‘democracy promotion’ through the so-called ‘moderate Muslims’: The rise in religious extremism in the Muslim world was essentially caused by secularist dictatorships that systematically excluded “moderate Islamists” from political participation. Therefore, for democracy to take root in the region, these conceptual narratives suggest that the only viable strategy is to ensure the meaningful inclusion of these moderate voices in the political process, as they are the only political force that can engage in dialog with the Salafist spectrum and include them as active participants in the democratization process. On the other hand, the local narratives framed the goal of the transition to democracy as achieving the aims of the so-called “revolution”, particularly employment, liberty, dignity, and salvaging the postcolonial societal model, which hinged on the promotion of gender equality from a ravaging Islamization project. In their view, this was what democracy truly meant and why they revolted against the dictatorship in the first place. The neo-Orientalist narratives, therefore, reframed the goal of the endogenous community as they translated it to Western constituencies: that Tunisians had resisted dictatorship not only for political freedom, but also to end the religious extremism with deep historical roots in the country. Thus, in this framing, the real litmus test for the success of Tunisia’s democratic transition is not employment, liberty, dignity, or the preservation of the postcolonial societal model but rather their ability to bring Salafists into the democratic fold. The implication within this Western frame is clear: democracy in Tunisia is only viable if Islamists; Ennahda, representing “moderate” Islamists; and their Salafist orbit, are acknowledged as central actors. This framing resonates in one of the key takeaways a Western reader is likely to extract from Fabio Merone and Francesco Cavatorta’s genealogy of Salafism as a local micro-movement in Tunisia: “postrevolutionary Tunisia could very well find in the challenge of Salafism an opportunity to test and perfect the democratizing process as it unfolds” (Gana 2013, p. 30).

This study has also found that Western narratives consistently downplayed or ignored the survival war waged by the Tunisian masses during the protracted constitutional drafting process, a period marked by relentless activism on the constitutional front and punctuated by uncustomary bloody chapters. These include the assassination of political opposition leaders and soldiers, often enabled by the Islamist Ministry of the Interior and perpetrated by Islamist groups, as well as death threats against artists, intellectuals, and civil society actors who opposed the Islamist agenda of imposing Sharia as a primary source of law. Direct accusations were made by the late opposition leader Chokri Belaid, who, in televised interviews on Nessma TV, explicitly blamed Ennahda for plotting to assassinate him. He denounced the lack of protection provided by the Ennahda-led Ministry of the Interior and pointed to the role of affiliated imams who issued fatwas calling for his death. Following his assassination in February 2013, over one million Tunisians attended his funeral, chanting “Ghannouchi assassin, murderer!” in a striking expression of public outrage. Further evidence emerged with the assassination of Mohamed Brahmi on 25 July 2013, Tunisia’s Republic Day. Soon after, local media leaked a document showing that a foreign intelligence service had warned the Ministry of the Interior about a plot to assassinate Brahmi. The Ministry, however, failed to act, confirming, in the eyes of many, including Brahmi’s family, their direct accusations of Ennahda’s involvement.

A key neo-Orientalist narrative emerging in the coded data from this period, one that notably reframed the local public narratives chronicling an uncustomary bloody chapter in the postcolonial history of Tunisia, is articulated in Dr. Lise Storm’s article, ‘The Fragile Tunisian Democracy: What Prospects for the Future?’ In her analysis of the first phases of the transition, Dr. Storm, Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics and Director of Research at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter (UK), significantly downplays the role and political weight of Chokri Belaïd, stating that “the reality is that Belaïd was relatively unimportant”, arguing that he commanded “only one parliamentary seat out of 217”, and that “the MPD was not, by any means, a relevant party, and Belaïd was hardly an opposition leader, although he was certainly a familiar face” (Gana 2013, p. 280). This interpretation, however, overlooks critical dimensions of Belaïd’s influence, which inductive coding highlights as being emergent from, most notably, his exceptional charisma; sharp oratory skills; ability to articulate popular frustrations with clarity and courage; capacity to rally a diverse, grassroots constituency; and his powerful resistance to the neocolonial projects in the region and concomitant Jihadi recruitment campaigns marketed under the guise of promoting democracy in Tunisia and the region. He emerged as a unifying voice for a broad spectrum of Tunisians disillusioned by the post-revolution political trajectory, and the most articulate anticolonial voice of a splintered political spectrum. The coded data covering the immediate aftermath of his assassination reflects a powerful grassroots response—over a million Tunisians escorted him to his final resting place, chanting “Ghannouchi, assassin!” These were not baseless accusations; Belaïd had himself warned of assassination threats from Ennahda affiliates, notably during a televised interview on Nessma TV on the eve of his assassination. He had received direct threats, and fatwas inciting his assassination were reportedly issued in certain mosques. His assassination galvanized the anti-Islamist movement and became a rallying point for the indigenous push to influence the direction of the constitutional drafting process. The divergence between Western representation and public resonance underscores a key disjuncture in the cross-cultural framing of the Tunisian democratic transition. Moreover, Storm’s assertion that “everyone, whether Jebali, the parties of the governing coalition, the opposition, or those amongst the general population who were simply anti-Ennahda (or anti-Islamist), tried to hijack the situation and use it to their own advantage politically”, (Gana 2013, p. 281) further reveals a tendency to reduce Belaïd’s assassination to a politically exploitable moment. Such a reduction fails to account for the genuinely transformative political energy that his death unleashed, mobilizing mass mourning, catalyzing collective resistance, and reinforcing an endogenous democratic agenda rooted in popular rather than “electoral” legitimacy.

Thus, the coded local narratives complicate Storm’s reading, offering instead a grassroots framing of Belaïd as a key moral compass in a moment of national reckoning. Storm’s narrative constructs a discursive frame in which Al Nahda emerges as an embattled democratic force surrounded by a political desert. It situates the leading Islamist party at the National Constitutional Assembly, endowed with the historical mission to set the foundations of democratic culture in Tunisia, as a victim of a hostile local political culture and an inhospitable environment marked by undemocratic actors and a population depicted as having been numbed by decades of secularist overdose. This framing implicitly equates the postcolonial forms of governance with secularism, irreligion, anti-Islamist sentiment, and dictatorship. What was framed as religious numbness or atheism hides, in reality, the Tunisian people’s fierce resistance to the transplanted Islamization project promoted by the so-called “moderate” Islamist majority party. A proper understanding of the people’s resistance to the destructive Islamist project requires clarifying the nature and origins of the ideologies involved. These were transnational Islamist doctrines, primarily Salafi–Wahhabi in character, that were transplanted into Tunisia from abroad, particularly Gulf countries. Far from being organically rooted in Tunisian religious or cultural traditions, these imported ideologies clashed starkly with Tunisia’s post-independence societal model, which had long embraced Zeytouni–Maliki Islam, gender equality, personal status reforms, and civic public institutions. In the early months of the transition, the Islamist majority party in the NCA facilitated a campaign of mosque domination by deposing local imams and placing religious institutions under its ideological control. This allowed streams of foreign preachers to flood the country, often welcomed in VIP lounges at Tunis–Carthage airport and chauffeured in luxury vehicles to various regions, where they disseminated a rigid vision of Islam alien to Tunisian society. These preachers openly promoted practices with no historical or cultural precedent in Tunisia, including female genital mutilation, polygamy, gender segregation in public spaces, and the full-body veiling of women and even young girls. One of the most infamous among them was Wajdi Ghoneim, an Egyptian cleric widely remembered in Tunisian public memory as “the female circumciser”, a moniker reflecting both their ridicule and rejection of the practice. A widely circulated video captures Ghoneim complaining to Ennahda co-founder Sheikh Abdelfattah Mourou about being barred from mosques by protesting citizens. Mourou’s response, intended to placate him, was chilling. Acknowledging the resistance of adult Tunisians to their message, he assured his guest that change would need to begin with the next generation, stating that while the current generation was beyond reform, their focus should shift toward influencing Tunisian women and children. The video went viral, reinforcing widespread fears that these figures were not religious guests but ideological invaders pursuing a long-term project to reengineer Tunisian society in the image of foreign Islamist models.

To further obscure the Tunisian people’s fierce resistance to transplanted transnational Islamist ideologies embraced by the “moderate” Islamist majority party in the NCA and their Western consultants during the constitution-drafting process, the Western media and academia, paradoxically, left no stone unturned to force Tunisians to fit within the transnational Islamist frame. At the heyday of the anti-Sharia popular campaign, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) sponsored a study titled “Women’s Political Participation in Tunisia after the Revolution, Findings from Focus Groups in Tunisia”. Conducted by Gabriella Borovsky and her Tunisian partner Asma Ben Yahia between 17 and 28 February 2012, the study based its findings on the ideological manipulation of the ontological narratives of Tunisian women collected through 15 focus groups held in Greater Tunis, Sfax, Medenine, Gafsa, and Sidi Bouzid. The choice of these areas was not arbitrary. These are loyal Islamist constituencies, known for their historical opposition to the postcolonial state and for being fertile grounds for transplanted transnational Islamist doctrines during the aborted global Jihadi recruitment campaign of the 1980s (Bergen 2002) and the (un)surprisingly successful campaign conducted under Islamist political leadership after the 2011 elections (Rosenblatt 2016; Benmelech and Klor 2018). Based on the translation of the ontological narratives of Tunisian women interviewed in these regions, the narrative projects an ultraconservative (rather extremist) view of gender roles that aligns with Sharia law as applied in other Islamist countries. This reframing process sustains what Ben Hadj Salem (2024) refers to as “gender neo-Orientalism”, a neocolonial discourse on the promotion of women’s rights under “moderate” Islamist political leadership. Among the range of narratives grouped under the data code ‘Gender Neo-Orientalism’ are notes taken from a videotaped lecture delivered by American long-time scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and Deputy Administrator for Policy and Programming at USAID, in 2017 at Dartmouth College as part of the “Women in Policy: Rising Voices for Equality, Empowerment, Security & Peace Series”. In her ethnographic work, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East, published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2010, Coleman examines how women in the Middle East are working within and alongside Islamist movements in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq to promote gender equality and socio-political change. Recasting this thesis in her 2017 lecture, Coleman appropriated a local struggle for gender equality, one led by anti-Islamist women’s rights activists in Tunisia, to validate her 2010 thesis. In the process, she grafted an externally devised analytical model onto autonomous local forms of resistance to the ravaging transnational Islamization project in Tunisia while serving neocolonial agendas marketed under the “Arab Spring” democracy-promotion metanarrative.

Forced on the consciousness of Western constituencies through repeated exposure, a process that French Sociologist P. Bourdieu (1998) qualified as symbolic drip feed, Western narratives often framed the Tunisian people’s unique democratic experiment, which hinges on a postcolonial societal model promoting gender equality and on a local Islamic intellectual heritage of Ijtihad (Ben Achour 2021), as a mere attempt to imitate Western models. They portrayed non-Islamist Tunisian women and women’s rights activists as victims of postcolonial secular dictatorships that had severed them from their Islamic roots. This framing, however, disregards local intellectual traditions and the perspectives of Tunisian Zeytouni Maliki Ulamas, who set the Islamic foundations of gender equality early in the 20th century (Haddad 1930). As a foundation for modern governance, Tunisian reformist Islam helped shield Tunisia from the influences of the spreading Pan-Islamist doctrines of the 19th and early 20th century which accompanied the spread of Western colonialism in the MENA region (Dreyfuss 2006), challenging the dominant Western discourse that equates modernization with secularization.

The same narrative was reproduced in different genres and modes after 2011 to normalize the 21st-century version of “gender neo-Orientalism”, which portrayed the unveiled Tunisian women and women’s rights activists, who were at the frontlines of the popular uprisings and fiercely resisted the post-2011 neocolonial Islamization project imposed systematically on the Tunisian people (Ben Hadj Salem 2021a, 2024), as victims of Westernizing dictatorships. Indeed, as the Islamists were forced to leave the government in 2014 under pressure from the disgruntled public, appalled and outraged by the terror-breeding course that the transition took under majority Islamist rule and the booty mindset guiding their colonial encounter with the Tunisian people. The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research surveyed veiling styles in seven Muslim-majority countries. The survey, which ignores Tunisia’s indigenous forms of veiling, reveals that only 15% of Tunisians prefer uncovered hair, while 57% favor the Brotherhood-style covering common in most Muslim-majority countries. These findings are particularly striking given that Tunisia is home to scholars of Zaytouni Islam, including Sheikh AbdulAziz Thâalbi who co-authored a book with the Tunisian Jewish lawyer Cesar Ben Attar and Hedi Sibaii who had already discussed the issue of veiling in Islam early in the 20th century. L’Esprit libéral du Coran (1905) demonstrated, through rigorous Quranic exegesis, that the veil is not a religious mandate in Islam. Their scholarship provided an Islamic justification for Tunisia’s anti-veiling policies, which, despite being rooted in local intellectual traditions (Thâalbi 1904), have consistently been framed both globally and domestically as Westernizing and un-Islamic. Unsurprisingly, the global media, reinforcing the same ideological narrative, portrayed Tunisian women through a distorting Islamist lens in their coverage of the constitutional gains secured by non-Islamist women’s rights advocates, political parties, deputies, and civil society. Rather than highlighting the latter’s struggle against the Islamist majority party’s obscurantist project (Ben Hadj Salem 2021a, 2022, 2024), the global media reports on Tunisia’s widely celebrated ‘groundbreaking’ January 2014 Constitution focused on images of veiled Islamist National Constitutional Assemblywomen embracing and weeping with joy over their illusory contribution to this ‘historic’ achievement in the Muslim world. Broadcast globally, this imagery, as demonstrated later in this work, projected a misleading narrative to international audiences, causing uninformed Western viewers to mistakenly assume that these women were the driving force of the constitutional provisions safeguarding Tunisian women’s rights.

All these reframing efforts, designed to align the domestic narratives with the neo-Orientalist master frame, are embedded within a broader discourse that asserts the fall of postcolonialism and the rise in a new paradigm: the “religious state” model of governance for the region. This overarching frame includes another layer of manipulation, namely the manipulation of the core of verifiable facts which flesh out Tunisia’s history books and national mythologies which make up the country’s civil religion. With the benediction of the native editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects (Gana 2013), Monica Marks, the author of “Women’s Rights before and after the Revolution”, for instance, unabashedly manipulated the Tunisian public narratives around one of Tunisia’s civil religion and women’s liberation symbols, the late President Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000). Obliterating the intellectual credentials of the founding father of the Tunisian postcolonial modernist state, the author of the Tunisian Code of Personal Status (1956) and a leader of political and religious acumen, she packaged him to the uninformed Western audience as a terrorist. Relying heavily on the reframing technique of selective appropriation (Baker 2006), she delved into the rich religious repertoire informing Bourguiba’s daily directives to the Tunisian people, zooming in on his call for the Tunisian people to exercise “the greater Jihad” to help the country develop. By invoking the metanarrative of the War on Terrorism, the ill-informed Western reader, who undoubtedly does not know the difference between “the greater Jihad” (meaning inner struggle) and Jihad against the West or “holy war” in its clash of civilizations definition (Emerson 2002), would equate Bourguiba with Bin Laden, Saddam, and all the bad guys of the Muslim world. On the other hand, the Western author, who had no scholarship on Tunisian women before this work and had been surpassed in expertise in Western academia by authoritative Tunisian scholars Charrad (1997, 2001) and Labidi (2007), did not hide her passionate admiration for Ghannouchi, the leader of the majority Islamist party, whose bleak record of violence, masterminded coups, and Islamic state projects during the Bourguiba era and after 2011 did not feature in her narrative. On the contrary, she presented him as a democratic Saint. Failing to find a single quote from his books that helped him win the American Times magazine title of one of the best 100 world thinkers in 2001, she resorted to post-2011 interviews she had made with him to assure the Western reader that he had become a democrat. To sustain this illusion, volumes were written for and about him in English, to craft a marketable image of him as a democrat and construct Tunisian roots for his movement’s alien doctrines (Ghannouchi 2023; Ghannouchi 2022; Ravanello and Ghannouchi 2015; Cavatorta and Merone 2013; Gana 2013).

By analyzing Western narratives about the uprisings and the constitution-drafting phase of the transition (2011–2014) which were knit along neo-Orientalist lines with the mediation of native translators, interpreters, and co-authors, it becomes evident that Tunisia was reinvented for the global audience to serve as a marketing model for the “Arab Spring” metanarrative. These micronarratives reframed the local transition narratives, not through a Western liberal democratization lens, but through a democratization lens that aligned with the ideological foundations embedded in the public and conceptual narratives circulating in Western media, academia, and strategic studies centers for nearly a decade before the 2011 events. In the process, they helped normalize the metanarrative of democracy promotion through the West-friendly “moderate” Islamists in the Western world (Rabasa et al. 2007). This study also reveals the complex interplay of power, ideology, and representation meant to consolidate pre-set patterns of domination shaping neocolonial encounters in a region. Western scholars, observers, and politicians frequently (and continue to) emphasize Tunisia’s transition as an exception within the “Arab Spring” on the condition that the Tunisia-based transnational Islamists play a key role in the decision-making process despite their proven terrorist record, glaring unpopularity, and limited electoral base. They never secured more than 20% of the votes of the electoral body despite the unremitting flow of transnational financial and logistic support lavished on them to win the elections with an overwhelming majority.

The reframing of the local narratives of democratic transition not only marginalizes alternative perspectives but also risks simplifying the context-specific multifaceted challenges and achievements of Tunisia’s democratic journey. While this work recognizes the pivotal role of concrete forms of activism channeled by the Tunisian masses, especially the women’s rights grassroots activists, in challenging the patterns of domination the neocolonial narratives promote, it contends that undermining them must also involve a direct challenge to the stories that sustain these narratives. This calls on Tunisians, mainly Tunisian intellectuals, to mount an equally regulated counter-narrative that prioritizes local agency and resists the imposition of external paradigms that serve to sustain neocolonial structures. However, this goal has become hard to achieve due to the profound imbalance in the means of knowledge production and dissemination across linguistic and cultural boundaries. The digital revolution and the key global players’ control over cyberspace have amplified this imbalance. Since 2011, digital platforms, social media, and globalized communication networks, as will be demonstrated in what follows, have served as tools to normalize the “Arab Spring Narrative” in real-time, making them appear universal, self-evident, benign, unquestionable, and emanating from within. This process has helped reinforce neocolonial structures by embedding external paradigms into the consciousness of the local population, influencing their thoughts, beliefs, behaviors (electoral choices), self-image (narratives), and internal socio-political dynamics, often at the expense of local agency. These mechanisms warrant further exploration.

4.2. Digital Colonialism: Technology as a Means of Normalizing Dominance and Marginalizing Subaltern Voices

Despite forms of legendary popular resistance to the neocolonial democratization–Islamization project, channeled particularly on the constitutional and para-constitutional war fronts (Ben Hadj Salem 2021a, 2024), sparing Tunisia the bloodier scenarios witnessed in other MENA countries hit by the same political Islamist storm, the course that the Tunisian transition has taken since 2011 reveals that, for the most part, Tunisians inadvertently sustained the “Arab Spring” metanarrative at its early phases. The Tunisian masses, especially the youth, were ill-informed about the complex transnational dimension of the returning political Islamist movement, given the absence of “political Islamism(s)” as a subject in the Tunisian school curricula and its marginality as an academic field. This was also due to the taboo halo it acquired since the rise of the Movement de Tendance Islamique (today’s Ennahda) in the 1980s as a destabilizing force for the postcolonial state, and its mutation since the 1990s into an offshore transnational political force working its way back to the country from the West. Unsurprisingly, after 2011, a wide segment of the Tunisian population was duped into believing that the returning Islamist expats, whitewashed by the Arabic-speaking Western media, Al-Jazeera, social media platforms, and the echoing local media as the iconic victims of the dictatorship, would be key players in the aspired democratization process.

In the coded data, many illustrative examples stand out, shedding light on how the strategic narrative patterns, underpinning the “moderate Muslims” Western ideological construct in the pre-2011 data set, have made their incisive entry into the local discourse through memetic adaptation. Explained through digital media theory, memetic adaptation is a mass-cognitive shaping process, whereby familiar, resonant symbols are repackaged to enhance their viral appeal and ideological acceptance in the local culture. Under the code “Moderate Islam”, the data reveals that the concept underwent memetic adaptation within the Tunisian context. This process is evident in the public discourse of Ennahda leaders, repeatedly emphasizing the compatibility of Islam and democracy and the strategic reframing of the party as “Muslim Democrats” (echoing Eastern Europe’s Christian Democrats). Tweets, speeches, and op-eds authored by key figures in Islamist and anti-Islamist parties echo the linguistic and ideological structures of the Western “moderate Islam” meme, recontextualizing it to suit local socio-political dynamics. Similarly, under the code “Islamic state”, op-eds, interviews, and speeches by Islamist leaders, including Ghannouchi, indicate that the “Islamic state”, the key foundational symbol of the party’s Islamic societal model for the post-Bourguibist modernist societal model of the 1980s (Enhaili 2010), was repackaged after 2011 to enhance the appeal and ideological acceptance of al Nahda as a key player in the transition. It mutated into different memes across audiences: the “Sixth Caliphate” or “The Rightly-Guided Caliphate” at electoral rallies and grassroots gatherings of the Islamist party’s support base, the globally palatable “civic state in Islam” at interviews with Western scholars, and a dream he once aspired to in his youth but failed to realize. It is now rekindled through the zeal of “his sons” (as he introduced them to the Tunisian people), the Salafists, who mirror his younger self and revive his vision of an Islamic state. This meme went viral in October 2012 as a secret video featuring Ghannouchi, rated one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People that year, lecturing radical Salafists on the need to be patient to achieve that dream as “The army and the police are not safe and the RCD supporters are coming back”. While this video scandal did not feature in the Western academic narratives which studied this phase of the transition, it went on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as well as Tunisia’s major dailies which warned that it displayed “the real agenda of Rached Ghannouchi’s Salafist project in Tunisia”. Local calls to disband An Nahda, bring Ghannouch to justice, and to convene a special session of the NCA to discuss the charge of treason were drowned out by the dominant global media democracy-promotion narrative, which amplified the party’s concessions to national pressure, namely, the establishment of a hybrid political system that would give some authorities to the president, the direct election of the president, a (unfulfilled) commitment to organize the next elections in June 2003, and the resolution of the prolonged debate over including Sharia as a source of legislation in the constitution.

More surprisingly was the crucial role that a large number of Tunisian intellectuals, cutting across the “revolutionary” ideological spectrum and political and cultural boundaries, have played in disseminating the metanarrative of the “Arab Spring” and socializing Tunisians into the view of the world and the exceptional image of Tunisia, Islam, and democracy it promoted. Some of them have lent the neocolonial discourse global support across linguistic boundaries by constructing indigenous personal, public, and conceptual narratives that helped shape the local culture into the mold of the Islamic state set for it by the Western intellectual elite. Even though they represent a site of ideological struggle, the indigenous narratives analyzed for this study show that the Tunisian authors, co-authors, and editors did not question the key ideological pillars of the metanarrative. These mainly include the spontaneous nature of the “Revolution”, i.e., the absence of foreign intervention and the compatibility of Islam (embodied in a political party with suspicious transnational ties and non-indigenous Islamic ideologies) and democracy. Indisputably, many of them harshly criticized US intervention in shaping internal dynamics and offering unconditional support for the postcolonial dictatorships before 2011 (Gana 2013; Ben Achour 2018). They did not consider, let alone entertain the possibility, that the Islamists of Tunisia may be a proxy for Western/US interests.

From a neuroscience-informed lens, the data coded under “postcolonial regimes”, reveals that through the intentional use of linguistic and visual strategies, the local narratives (un) intentionally helped sustain the neocolonial democratization master frame, which places the imperial powers’ “moderate Muslim” allies at the core of the “religious state” mode of governance preordained by global powers for the region. These strategies include persuasive linguistic patterns, cognitive triggers, and repetition, which are foregrounded as neural hacking mechanisms within the conceptual and analytical frameworks of neuroscience theory, influencing the brain, especially regarding decision-making, memory, and emotional reaction. Correlating local narratives coded under “Islam and democracy” reveal an overt mistrust and lack of confidence in the democratic intentions of the returning Islamist expats, stemming from their grim legacy during what is now widely referred to amongst the general population as the ‘Black Decade’, a memetic adaptation of the Algerian brutal civil war experience within the Tunisian context. This meme shows how echoes of “past” majority Islamist rule (2011–2014; 2019–2021) have come to resurface in public memory and have shaped current perceptions of democracy promotion through transnational Islamist ideologies in Tunisia. (Un)surprisingly, like Western narratives, the local narratives chronicling the early stages of the transition covered in this study (2011–2014) helped disseminate accounts surrounding the postcolonial regimes that framed them, following Ghannouchi’s lead, as colonial powers. Overlooking their significant contributions to the Tunisian state, which Tunisians have come to recognize and strive to preserve since they experienced transnational Islamist rule, they were repeatedly described as “authoritarian”, “dictatorships”, “repressive”, “secularist” “Western puppets”, and “colonial” regimes, imposing “Western models” on a subjected local population, severing them from their Islamic roots. Similarly, recurrent phrases such as “killing off its opponents Ben Ali Style” and “megalomaniac” to refer to Habib Bourguiba, a statesman of exceptional intellect and strategic brilliance, function as cognitive-emotional triggers, evoking a total lack of democratic culture in Tunisia, standing in stark contrast to “moderate Muslim”, “Muslim democrat”, “bridge-builder”, and “authentic Islamic values”, phrases which bypass doctrinal critique and frame the political role of the leader of the Islamist movement in emotionally resonant and cognitively digestible terms. Neuroscience suggests that such persuasive linguistic patterns or repetitive labeling enhance message retention and trust formation, contributing to cognitive ease and the acceptance of a simplistic narrative frame without scrutiny: neural bias. Notably, the reproduction of these binary framing patterns across platforms and cultural and linguistic boundaries amplifies their neural impact, normalizing the neocolonial democracy metanarrative, which markets the so-called returning “moderate Muslim” strategic allies as the key democratizing force in a Middle East barren of democratic culture. This explains to a large extent why local forms of resistance to its implications have been reduced, in the global narratives about the transition, into irrational overreactions amongst an inherently undemocratic secularist Westernized general public and weak opposition parties that “were simply anti-Ennahda (or anti-Islamist)” (Gana 2013, p. 280).

Following the protracted departure sit-in of Summer 2013, the subsequent resounding electoral failure of the Islamists, and the triumph of the majority non-Islamist party Nidaa Tunis in 2014 (one of the indigenous forms of resistance to the metanarrative that the West had to contain), America’s passionate attachment to the Islamists was glaring throughout the national dialog process. The superpower sought to uphold the authority of its loyal political agents and ensure they signed the constitution in a globally televised ceremony. This form of Western interventionism was sidelined in the local narratives. The US and the international community turned their back on the Tunisian people who stormed the streets and braved live ammunition to rid the country of “the new Trabelsis”, referring to the Islamists who stole their dreams, took their jobs, plundered the country, and turned it into a hotbed of terrorism in the region (Rosenblatt 2016; Benmelech and Klor 2018). They brandished the English-language verdict of the 2011 uprisings, “game over”, in the face of the Islamists (a clear case of memetic adaptation). To add insult to injury, the international community aborted the genuine popular uprisings of the Tunisian people. Instead, they conferred on the National Dialogue Quartet the Noble Prize in recognition of their efforts to impose the Islamists on the Tunisian people as key players in Tunisia’s political landscape. Little wonder that despite the mounting global academic interest in studying the transnational ties of social and political movements and their impact on the processes of social and political change in their respective spheres of influence, there has been no serious attempt in the local narratives to pursue a historically mined investigation into the transnational ideological, financial, and logistic ties of the returning Islamist players and how they represent an assault on democracy through fair elections.

The local narratives examined for this study reveal that the Islamist party was not criticized for serving as a vehicle for the hegemonic agendas of global powers in the region, as was meticulously spelled out in the works of the American think tanks before 2011 (Rabasa et al. 2007). It was instead reproached for its alliance with the so-called “secular” actors of the political spectrum and the so-called Salafists, and for its illegal resource mobilization tools. In addition to the reports of the Tunisian Cour des Comptes (Tunisian Court of Auditors), which documented a lack of transparency and irregular financial practices, including undeclared funds and external financial support, which raised serious concerns in the local media debates about the fairness and legality of Ennahda’s campaign financing since 2011, Ben Achour (2018) offers critical insights into the Islamist party’s exploitation of state institutions and religious legitimacy for political gain. While his work acknowledges Ennahda’s later role in democratic compromise and advocates for the potential laïcisation of the party, it also contains indirect yet powerful critiques of its early strategies. In Part III, ”Les contrastes, Les contrastes de la révolution”, Chapter IX, Peuple de la révolution, peuples des élections, Ben Achour characterizes the 2011 elections as having been won through “à coups de pêches politiques dans les mosquées, de versets coraniques, ainsi que d’accusations d’hérésie ou d’apostasie contre les adversaires politiques” (pp. 188–89). These references point to the instrumentalization of religion and ideological rhetoric in the public sphere as tools for political gain, often under conditions enabled by their control over the mosques as key state institutions. In Part IV, “Révolution et contre-révolution”, particularly in Chapter XII, Protéger la révolution, Ben Achour further critiques the political manipulation that accompanied the Islamists’ rise to power, positioning it as part of a broader effort to redirect the aims of the revolution for partisan ends. In Part IV, “Révolution et contre-révolution”, particularly Chapter XII, Protéger la révolution, Ben Achour further highlights how the Ennahda-promoted violent groups, called the Ligues de protection de la révolution (reminiscent of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran), acted as violent instruments to repress rising anti-Islamist opposition forces since 2011. These groups were involved in assaults on opposition forces such as Nidaa Tounes and the UGTT (the oldest and most powerful union in Tunisia), including the widely condemned attack on the UGTT headquarters on 4 December 2012, following which, the author documents, the Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi praised these violent groups as “la conscience vive de la révolution” (the living spirit of the revolution). Ben Achour also notes their alleged involvement in the lynching of Lotfi Nagd, regional coordinator for Nidaa Tounes, in Tataouine on 18 October 2012, and in the political assassination of the opposition leader Chokri Belaid. Such acts of violence and intimidation against rising anti-Islamist figures and institutions were used to neutralize opposition ahead of the 2014 elections and preserve the Islamists’ political dominance. Further, in Part V, “La force du droit dans la révolution”, Chapter XV, La révolution face au droit, Ben Achour references broader institutional abuses under Islamist governance. Citing the UGTT declaration of 29 July 2013, issued in the wake of Mohamed Brahmi’s assassination and amid the popular anti-Islamist departure sit-in protests, he underscores how control over the state apparatus was used to manipulate the electoral environment. The declaration called for, among other measures, the dissolution of the Ligues de protection de la révolution, the depoliticization of the civil administration and educational and cultural institutions, a review of partisan (predominantly Ennahda) appointments, and the preparation of the draft electoral law. These demands, which later formed the basis of the National Dialogue, illustrate how Ennahda’s consolidation of state power in less than two years mirrored authoritarian-era practices, thereby casting doubt on the integrity of the electoral processes during the transition period.

The analysis of the local narratives of the corpus, which were written mainly in French and English, clearly for an international rather than a domestic readership, captures the cyclical and self-reinforcing nature of the process of translated hegemony. Books emanating from the Islamic camp, such as On Muslim Democracy: Essays and Dialogues (Ghannouchi 2023) by Rached Ghannouchi with Andrew F. March, Public Freedoms in the Islamic State by Rached Ghannouchi and translated by David F. Johnston (Ghannouchi 2022), and Entretiens d’Olivier Ravanello avec Rached Ghannouchi (2015), where Western tutelage was badly needed to reframe the author’s Salafist ideologies; seem to stand in harmony with books written in French by Yadh Ben Achour, an authority on constitutional law and Islamic movements, including l’Islam et la Démocratie: une révolution intérieure (Ben Achour 2021), and Tunisie: une révolution en pays d’Islam (Ben Achour 2018). Despite their ideological divergences and antithetical approaches, these works collectively contribute to the promotion of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative and the preexisting power structures it sustains, normalizing their ideological underpinnings through acts of translation into the “colonial” languages. Indeed, for a Western reader, they are knit according to the key assumptions of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative, celebrating the compatibility of Islam with democracy as abstract categories.

This epistemic circularity is a key mechanism through which coloniality is maintained, amidst celebratory narratives hailing the end of postcolonial frameworks and the advent of a new era of self-determination in the context of the Arab Uprisings (Dabashi 2012; Gana 2013). This phenomenon, as mentioned in the previous sections, is grounded theoretically in postcolonial critiques of knowledge production, particularly the works of Fanon (1952), Said (1978), and Spivak (1988), which highlight how colonial knowledge systems are internalized by colonized peoples, shaping their self-perception and cultural identity. Baker’s socio-narrative translation approach offers a multidisciplinary understanding of how these dynamics, which perpetuate neocolonial structures and epistemic hegemonies, operate and how they might be resisted. However, what distinguishes the Arab Spring metanarrative from the metanarratives studied by Baker in her 2006 study, including the then-rising “War on Terror” metanarrative, is that the latter gained currency over considerable periods and through relatively traditional global dissemination mechanisms, including the superpower’s global economic and cultural might. Coming to full blossom in the age of AI and digital revolutions, the normalization of the “Arab Spring” metanarrative and its sustaining micronarratives happened in real-time. Indisputably, the current superpower’s control over cyberspace was pivotal in instantaneously normalizing these narratives in Tunisia and globally.

Most retrospective studies of the Arab uprisings and the political transition have highlighted the liberating role of social media platforms (Gana 2013; Dabashi 2012). However, as a growing body of literature bridging digital communication and neural science theory has shown, social media platforms, search engines, and digital communication networks are often designed and controlled by entities rooted in dominant cultures, which means they inherently prioritize and propagate their narratives. Algorithms, for instance, are not neutral; they are shaped by the values and assumptions of their creators, often reflecting neocolonial biases (Cerise 2016). This results in a feedback loop where dominant narratives are continuously reinforced, making them appear natural and inevitable, while local and subaltern voices are algorithmically suppressed or rendered invisible (Floridi 2014; Cerise 2016; O’Neil 2016; Alter 2017). It may not be too contentious, therefore, to argue that given the remarkable connectedness of Tunisians to social media platforms, it was through neural hacking and algorithmic manipulation that the Tunisian masses, who were ill-informed about transplanted political Islamism, were subtly misled into believing the dominant culture’s democratization narratives at the early phases of the transition. It is undeniable that algorithms, as a tool of soft colonial power, reframed the invading transnational Islamic actors as legendary victims of the dictatorship and legitimate key players in the local democratization process. More importantly, they helped disseminate the narrative globally in real-time. In the process, they helped influence (and still continue to influence) the thoughts, beliefs, electoral choices, and self-image (local narratives) of a wider segment of the Tunisian masses. Consequently, they continue to shape the socio-political dynamics of the country along with concomitant internal and external dynamics.

In Tunisie: une révolution en pays d’Islam (Ben Achour 2018), Yadh ben Achour, the head of the HIROR, the temporary commission that provided a platform for Tunisia’s “fleeting democracy” after the uprisings, wondered why the people who were elected to the majority Islamist National Constitutional Assembly were different from those who were on the frontlines of the uprisings and embodied the democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people. The largest segment of the Tunisian population has been asking a similar question about the course the transition process has taken over the past 14 years. It has been at odds with their local socio-cultural, political, and intellectual heritage, which helped flesh out the fugitive democratic moments that Tunisians had experienced before the Islamists took over. Although Yadh Ben Achour opens and concludes his book with a celebration of the uniqueness and enduring value of the Tunisian revolution, he remains sharply critical of the setbacks and counter-revolutionary dynamics that marred the transition process. In the Introduction, he asserts that “[p]our l’avoir vécu de plus près, et tout en admettant qu’elle ne ressemble à rien, je prétends que la révolution méritait véritablement le prix international des révolutions qui lui fut décerné” (p. 3). In the Conclusion, he reaffirms his belief in its lasting historical significance. He asserts that “[q]uelles que soient les vicissitudes qui la suivront, les pages glorieuses qui ont été écrites au cours de son jaillissement et de son déroulement ne seront jamais tournées” (p. 355). Yet, the body of the work, particularly Part III titled “Les contrastes de la révolution”, reveals his concern over the “revolution’s” derailment. In chapters such as La révolution et les conflits du référentiel culturel (VII), Démocratie ou théocratie? (VIII), and Peuple de la révolution, peuples des élections (IX), Ben Achour highlights the tensions between the democratic aspirations of the revolutionaries, rooted in Tunisia’s postcolonial, Bourguibist legacy of civil reform and gender equality, and the ideological agenda imposed by the Islamist majority that rose to power in the 2011 elections. More broadly, as the book reveals implicitly, Ben Achour defends the revolution not only against the remnants of the old regime who sought to deny it, but most forcefully against those who attempted to co-opt it through a theocratic counter-revolution, imposing archaic and anachronistic dogmas incompatible with the spirit of the time. In this reading, the “revolution” was not merely political; it was a deeply rooted socio-cultural project grounded in the gains of the Bourguibist civil revolution, particularly the Code of Personal Status of 1956, which enshrined gender equality and modern civil liberties. This tension between an indigenous democratization trajectory and a non-indigenous Islamization project lies at the heart of Ben Achour’s critical engagement with the post-revolutionary transition.

One way to decipher this electoral riddle is through in-depth investigation and research into the processes of neural hacking of the mass mind and digital colonialism, which have been at play since the uprisings. These crucial processes, which have received little, if any, attention in the academic studies of the Tunisian transition, are worthy of more multidisciplinary inquisitive and archival research for their importance in providing a lens through which the unbridgeable hiatus between the genuine democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people and the undemocratic course that the transition has taken can be understood. Such studies are likely to reveal that the narratives of the Tunisian uprisings and the transition need to be reconsidered in a more nuanced way.

5. Reflections and Concluding Remarks

Contrary to the pervasive presumption that the Tunisian uprisings of 2011 emerged organically independent of Western mediation, and solely as a spontaneous expression of the indigenous population’s yearning for liberty and democracy, this work sought to demonstrate that the Tunisian uprisings and the ensuing transition (2011–2014) were also knit along the lines of a larger neocolonial democracy-promotion metanarrative marketed under the “Arab Spring” ideological construct. As such, it is aware of the conditions of its own making as an insider’s counter-narrative to the “Arab Spring” as a democracy-promotion grand narrative and its supporting micronarratives, challenging the assumption that the uprisings were spontaneous and had no theory of origins. This work analyzed the content of a corpus consisting of threads of narratives produced across linguistic and cultural boundaries, for the most part, with the mediation of indigenous co-authors, translators, and interpreters. They represent sites of neocolonial encounters between the Tunisian people and the West, led by the USA. By drawing on multidisciplinary theoretical, conceptual, and analytical frameworks developed in the fields of postcolonial theory, socio-narrative translation theory, digital communication theories, cognitive neuroscience theories, and social movement theory to analyze the corpus, this work has delineated a genealogical framework for the “Arab Spring” metanarrative, mapping its ideological evolution, discursive construction, and mediated cross-cultural dissemination mechanisms over time and in real-time. This analysis has revealed the complex interplay of ideological manipulation, reframing strategies, and normalization mechanisms that shaped the “Arab Spring” metanarrative. The juxtaposition of the dominant power’s democratic narrative with the local narratives has illuminated how global players and their local-transnational political actors co-opted and distorted the genuine democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people to serve their respective agendas.

While recognizing the role that technology played during the uprisings as a liberating force, technology, particularly digital communication, this work argues, was a soft power mechanism that helped, in concert with traditional global media, disseminate and normalize “the Arab Spring” metanarrative as a template within the region. However, this paper has also highlighted the tension between the genuine, culturally, and historically mined democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people, which were reflected in the local narratives, and the eventual course of their transition, which diverged sharply from the fleeting moments of democratic promise experienced in the early days of the uprisings.

This work has argued that following the October 2011 elections, the rise to power of the Universal Muslim Brotherhood’s branch in Tunisia, the superpower’s new interlocutors in the region, was, by no means, the ineluctable outcome of internal dynamics or a reflection of the democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people as the election results were framed by Al Jazeera and the global media. As this work demonstrated, the roadmap to the “Arab Spring”, as a Western democracy-promotion narrative that confers on the branches of the Universal Muslim Brotherhood the historical mission of institutionalizing Islamic democracies in the region, had already been set by American think tanks over the decade that bridged the 9/11 attacks and the Tunisian uprisings. An unremitting flow of conceptual narratives, samples from which were analyzed in this work and previous research conducted by the author, offered the philosophical foundations of the “Arab Spring”. Anabaptizing this abstract category of transnational political Islamist actors as “moderate”, the neo-Orientalist experts did a stellar job as exegetes for the unseasoned Islamist power elite. They clarified the theological foundations of the “moderate” Islamic state and governance system, outlining its principles and limitations. They also established red lines defining the extent to which moderate Islamists could resort to violence in response to aggression, aiming to restrict such actions, particularly against Western interests in the region. Additionally, they played a key role in determining which aspects of Sharia should be upheld or discarded, as well as the extent to which it could serve as a foundation for family law. Some of these experts were even invited by the Islamist majority party in the National Constitutional Assembly to contribute as advisors during the constitutional drafting process, which was punctuated by acts of terror and political assassinations to force the disobedient and highly educated Tunisian masses to succumb to the Islamization project. However, the involvement of American experts was met with strong resistance from non-Islamist members of the NCA, who adamantly opposed foreign interference, pointing to the Iraqi model as a cautionary tale. This was particularly evident in the case of Noah Feldman, Ennahda’s consultant, who Tunisian National Constitutional Assembly deputies chased out due to his role in Iraq’s constitution-writing process, which resulted in an anomalous constitution, widely criticized for failing to reflect the culture, aspirations, and general mindset of the Iraqi people.

What set the Tunisian constitution of 2014 apart from other examples in the region was the Tunisian people’s unwavering and unified struggle to enshrine gender equality and freedom of conscience in a founding document that was still below their democratic aspirations. What informed their collective vision and collaborative activism was their adherence to the subconscious norms of their socio-cultural heritage as a Zaytouni Maliki Muslim country, with a rich intellectual heritage in Quranic exegesis untarnished by the alien neocolonial ideologies emanating from the Muslim world. However, with the emergence of transnational Islamist actors framed as key players in driving the processes of social and political change from within, the local masses had to reframe their democratic struggle for the universal values of “employment, freedom, and dignity” as a struggle to salvage the Tunisian idiosyncratic societal model which hinges on promoting gender equality from a ravaging neocolonial Islamization project. Between 2011 and 2014, they defeated three Islamist constitutional drafts (14 December 2012; 22 April 2013; 1 June 2013) that could have turned Tunisia into one of the most radical theocracies in the region. They were refuted by the civil society, women’s organizations, opposition parties, and international observers for being below the international democratic standards. (Ben Achour (2018) discusses the theocratic overtone of the first draft in Part III, “Chapter VIII: Démocratie ou théocratie?”). Indeed, the disgruntled Tunisian masses orchestrated repeated sit-ins to put an end to Islamist rule despite the uncustomary reign of terror they experienced during that period (political assassinations, lynching of opposition leaders, assassinations of soldiers and national guards, death threats to journalists and artists, etc.). However, they accepted a parliamentary system that contradicted their collective vision of governance, one that was imposed on them to ensure the continued influence of Islamists in decision-making. This imposition was reinforced by the rapid proliferation of NGOs (a financial orbit of the Islamist party), which further weakened the non-Islamist parties. The latter spread mushroom-like across the country following the adoption of the September 2011 Decree on political parties and NGOs. The legal framework that this decree provided facilitated numerous security crises (terrorism) that had crippled the indigenous democratization process. It also served as a legal shield facilitating the unremitting flow of resource mobilization mechanisms put in place at the hand of the transnational Islamist actors to reshape the processes of social and political change in the region and the country, ultimately serving to advance the transnational Islamization agendas and Western interests in the region.

From a research-driven academic lens, the unrestricted flow of resources to Islamist movements raises serious questions about the continued relevance of social movement theories and research tools to study the processes of social and political change in societies where “social movements” have very complex transnational ties and shifting identities. These frameworks (Zald and Useem 1987; Tarrow 2011), originally designed to analyze how conventional social movements can influence the process of political and social change (including democratization) in the West, have recently been applied to study the same process in post-uprising Tunisia by Western scholars (Derichs and Fennert 2014). They fell short when applied to Islamist movements in Tunisia, which operate with extensive transnational networks and enjoy substantial foreign backing. Unlike other local movements that struggle with financial and logistical constraints to advance the local democratization project, transnational Islamist movements in Tunisia benefit from virtually limitless resources under Decree-Law No. 2011-88, promulgated on September 24, 2011, which allows associations to receive foreign funding without prior authorization from the government. This makes any comparison with traditional grassroots activism to advance the democratic aspirations of the masses deeply flawed. Accordingly, this work invites further research into this area and a more nuanced understanding of the global narratives about the Tunisian transition and the forces that shape them. Such research is essential not only to reconsider the “Arab Spring” as a Western democracy-promotion ideological construct but also to critically examine the broader dynamics of power, ideology, and technology in shaping historical and contemporary transnational movements. Ultimately, this counter-narrative serves as a reminder of the importance of centering local voices and experiences in analyzing global narratives, challenging dominant frameworks, and uncovering the hidden mechanisms that perpetuate ideological control. Only through such efforts can we move toward a more equitable and authentic understanding of historical transitions and their implications for the future.