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There are more than 6.5 million internet and social media users in Jordan, the majority of whom are youth, out of a population of roughly 11 million. Jordanians are avid social media users, and over the years have used Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms to share news not broadcast on state-controlled channels, jokes targeting the regime, and rumors about the myriad political and corruption scandals circulating across the country on a regular basis

Cybercrimes Law No. 27/2015 is a popular regime tool used to control expression online. Article 11 regulates expression on online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In April 2019, parliament introduced amendments to the law to criminalize the act of spreading “rumors” and “hate speech,” extending to the use of private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The latest amendments define hate speech as “every writing and every speech or action intended to provoke sectarian or racial sedition, advocate for violence, or foster conflict between followers of different religions and various components of the nation.” And under the cybercrime law, Jordanians will face a criminal penalty if they are convicted of “sending or resending or disseminating information through the Internet or website or any information system that includes defamation, slander or libel against any person.” Between 2019 and 2020, the cases brought under the cybercrime law exceeded two thousand, more than double the number from the year before. In 2022, there have been more arrests under charges of “spreading false news,” including the detentions of several high-profile journalists.

Even the Jordanian National Center for Human Rights, a semi-governmental organization, wrote in its own recent annual report that “the detention of individuals for what they express is continuing.” Alarmingly, a recent Citizen Lab and Front Line Defenders joint report confirmed that two operators, “likely agencies of the Jordanian government,” used the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of at least four Jordanians, including a human rights defender, a lawyer, and a journalist. 

Loosely formed groups of youth activists, often described with the term hirak (“movement”), organize in various neighborhoods and towns across Jordan around shared issues. In 2019, a workshop looking at youth activism across the Middle East and North Africa found that youth activism does not adhere to formalized structures of organizing, such as political parties, professional associations, and civil society organizations.

we have seen youth movements in the past decade break the generations-old divisions of urban versus rural and West Bank versus East Bank

organizing around their shared frustrations over unchecked levels of corruption, perpetual over-education combined with underemployment, and restrictions on what they can write on social media or when they can gather.

the attitudes of ruling elites and public officials toward youth are dismissive

the many initiatives launched over the years have not ever been driven by local youth demands, but rather have been top-down, buzzword-filled projects, centralized within the newly created Ministry of Youth, with little to no popular support or participation

a new generation of Arab artists who monetize their work directly online, not mediated through galleries or other parts of the artistic establishment

social media are increasingly becoming the space for transnational and global activism for Palestine

Hisham Soliman spoke of a pre-revolution identity crisis that permeated Egypt’s young population and made citizenship and national feeling count for very little. Scores of youth, especially young men, considered emigration as one of the only solutions. But the new media allowed them access to new spaces and empowered them with new techniques to redefine their senses of identity and belonging. Instead of keeping them in their private spaces, it allowed them virtual alternative spaces that compensated for the absence of an actual public space. It even provided them with the means to aggregate and to later claim back the actual public sphere

transposing the model of the salon to blogs on the Egyptian Internet

A limitation of virtual media is its inability to give rise to a coherent discourse and set of ideas. Online activism might even be inhibiting deeper thinking and analysis of complicated political and economic problems

Surian, drawing on arguments made with regard to “filter bubbles” argued that the individuals, through Google searches and Facebook filters, are being locked into patterns. Facebook and Google become familiar backyards, leading to reduced thinking and a closing rather than opening of ideas and social spaces.

Gramsci states in his Prison Notebooks: If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer leading but only “dominant,” exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

MAM’s deference to expertise and social capital was also evident in its reliance on individuals with prior NDP credentials; that is, people who had the knowledge and connections to run a political machine. While some of the cofounders of MAM fit that bill, All-MAM was in some ways an NDP reunion.

Nothing symbolized Sisi’s embrace of Mubarak’s political machine more than All-MAM’s pick for secretary general, Mohamed Heiba, the former NDP Secretary of Youth. Under the leadership of Gamal Mubarak, Heiba was once at the forefront of the NDP’s youth mobilization efforts

Besides leaning on the seasoned political organizers of the NDP, All-MAM was also relying on the former ruling party’s big business politicians who brought to the table not only experience, but also money. The most emblematic example was mogul and former NDP lawmaker Mohamed Aboul Enein, an icon of the business clique that dominated politics during Mubarak’s final decade. Up until that point, the Sisi regime kept a largely cordial orientation toward the likes of Aboul Enein. Certainly, Sisi may have worked to politically disempower such oligarchs, but he steered clear of expropriating their assets, as Amr Adly notes. Thus, high-profile business NDPers such as Aboul Enein survived, and may have even thrived to some degree, but they were not encouraged to play politics.[4] For Aboul Enein specifically, the tide began to turn in 2018 in the lead-up to the presidential election, as he became a visible figure in the marketing of the Sisi campaign. The regime was not simply tolerating the former NDPer, as was previously the case. It was awarding him a political role, while proudly showcasing his support for the president. On a deeper level, Sisi was essentially indulging the NDP’s deep pockets, hoping they could bankroll the big campaigns the regime was about to embark upon. Sisi may hold a grudge or two against the Mubarakists, but he will always hold a place for those who pay.

MAM proved to be a useful instrument for coopting NDPers and deploying their resources and expertise on behalf of Sisi. Also, it kept these Mubarakists loyal to the president and away from the likes of Shafik and other presidential hopefuls eyeing the Mubarakist networks.

by early 2021, MWP looked much less like the youth-led party of 2014 and much more like MAM, with many of the association’s founders, including Mandhour, holding senior posts inside the party. Likewise, the NDPers made themselves quite comfortable inside MWP, as exemplified by Mohamed Aboul Enein, who became vice president of the party, not to mention deputy speaker of the House of Representatives following his return to parliament after the 2020 election.

Today, MWP controls parliament and serves as a vehicle for advancing Sisi’s political agenda. Yet, the president holds no affiliation with it and neither do most senior members of the government and the state apparatus. There has been no clear effort to encourage officials to affiliate with the party either. In other words, the president has kept MWP in this ambiguous space akin to a political “friendzone.”

the NYP (or, at least, the “wisdom” behind it) was essential in facilitating Sisi’s accommodation with NDP-tied families. Many such families capitalized on the president’s NYP discourse, prodding their own younger members to enter the political stage under the guise of youth empowerment. It may be hard to believe, but longtime political families managed to gaslight Sisi right back: “You want youth? We’ll give you youth.” This strategy was evident in MWP to the extent that it featured young affiliates of NDP families. But it was more than just MWP. By the time the 2020 elections were over, the phenomenon of relatives of former lawmakers entering parliament became more visible across parties and regions, as Amr Hashem Rabee noted. Outside legislative chambers and Mustaqbal Watan, other parties jumped on the same bandwagon, recruiting and showing off young figures from politically prominent families. In other words, every establishment party is now cutting two carrots with one knife: get on Sisi’s good graces by checking off the youth empowerment box, and, at the same time, solidify alliances with politically distinguished families

Whereas between 2014 and 2018, the regime’s principal aim was keeping civilian politics weak, fragmented, and inconducive to collective action, its approach became more interventionist beginning 2018. This is because the president now had a clearer vision for political outcomes he needed to generate, majorities he wanted to manufacture, and allies he needed to coopt and reward.

the regime’s aggression had surpassed those rejecting the post-2013 political order and that the security apparatus was just as predatory in targeting opposition actors who have accepted the political system and agreed to work from within it

as Sisi began reorganizing his own political apparatus and putting his own ducks in a row, he embarked on an effort to sabotage his competitors and wreak havoc on their organizations and networks at an unusually broad scale

In contrast to 2015 when it sought to engineer a fragmented parliament, this time around, the regime wanted a majority for its own political arm and was adamant to stack the cards in favor of that outcome. Not only that, but the regime was also keen on dictating the candidate rosters of other independent parties participating on its own list, “The National List for the Sake of Egypt.” Indeed, Sisi was that determined not to leave anything to chance.

the 2020 election marked the reintroduction of parliament’s upper chamber. As a body devoid of any meaningful legislative powers, the Senate provided Sisi with a low-cost method of rewarding political allies with “certificates of prestige.” Certainly, this was not unique to Sisi’s reign. This same tradition was prevalent under previous rulers. But that Sisi is now conforming to this same template shows that he has finally succumbed into resurrecting his predecessors’ cooptation and clientelistic practices after years of eschewing them in his dealing with civilian politics. The details might differ, but the overall story is a familiar one: the initially timid officers instinctively avoid getting their hands dirty by civilian politics, until the imperative for survival draws them into the same “swamp” they once swore to drain

their entry into MWP captures Sisi’s post-2018 rapprochement with the interests and clientelistic networks that once occupied the Mubarak regime, as distinct from the cadre of younger politicians Sisi had been trying to cultivate through the NYP

Sisi’s refusal to grant MWP (or any party for that matter) the status (and privileges) of a ruling party arguably speaks to the persistence of his populist instincts and his own belief that he is in fact capable of ruling without the mediation of any political class.

for Sisi, turning MWP into an actual ruling party would be ceding power and access to the very political forces he has been trying to contain. If the NDP (along with all its missteps) was the reason for Mubarak’s demise, why give its descendants the chance to grow and gain more influence through MWP? Therein lies the source of the paradox: Sisi needs the NDPers’ expertise and resources, but he is aware their support cannot take for granted. Thus, despite Sisi’s accommodation with the Mubarak regime’s networks and their presence in MWP, the president’s propaganda machine remains discursively hostile to NDP remnants, especially more recently with growing chatter about a Gamal Mubarak presidential bid.

The president may believe that his investment in this project will someday bear fruit, contributing to a new reality actualizing his vision for the ideal civilian politician—that is, the politician who will blindly defer to the men in the uniform, accept their supremacy, and respect their economic privileges (with all the corrupt practices they entail).

The regime’s continued inability to assert its hegemony over the formal political sphere, its dependency on political intermediaries it does not trust, and the shutting out of credible competitors from politics, have all limited Sisi’s political options for managing the ongoing economic crisis

the realm of formal politics has become so discredited that the regime itself is aware that it will not provide its international audiences a sufficiently persuasive façade of democratic politics

Sisi’s long struggle to invent the politics he dreams of through his political grooming projects, while evading the politics he actually faces by gaslighting his allies and critics, alike

low-cost organizational structure and no durable organizational mechanisms are put in place

he political evanescence of social media activism raises issues of accountability and democratic control on the new emerging leaders of social movements, because of a certain opacity that accompanies the fluidity and partial anonymity of online interactions

The political evanescence of digital activism in the Egyptian revolution needs to be understood in connection with the libertarian ideology of “leaderlessness” and “horizontality” that has provided a cultural framing for social media use among activists

it is apparent that the Egyptian revolution, as any great upheaval in history, was not completely spontaneous and leaderless. Rather it bore the mark of complex direction exercised in concert by multiple leaders, from grassroots groups on the ground as the April 6 Youth Movement, to organized forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Left opposition parties and NGOs, to end with digital activists responsible for spreading revolutionary information, recruiting online communities of supporters and publicizing protest events

While Ghonim had some basic activist experience, having done some digital campaigning in support of the presidential campaign of Mohammed el-Baradei in 2010, he was little known within activist circles. From the distance and safety of Dubai where he was working for Google, he collaborated with activists on the ground including Mohammed AbdelRahman Mansour who acted as co-admin on the page, and Ahmed Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement, the group that pioneered digital activism in Egypt. It was only after he was released from prison in the midst of the eighteen-day insurrection, that he suddenly became a famous and respected figure. Yet, Ghonim did not manage, neither he tried, to turn the great influence he had exercised during the revolution into any form of structured political leadership during the transitional phase. Ironically the Facebook fanpage he founded has discontinued its communications with a status message celebrating “the power of the people” on 3 July 2013, the day of the anti-Morsi coup. Ghonim has recently left the country for voluntary exile after a streak of attacks on the news media.

The case of Tamarrod demonstrates how the fluidity in the field of social media in the activist field, dominated by flexible groupings coordinated through social network sites can open space for opportunist groups. Both Wael Ghonim and the main leaders of Tamarrod were secondary figures in the activist scene in Cairo, despite the fact that some of them, had been previously involved in pro-democracy campaigns and in the Elbaradei presidential campaigns. Similarly to what happened with previous political groups it was a great extent this outsider aura that managed to gather so much enthusiasm from Egyptian youth. The group managed to build an extensive network across the country, collecting millions of signature (the exact quantity will remain unverified) to withdraw confidence from Morsi. However, it progressively became clear that Tamarrod was far from being simply a disingenuous and spontaneous citizens groups. It has been publicly confirmed that the campaign received substantial funding from a number of Egyptian entrepreneurs, including Naguib Sawiris. It is also reasonably suspected that the group received financial and operational support from the Egyptian army, and the so-called deep state, which saw in Tamarrod a sort of useful idiot to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and create a favorable climate for the coup d'etat. Since the campaign of repression orchestrated by al-Sisi and the new post-coup government, the group has been marred by intestine fight between different factions, and seems to have lost much of its “street cred” among Egyptian youth. It was yet another group falling victim of its own precipitous rise.

The very existence of the Dialogue underscores the extent to which Sisi has managed to lock himself in a corner after spending much of the past decade destroying all forms of managed dissent and limited pluralism, once a staple of the previous authoritarian order.

the July 2013 coup proceeded on the ruins of the “civilian punching bag” model of 2012-13. The latter describes a tacit arrangement in which the military was poised to pursue its interests from behind a civilian interlocutor (or, a “punching bag”), the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party—an arrangement that ended in utter failure. By 2013, therefore, the military’s appetite for working in collaboration with civilian parties had run its course.

the reinvention of Mubarak-style dominant party rule was not an appealing option for Sisi in 2014.

“the New Youth Project” or NYP for short. The NYP describes a host of formal and informal initiatives and programs that, collectively, seek to cultivate a new cadre of youth politicians and public servants socialized around military-centric nationalism

a broader effort the political leadership is undertaking to inject into public institutions a broad-based ideological commitment to the military-dominated political order

a pervading discourse senior officials and pro-regime figures have propagated in the past few years under the banner of “the battle of consciousness” (معركة الوعي). Behind this rather eerie term is a narrative claiming that Egypt’s most pressing national security concern is the spread of misinformation and ideational attacks against society’s so-called core values. The implication of course is that any expression of dissent, criticism of government performance, or questioning of state-provided information is a suspected attempt to foment instability and undermine Egypt’s social peace. The solution, the story goes, is countering such “false consciousness” by promoting public awareness of these threats and by enlisting more patriots in the “battle of consciousness.”

the Sisi regime has been pursuing a broad-scoped project to ideologically militarize civilian spheres and to inculcate all sectors of Egyptian society with ideas rationalizing blind support for the military-sponsored regime

the politicians who have been coached to impress the crowd by their confident demeanor, their captivating TED Talk public speaking style, and their superficial use of catchy phrases that borrow (albeit superficially) from the language of scientific research. Most importantly, they have been socialized to accept the supremacy of the military such that they would never question the men in uniform, as was the case with the contentious youth activists who often denigrated officers in public forums and protests between 2011 and 2013

a consistent strategy Sisi has adopted whenever frustrated with the ineffectiveness or the bureaucratic resistance of state institutions: the creation of parallel structures to bypass these institutions altogether. Thus, today one finds a host of bodies and offices Sisi formed over the years and that seemingly replicate the roles of existing government ministries. Examples include the Supreme Council for Investment, the Supreme Council for Combatting Terrorism, the Supreme Council for the Automotive Industry, and, currently under study, the Supreme Council for Education. Whereas the office of the minister of health still exists officially, a presidential advisor for health affairs (a former minister of health himself), appointed by Sisi in 2020, has taken a visible role in explaining and defending state health policies, just like a minister of health would.

Mustaqbal Watan Party (MWP). MWP was once the embodiment of Sisi’s dream of a new generation of pro-military youth politicians who could lead Egypt’s post-2013 political scene. After several wake-up calls, the regime was forced to restructure the party so that “Sisi’s youth” could step aside to accommodate a larger role for the older and more seasoned networks and affiliates of the Mubarak regime—the same actors the president once sought to sideline. These transformations underscore the inherent limitations of the NYP and the idea that Sisi, despite all the power and resources he possessed, had to forge compromises with the once-dreaded traditional political classes, even if at the expense of his own coveted project.

observers were aware that MWP was among the political parties the intelligence establishment created and funded to promote the Sisi presidency. Nevertheless, Sisi kept an official distance from the party, avoiding any insinuation that Mustaqbal Watan represents the wielders of power in any formal sense. This policy was partly shaped by Sisi’s aforementioned skepticism of political parties and his interest in engineering the political field from a distance

there was more to Sisi’s apprehension toward the Mubarakists than appeasing the January 25thers or deflecting criticism. On a more fundamental level, Sisi was keeping a watchful eye on presidential hopeful Ahmed Shafik, former Air Force general and Mubarak’s last prime minister, who ran for president in 2012 and lost to Morsi in a tight runoff. Even though Shafik opted (rather grudgingly) not to run for president in 2014 after it became clear Sisi was the state’s chosen candidate and trying to challenge him was pointless, his supporters did not relent.

The idea of former Mubarakists banding together outside the state’s purview[3] was (and remains) an alarming prospect for Sisi for multiple reasons. They are proficient in mobilizing supporters in elections and have a long experience in the business of setting up vote-buying machines. More than any other civilian player, they can work collaboratively with security agencies. Most significantly, if organized sufficiently, they have what it takes to offer Sisi’s international allies and domestic constituents the same deal he offers them: a stable authoritarian project accommodating the various geostrategic, political, and economic imperatives the Sisi regime claims to protect

In early 2021, over half of MWP’s Central Secretariat members had ties to the NDP (compared to a quarter in 2016), and so did two thirds of its provincial leaders. This reality stood in stark contrast to the state of affairs inside Mustaqbal Watan during its founding years, when a younger group of political outsiders were running the show. Interestingly, by 2021, only two of Mustaqbal Watan’s 2014 founding signatories enjoyed posts in the party’s Central Secretariat, which now featured a completely different cadre of politicians.

lawmakers voted down by a wide margin the president’s highly coveted civil service bill, among the reforms reportedly “encouraged” by the International Monetary Fund at the time

in the fall of 2019, the president decided to put an end to this disarray, ordering a freeze on parliament’s operations, nearly a year before the next legislative elections were due.

The lead-up to the 2018 vote confirmed in many ways Sisi’s intolerance of any political competition, even to the most limited degree. He went to great lengths to eliminate all presidential contenders by any means possible: imprisonment, intimidation, violence, and dubious legal measures. Left to his own devices, Sisi would have run unchallenged. Pressured by Washington, however, he ultimately agreed to let one of his own political cheerleaders, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, run against him in what proved to be an unconvincing (even if lighthearted) episode of political theater, with Sisi winning 97 percent of the votes.

many of the region’s youth have become immobilized by revolutionary fatigue left by the tragic, violent trauma of the Arab Spring’s aftermath

Breakthroughs in surveillance methods are allowing intelligence outfits across the Middle East to infiltrate just about every crevice of civil society, making it almost impossible to communicate or organize without the government’s knowledge. Some of the most sinister of these weapons have been manufactured in Israel, which has emerged as a leading global exporter of surveillance technologies that are now being deployed against oppressed populations worldwide.

with the United States declining as a global hegemon, authoritarians are selling their allegiances to the highest bidder, with human rights, democracy, and accountability falling further by the wayside.

While arming themselves with the latest repressive tools, autocratic regimes across the Middle East continue to be encouraged by their external benefactors to prioritize security and foreign interests at the expense of democracy and human rights at home

The prospect of acquiring dystopian surveillance tech like Pegasus has become a driving motive for authoritarian Arab leaders in their rush to normalize relations with Israel, against the will of their people

Since 2011, Russia has doubled down on its support for some of the most brutal regimes in the region.

About 60 percent of the region’s population are under 25 years old, and the dire socio-political and economic conditions that much of the Middle East’s youth face have changed little since the thwarted revolutions of 2011. Youth unemployment has, in fact, worsened over the past decade, increasing from 23.8 percent in 2010 to 27.2 percent in 2020. The lack of opportunities continues to fuel brain drains and mass migration across the region.

dictators driven by paranoia have continued to hollow out civil society, ensuring that no viable political alternative to their rule exists. Press freedom across the region has declined drastically; Egypt, for example, has become one of the world’s top jailers of journalists since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in a military coup in 2013. In Tunisia, President Kais Saied has undone many of the country’s democratic advances by dissolving the government and enhancing his powers through a new constitution.

This aggressive trend has intensified in Palestine, too. Following the 2021 Unity Intifada, Israeli forces arrested hundreds of political activists and are now stepping up efforts to target civil society and human rights groups that expose Israeli war crimes and rights violations. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority has entrenched its role as a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation, stepping up arrests of political activists and resistance fighters alike across the West Bank at Israel’s behest.

A recent study by The Guardian and YouGov found that although a majority of respondents in Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, and Egypt do not regret the uprisings, more than half of those polled in Syria, Yemen, and Libya say their lives are now worse

By shutting down spaces for Iranians to realize their imagined future, Iran’s leaders have ensured that any substantial transfer of power will be violent

According to a statement issued by the Rebel campaign, of which three of its members attended Tuesday's meeting, Mansour has slammed the media attack against revolutionaries as "political stupidity," saying a media code of ethics will soon be issued in collaboration with media figures and the National Council for Human Rights

The meeting also tackled the role of the police, with many of the attendees accusing it of enforcing what they saw as "systematic measures" similar to the notorious ones practiced by the apparatus prior to the revolution. Mansour, however, ruled out that any violence practiced by the police is systematic. He also requested a list of those claimed to have been randomly arrested without charges.

Mansour went on to urge those present to engage with society through political activities to ensure that no force solely dominate the political scene. "You [the youth] should work on preserving the gains of the revolution that no one from the corrupt regimes should be allowed to obtain," said Mansour, who added that the differences between political groups, lack of organisation and failure to interact with the population could give a chance to "the unworthy to win the coming parliamentary elections."

he condemned the Sousse massacre and a terrorist attack in March, 2015, at Tunisia’s national museum, the Bardo, where three gunmen killed two dozen people. The victims were innocents, he said. Kamal still entertained a fantasy of joining a reformed police force. His knowledge of Islam was crude, and his allegiance to isis seemed confused and provisional—an expression of rage, not of ideology. But in Douar Hicher anger was often enough to send young people off to fight

“Maybe it’s the Tunisian nature—we like risk,” a former jihadi told me. A million Tunisians live and work in Europe. “A lot of drug dealers are Tunisian; many smugglers of goods between Turkey and Greece are Tunisian; a lot of human traffickers in Belgrade are Tunisian. Online hackers—be careful of the Tunisians, there’s a whole network of them.”

“The radical narrative tells you that whatever you’ve learned about Islam is wrong, you have to discard it—we have the new stuff. The old, traditional, moderate Islam doesn’t offer you the adventure of the isis narrative. It doesn’t offer you the temptation to enjoy, maybe, your inner savagery. isis offers a false heaven for sick minds.”

Democracy didn’t turn Tunisian youths into jihadis, but it gave them the freedom to act on their unhappiness. By raising and then frustrating expectations, the revolution created conditions for radicalization to thrive. New liberties clashed with the old habits of a police state—young Tunisians were suddenly permitted to join civic and political groups, but the cops harassed them for expressing dissent. Educated Tunisians are twice as likely to be unemployed as uneducated ones, because the economy creates so few professional jobs. A third of recent college graduates can’t find work. Frustration led young people to take to the streets in 2011; a similar desperate impulse is now driving other young people toward jihad.

the factors that drive young men and women to adopt Salafi jihadism are diverse and hard to parse: militants reach an overwhelmingly reductive idea by complex and twisted paths. A son of Riyadh grows up hearing Salafi preaching in a state-sanctioned mosque and goes to Syria with the financial aid of a Saudi businessman. A young Sunni in Falluja joins his neighbors in fighting American occupation and “Persian”—Shiite—domination. A Muslim teen-ager in a Paris banlieue finds an antidote to her sense of exclusion and spiritual emptiness in a jihadi online community. Part of the success of isis consists in its ability to attract a wide array of people and make them all look, sound, and think alike.

Souli wasn’t sure what should be done with returned jihadis, but, like nearly everyone I met, he spoke of the need for a program of rehabilitation for those who come back. No such program exists

In its eagerness to modernize, the Ben Ali regime encouraged widespread access to satellite television and the Internet. The sermons of Islamist firebrands from the Gulf, such as the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, entered the homes of Tunisians who felt smothered by official secularism. Oussama Romdhani, who was a senior official under Ben Ali—he was referred to as the “propaganda minister”—told me, “Radicals were able to use these tools of communication to recruit and disseminate the narrative, and they did it quite efficiently.”

Around 2000, the Tunisian Combat Group, an Al Qaeda affiliate, emerged in Afghanistan, dedicating itself to the overthrow of the Tunisian government. One of its founders, Tarek Maaroufi, provided false passports to two Tunisians who, allegedly on instructions from Osama bin Laden, travelled to northern Afghanistan posing as television journalists and assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan mujahideen commander, on September 9, 2001. The Combat Group’s other leader, known as Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, was an Al Qaeda commander; when the Americans overthrew the Taliban, in late 2001, he escaped from Tora Bora with bin Laden, only to be arrested in Turkey, in 2003, and extradited to Tunisia. (Sentenced to forty-three years in prison, he seized the chance to radicalize his fellow-prisoners.)

Why can’t the police do their job and stop the terrorists but let the smugglers go with a bribe?

revolution opened up a space that Salafis rushed to fill. There were a lot more of them than anyone had realized—eventually, tens of thousands. In February, 2011, Tunisia’s interim government declared an amnesty and freed thousands of prisoners, including many jihadis. Among them was Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, the co-founder of the Tunisian Combat Group. Within two months, he had started Ansar al-Sharia.

Walid was vague about his reasons for returning to Tunisia. He mentioned a traumatic incident in which he had seen scores of comrades mowed down by regime soldiers outside Aleppo. He also pointed to the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in April, 2013, which soon engaged in bitter infighting with the Nusra Front. Walid spoke of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, with the personal hatred that Trotskyists once expressed for Stalin. He accused isis of destroying the Syrian resistance and helping the Assad regime. He believed that isis was created by Western powers to undermine Al Qaeda and other true jihadi groups.

these aged men from the two Tunisias—Essebsi a haughty remnant of the Francophile élite, Ghannouchi the son of a devout farmer from the provinces—began a series of largely secret conversations, and set Tunisia on a new path. In January, 2014, Ennahdha voluntarily handed over the government to a regime of technocrats. Ghannouchi had put his party’s long-term interests ahead of immediate power. A peaceful compromise like this had never happened in the region. Both old men had to talk their followers back from the brink of confrontation, and some Ennahdha activists regarded Ghannouchi’s strategy as a betrayal.

To many Tunisians, Nidaa Tounes feels like the return of the old regime: some of the same politicians, the same business cronies, the same police practices. The Interior Ministry is a hideous seven-story concrete structure that squats in the middle of downtown Tunis, its roof bristling with antennas and satellite dishes, coils of barbed wire barring access from the street. The ministry employs eighty thousand people. There is much talk of reforming Tunisia’s security sector, with the help of Western money and training. (The U.S., seeing a glimmer of hope in a dark region, recently doubled its aid to Tunisia.) But the old habits of a police state persist—during my time in Tunis, I was watched at my hotel, and my interpreter was interrogated on the street.

The inhabitants of Kasserine, however neglected by the state, were passionate advocates for their own rights. They had played a central role in the overthrow of the dictatorship, staging some of the earliest protests after Bouazizi’s self-immolation. In every coffee shop, I was told, half the conversations were about politics. Although Kasserine is a recruiting area for jihadis, Tunisia’s wealthy areas are so remote that the town felt less alienated than Douar Hicher and Ben Gardane.

“You feel no interest from the post-revolutionary governments in us here. People feel that the coastal areas, with twenty per cent of the people, are still getting eighty per cent of the wealth. That brings a lot of psychological pressure, to feel that you’re left alone, that there’s no horizon, no hope.”

The old methods of surveillance are returning. In the center of Kasserine, I met an imam named Mahfoud Ben Deraa behind the counter of the hardware store he owns. He had just come back from afternoon prayers, but he was dressed like a man who sold paint. “I might get kicked out of the mosque, because last Friday’s sermon was something the government might not like,” the imam told me. He had preached that, since the government had closed mosques after terror attacks, “why, after an alcoholic killed two people, didn’t they close all the bars?” To some, this sounded like a call for Sharia, and after informers reported him to the police the governor’s office sent him a warning: “In the course of monitoring the religious activities and the religious institutions of the region, I hereby inform you that several violations have been reported.” The imam was ordered to open the mosque only during hours of prayer and to change the locks on the main doors to prevent unsupervised use. The warning seemed like overreach on the part of the state—the twitching of an old impulse from the Ben Ali years.

“I never thought I would repeat the same demands as five years ago. The old regime has robbed our dreams.”

According to the Tunisian Interior Ministry, a hundred thousand Tunisians—one per cent of the population—were arrested in the first half of 2015. Jihadi groups intend their atrocities to provoke an overreaction, and very few governments can resist falling into the trap.

New democracies in Latin America and Eastern Europe and Asia have had to struggle with fragile institutions, corruption, and social inequity. Tunisia has all this, plus terrorism and a failed state next door.

Ahmed told himself, “If I pray and ask for divine intervention, maybe things will get better.” Praying did not lead him to the moderate democratic Islam of Ennahdha. His thoughts turned more and more extreme, and he became a Salafi. He quit smoking marijuana and grew his beard long and adopted the ankle-length robe called a qamis. He un-friended all his female friends on Facebook, stopped listening to music, and thought about jihad. On Internet forums, he met jihadis who had been in Iraq and gave him suggestions for reading. Ahmed downloaded a book with instructions for making bombs. In the period of lax security under Ennahdha, he fell in with a radical mosque in Tunis. He was corresponding with so many friends who’d gone to Syria that Facebook deactivated his account. Some of them became leaders in the Islamic State, and they wrote of making thirty-five thousand dollars a year and having a gorgeous European wife or two. Ahmed couldn’t get a girlfriend or buy a pack of cigarettes.

“Dude, don’t go!” Walid said when they met on the street. “It’s just a trap for young people to die.” To Walid, Ahmed was exactly the type of young person isis exploited—naïve, lost, looking for the shortest path to Heaven. Al Qaeda had comparatively higher standards: some of its recruits had to fill out lengthy application forms in which they were asked to name their favorite Islamic scholars. Walid could answer such questions, but they would stump Ahmed and most other Tunisian jihadis.

“We need to reform our country and learn how to make it civilized,” he said. “In Tunisia, when you finish your pack of cigarettes, you’ll throw it on the ground. What we need is an intellectual revolution, a revolution of minds, and that will take not one, not two, but three generations.”

the nation’s civic consciousness hasn’t dissipated, as many people have bemoaned, “but until it’s translated into a political movement capable of entering the Tunisian political scene, it won’t lead to any substantial change.”

the new setup serves to weaken the legislative branch in a system with Saied and the presidency at its center. “The electoral law cannot be read separately from the new constitution. Everything has been done to prevent parliament from playing a real political role and from acting as a balancing power.”

“I took part in the revolution. I am a citizen, but this country does not treat me as such. I have decided not to vote,” she said. She knows the exact figures for how much inflation rises monthly, and the increases in the prices of taxis, bread and gasoline. Yet “for the first time,” she says, she doesn’t “even know the names of the candidates” running for parliament in her district.

The new electoral law — enacted after Saied ran on a staunch anti-corruption platform, rewrote the country’s constitution and put it to a referendum in July — also eliminates public funding for campaigns. Candidates are left to use their own money to run, or to raise donations from individuals, because funding by parties is also barred.

A new law forbids candidates from speaking with foreign journalists

“Where is the state?”

The disinterest in the ballot box and rejection of politics in its institutional forms, then, do not necessarily correspond to a depoliticization of Tunisian society. Many of the activities carried out by young activists and civil society constitute an alternative way of doing political education at the local level. With increasingly stringent controls on NGO funding, however, many small associations find themselves in a tight corner and fear for their future, including Mobdiun, which benefits from a certain amount of European funding.

“Many would try to leave for Europe, but here we create an alternative.”

“I stopped on the way to school to look at this empty wall, without the candidates’ posters, and I thought it said so much.”

Khaled opened his set at Bobigny with a religious song, "Sallou 'ala al-Nabi" (Blessings on the Prophet). This is also how he typically opened concerts in Algeria. This is important to underscore because standard accounts of rai music (like Eyre's) typically give the impression that there is a kind of inherent antagonism between rai artists and Islam.

Because rai was a badge of cultural pride for young Beurs, the French state determined that its interests lay in promoting North African Arab culture in France, rather than being an antagonist. Not just Khaled, but an array of top Algerian rai artists performed at Bobigny in 1986. Clearly the tab for transporting and putting up these stars was an expensive proposition for the French government. Moreover, because Khaled had been avoiding his military service, Col. Snoussi had to intervene with the Algerian military authorities in order to secure him a passport to travel to France.

That liberal elements of the Algerian state played a major role in initiating and underwriting the process whereby rai music became known around the world, and whereby Khaled became the world's best-known Arab singer, deserves to be much more widely known. (Government sponsorship and subsidies for rai came to an end, after the bloody riots of October 1988 and the state's launching of a movement toward reform and democratization.) It is remarkable success story, with significant political and cultural implications, in both France and Algeria. Col. Snoussi and his liberal associates deserve credit, as do key French actors like Martin Meissonier and Jack Lang.

Khaled met some criticism after recording the John Lennon song "Imagine" with Israeli artist Noa (for the European release of his 1999 album Kenza) and after performing the song with Noa at a "peace" concert called "Time for Life" in Rome in May, 2002. Khaled subsequently toured the Middle East with Palestinian-American 'ud and violin maestro Simon Shaheen and Egyptian shaabi singer Hakim. In Lebanon and Jordan he encountered campaigns to boycott his concert, on the grounds that he had engaged in "normalization" with Israel by performing with an Israeli artist and in the presence of Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Khaled responded that Palestinian singer Nabil Khouri had also performed at the concert and that Yasir Arafat's adviser Mohammed Rashid was in attendance. The Lebanon and Jordan concerts were well-attended, despite the protests. Khaled also recorded with the Algerian Jewish pianist Maurice El Medioni on his 2004 album Ya-Rayi, but I'm not aware that any criticism was leveled against him for working with Medioni or with U.S. musicians

It makes more sense to speak of Khaled as a European artist who has done much to promote Arab culture in the West, rather than to frame him as an Algerian artist, the thrust of whose work is against Islamic intolerance.