ABSTRACT
The analysis speaks to the issues of unity and homogeneity being preconditions for democracy and the toleration of difference as an essential test and core democratic value. However, it is the lack of concurrence between Tunisia’s ethnic homogeneity and democracy that the chapter concentrates on. To this end, it unpacks how ‘fragmented’ politics works in the North African country. Politics becomes ‘fragmented’ when ‘loyalty’ to the state’s discourse of ‘citizenship’ and ‘identity’ becomes the one distinguishing feature by which political community is defi ned and membership within it is determined. National unity is another word for political uniformity. Thus understood, the state’s imperative of unity and uniformity contradicts political pluralism and demotes rather than promotes democratic development. Challenge or resistance to the state’s discourse and practice of ‘identity’ or ‘citizenship’ leads to ‘political cleansing’ – unlawful exclusion, repression and disenfranchisement. The chapter fi rst maps out Tunisia’s political landscape since the onset of political liberalisation in the early 1980s.
