Ben Ali's Tunisia: Power and Contention in an Authoritarian Regime

Anne Wolf

feb 2023 · Oxford University Press

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Based on a wealth of new primary data, this book offers the first account of the internal regime factors that ultimately caused the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's long dictatorship in Tunisia during the Arab Uprisings. Anne Wolf's account challenges studies that focus on the role of mass mobilization alone, and demonstrates that in the last decade of Ben Ali's presidency, dissent within his ruling party - the Constitutional Democratic Rally - mounted to such an extent that followers began challenging their own powerbroker. The culmination of this was a secret coup d'état staged by regime figures against Ben Ali in January 2011, an event that has not previously been uncovered. Wolf proposes a new theory of power and contention within ruling parties in authoritarian regimes to explain how dictators seek to fortify their rule and foster party-political stability, but also when, why, and how they succumb to internal contention and with what effect.

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Anne Wolf is a Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, where she researches Authoritarian Politics, with a specific focus on the Middle East and North Africa. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of North African Studies and a senior researcher at the Project on Middle East Democracy. Her book Political Islam in Tunisia: The History of Ennahda (OUP 2017) won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award.