The name Shireen Abu Aqleh has tragically made international headlines in the past week. A renowned Palestinian journalist, Shireen was executed by the Israeli military while covering one of their numerous assaults on the Jenin refugee camp in the colonized West Bank.
Since the Russian interference with the 2016 US presidential elections, there have been numerous conversations, strategy building and commitments on a global scale involving policy makers, civil society and leading tech companies like Facebook to fight disinformation. In the era of “troll armies” and “fake news”, we are witnessing more and more the power of clandestine influence campaigns on social media to fuel divisions, disfigure the public spaces and influence voters. Tunisia is not exempted.
Ennahdha’s lack of transparency around its agreement with Burson-Mersteller gives rise to inevitable suspicion that the transaction, contrary to encouraging «free and fair elections in Tunisia» might in fact undermine them. Ambiguity around the financial aspect of the deal (“Fees and expenses to be determined at a later date,” reads the official registration document) is a particular concern after political parties’ financial mismanagement in past elections.
As much as Tunisia’s initial, post-independence, political transition was influenced by the extent and nature of economic support from the West, the success of the country’s waning post-revolution «democratic transition» is significantly impacted by the same US and EU powers. A misnomer that diminishes the scope and complexity of international alliances and enmities that it encompasses, the Arab-Israeli conflict bears greatly upon Tunisia’s relations with Western democracies, the primary prospective investors and financial backers of political transition in Tunisia for the past half century.
In Tunisia, there is a great deal of skepticism regarding the competency and «responsible governance» of the interim government in juxtaposition with Tunisia’s international image as the ‘sole democracy in the Arab world’ as citizens sense that technocrats and politicians are incapable of rising above their own political and electoral trajectories to synchronise a unified, coordinated national response to aggression that is tantamount to a Palestinian holocaust.
The Israeli army is at the centre of a second controversy over the moral conduct of its soldiers in as many days. The revelations centre on t-shirt designs made for soldiers that make light of shooting pregnant Palestinian mothers and children and include images of dead babies and destroyed mosques. […]
European attorneys have reportedly petitioned a Belgian court to arrest Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni upon her arrival in Brussels later […]
The following map shows the bombing intensity and casualties in Gaza strip between December 27th and January 12th. The map […]
We’ve got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don’t care any more – providing we […]
Eight Tunisians were among the 197 bodies handed over by Israel to Lebanon, in the latest prisoner swap between the […]
