Shifting from party politics to civil society : hybrid trajectories of Islamist engagement in post-authoritarian Tunisia

Abstract

This study investigates why and how Tunisian Islamist activists committed to new forms of socio-political engagement alongside, or as an alternative to, the Ennahda party since the fall of the authoritarian regime. Notably, thanks to the opening of social and political opportunities occurred in 2011, several militants of the Tunisian Islamist movement, developed in the 1970s and institutionalized as a party in 1989, have undertaken new pathways of engagement in faith-based associations and, more recently, in new political networks rooted in the social fabric. Based on this observation, the paper inquires how activists’ trajectories outside the Islamist party eventually transformed their relationship with the Ennahda party itself and, in more general terms, with politics. Drawing on strategic interactionism, this study accounts for the activists’ motivations to explore new forms of socio-political commitment, as well as the transformations of Islamic activism when it comes to shifting venues of engagement. As shown, Islamist activists emerge in the post-authoritarian arena as strategic players interacting with the Ennahda party according to different relational logics: professional emancipation, the party’s complementarity, the political challenge. Overall, this article challenges a linear and one-dimensional interpretation of the transformation of the Tunisian Islamist movement by shifting the unit of analysis from the political party to individual activists. In this regard, drawing on the Tunisian case, this study provides a theoretical framework to account for the hybrid forms of Islamic activism in a time of political change.