This paper will look into the dynamics of police repression and violence against contentious actors during the latest wave of protests in Tunisia. It will argue that there is a continuity between the grievances of the recent protests and those expressed during the 2011 revolution, including corruption, access to socio-economic rights and individual and collective freedoms. The paper will also highlight the role of the youth, particularly those from marginalised neighbourhoods, in leading the protests, positioning them as the main targets of police violence and arbitrary arrests. Finally, it will shed light on the recent police repression and violation of individual freedoms, showing that despite being considered as one of the main achievements of the Tunisian’s revolution, civil liberties remain under threat.

This paper will first explore the witnessed recurrent mobilisation cycles since 2019 through the lens of accumulated emerging movements over the last decade. Then, it will highlight the dynamics of collective mobilisations from October 2019 onwards based on the data mappings of collective actions produced by Lebanon Support (Lebanon Support, Mapping of Collective Actions in Lebanon), tracing its own evolution since its start up until today: Are the modes of action adopted by protestors the same since October 17, 2019? Have the advanced causes and grievances evolved? Do we observe any continuity in its decentralised spread and non-sectarian character? The paper will explore the dynamics and characteristics of this social movement such as the main mobilising actors, the modes of action, and the causes and grievances of mobilisations and their evolution across three time-periods from October 2019 until May 2021. The first time-period extends from October 2019 to February 2020, the second starts from the imposed-lockdown measures in March 2020 to October 2020 marking the first-year anniversary of the Uprising, and the third from November 2020 up until May 2021. 

نسعى في هذه الدراسة إلى بلورة مقارَبة تأخذ بالمنهج الوظيفي من خلال دراسة وظائف المراكز البحثية وأدوارها في صنع السياسة الخارجية المغربية، إضافة إلى قدرات الوصف والتحليل لمعالجة هذا الموضوع، وذلك انطلاقاً من رصد السياقات التي عرفت نشأة المراكز البحثية المذكورة وتكاثرها، مرتكزين على محاور الاقتصاد السياسي للبحث وتحولات الأبحاث في مجال العلوم الاجتماعية

The Lebanese power sharing consociational system has structurally engendered recurring protest cycles: student mobilisations, labour and union mobilising, left-wing collectives, as well as a more routinised associative sector. In a long temporality, and looking at these movements in a longitudinal approach, changes they appear to be seeking appear to be marginal or quite limited, which may lead to the observation that contentious movements play the role of mere relief outlet within the system they are challenging, hence, contributing to the permanence of the social and political structures they are challenging. 
The past year has witnessed the emergence of a mobilisation cycle in the country that displays a continuity with previous forms of organising, although unprecedented in terms of its geographical spread over the territory. 
To understand how this current protest cycle unfolds, its dynamics, and limits, we propose to consider how social actors “move” in a contested, competitive, ever-shifting and evolving arena, rather than a homogeneous one. We rely on a three-fold conceptual approach that focuses on the analysis of the interactions and dynamics between actors, and the strategies they employ: persuasion, coercion, and retribution.