Ten years after its protests sparked the Arab Spring, Tunisia remains the lone country in the Middle East to have effectively changed its system of governance. Yet many Tunisians have mixed feelings about how much progress their country has made.
Nesrine Mbarek is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Nesrine Mbarek was a John Gardner Fellow for Public Service working at Carnegie’s Middle East Program. Her research focuses on addressing the deeply rooted economic, social, and political problems that ignited the 2011 popular uprisings in Tunisia and the Arab Spring. Her interests also include gender issues in North Africa and possibilities for a new economic agenda in Tunisia, including economic justice for women.
Mbarek studied at Stanford University as a McCaw Scholar, earning a B.A. in history in the global affairs track with a concentration on the modern Middle East. She wrote an honors thesis on the ideological trajectories of Tunisian women activists in France since 1970, arguing that the transnational position of Tunisian feminists in France both enriched Tunisian feminist debates and inscribed migrant women’s issues as central in the French feminist movement. Mbarek additionally served as the president of the American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS) and was one of the core initiators of Tunisia88, a national project introducing a music program in every high school in Tunisia.
Ten years after its protests sparked the Arab Spring, Tunisia remains the lone country in the Middle East to have effectively changed its system of governance. Yet many Tunisians have mixed feelings about how much progress their country has made.
If Joe Biden wins the U.S. presidential election, the Maghreb would be a perfect venue for greater engagement.