COVID-19 in Tunisia: Mapping and Documenting the Impacts on Those on the Margins

ABSTRACT

Since the 2011 uprisings, Tunisia has been going through a delicate political transition while the socio-economic context is continuously deteriorating. Our analysis focuses on the exceptional period of the lock down (from the 20th of March 2020 to mid-June 2020). With a large portion of the population deprived of their daily informal jobs, the collateral damages of the coercive measures were immediately visible in Tunisia. By critically engaging with how the coronavirus was politically managed in Tunisia, we propose to map and document plural impacts of the pandemic contextualizing this crisis for specific groups of population and territories Tunisia's young population from hinterland regions (symptomatic of the 2011 uprising and the territorial division) and illegalized sub-Saharan migrants. By focusing on precarious, invisibilized and marginalized groups, we question processes of politization of socio-economic claims under the circumstantial constraints of the pandemic. Besides, this period (re-)activates new forms of civil society mobilization as well as cooperation through solidarity. In a nutshell, the effects of COVID-19 allow us to observe the transformations in the Tunisian post-revolutionary context through a much broader lens. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.