Celebrating Revolution Day in Tunisia. Demotix/ Chedly Ben Ibrahim. All rights reserved.“Out of the revolution and counter-revolution…was born the dialectical movement and counter-movement of history which bears men on its irresistible flow, like a powerful undercurrent, to which they must surrender the very moment they attempt to establish freedom on earth.” Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
Today marks five years since the start of Tunisia’s revolution. 17 December 2010 was a day like every other, except for one act that transformed it into the beginning of an extraordinary set of events.
Tunisia’s revolution and the ensuing wave of protests that swept the Arab world caught the world by surprise. Much ink has been spilt in the last five years in an attempt to piece together a genealogy of this upsurge of dissent, seeking to trace the roots of an earthquake that emerged from the fertile inner reaches of Tunisia’s rural and deprived regions. While academics debate whether the determinant factors were economic, social, political, demographic or technological, what matters for those who lived them is that these uprisings laid bare the lived experiences of the people of this region and put their demands at the heart of political events, rendering the invisible visible.
