Most recent scholarship on the North African nation of Tunisia has closely examined domestic political explanations for the popular uprising of 2011, the once hopeful political transition that followed, and the sudden reversion to authoritarian rule in 2021. Mathilde Zederman now brings a new dimension to the topic by explaining the significance of Tunisian political mobilization in exile. Drawing on several dozen interviews during fieldwork with Tunisians in France, she captures the achievements and challenges of “long-distance activism” in the years before 2011 and presents new evidence to show why it proved so difficult for activists to overcome their ideological differences despite their shared opposition to the authoritarian regime at home.

Taking a political sociology approach, this excellent book asks what conditions enabled long-distance Tunisian politics and what it meant to support or oppose the authoritarian regime of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali from afar. The cases include activism in support of and against the Tunisian regime, and especially capture the wide range of opposition activism, which was leftist, Islamist, and, sometimes, cross-ideological. The argument develops two concepts. First, this Tunisian activism in France takes place in a “trans-state space of mobilization” (p. 11), meaning a politicized space with opportunities and constraints set by both host and home states. Here, activism is not merely transnational but is shaped by the power of the state, partly in the constraints set by the French government but especially in the form of interference by the Ben Ali regime, which closely scrutinized the activism of its citizens in exile. Second, this Tunisian regime interference is understood through the French term encadrement, understood here as “a continuing dialectic between courtship and control” (p. 18). So capacious were the Ben Ali regime’s clientelist and repressive actions that it appeared omnipresent in the life of Tunisian activists in France, just as it did among the citizenry at home.

This empirically rich account aligns with recent interest in diaspora mobilization, which explains how resources and opportunities affect the continued role of voice even after exit. It adds too to our understanding of transnational repression, in this case, highlighting just how effective the Tunisian regime was in using administrative, social, and political control to demobilize opposition activists abroad. A key contribution is in explaining why activism in exile does not simply reproduce opposition activism in the homeland, here highlighting the role of the French host government and French political actors, who tended to mistrust the Islamists and act more favorably toward the leftists. The analysis persuasively assesses how differences of class, strategy, and legal status affected co-ordination among opposition actors. Both Islamist and leftist Tunisian activists in exile adopted a human rights rhetoric to oppose the regime at home, hoping that this universal language would engage the support of more powerful actors and, especially in the case of the Islamists, overcome the distrust they faced from other Tunisians and potential French allies. Yet, this rights-based language seemed to depoliticize the different groups in their critique of the Ben Ali regime. Over time, Islamists and leftists alike shifted their activist energies toward immigrant politics in France, intervening in particular in debates around the role of Islam in public life.

The most compelling evidence in the book captures the sharp divisions between opposition activists despite their shared human rights vocabulary and their shared critique of the Tunisian regime. Two key dilemmas stood out: whether to avoid or cooperate with Tunisian Islamists in France, especially after they arrived in large numbers in the early 1990s as repression intensified at home, and whether to adopt strategies of accommodation or rupture with the Ben Ali regime. Earlier accounts have highlighted the importance of cross-ideological cooperation in exile in explaining the early successes of the political transition (e.g., the idea of the “useable past” plays a key explanatory role in Stepan, Alfred. 2012. “Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations,” Journal of Democracy, 23(2)). By contrast, Zederman’s detailed account instead uncovers the ruptures and dissent provoked by attempts at reconciliation between Islamists and leftists abroad. In the years before the uprising, many leftists argued that cross-ideological cooperation would only fracture the left. As one group of leftists put it starkly in 2006: “Democratic debate is one thing, the alliance at any price is another” (p. 150). For some leftists, opposition to the Islamists was even more important in shaping their activism than their attitude to the Ben Ali regime, she argues. This mistrust in exile presaged the societal polarization that accompanied the ill-fated political transition in Tunisia after 2011. Following early cross-ideological cooperation, the transition was increasingly characterized by an ideological cleavage between the Islamists and their rivals. This bitter division was seized upon by President Kais Saied when he deployed anti-Islamist rhetoric to claim full power for himself in a constitutional coup in July 2021.

However, if long-distance Tunisian activism was hampered both by regime efforts at demobilization through encadrement and ideological dissent between rival political projects, then it is unclear how much weight to give diaspora activism in an explanatory model of a broader pre-2011 Tunisian politics. Activists in exile were clearly targeted by the regime for transnational repression, and it would be useful to know whether this surveillance, co-optation, and coercion was qualitatively different for Tunisian activists than for other citizens from North African and Middle Eastern states. However, it is less clearly specified here how exactly activism in exile contributed to supporting or developing opposition movements and strategies on the ground in Tunisia, or how it shaped coordination among domestic opposition groups and efforts to negotiate between the opposition and the Ben Ali regime.

Much of the focus of the book is on the pre-2011 years, when the Ben Ali regime suffocated Tunisian politics. After the uprising, some of the key activists in exile returned home to play central roles in the democratic transition, not least the activist Moncef Marzouki, who was elected president by the new constituent assembly in 2011. Zederman suggests that many of these exiles struggled to reintegrate into Tunisian political life after so many years away, although there was perhaps more to say about their search for legitimacy. Marzouki himself has since returned to exile, after the Kais Saied regime brought trumped up charges against him in the courts. It would have been valuable to read more about how diaspora activism developed in France after 2011, including its role in the Tunisian political transition, and especially to understand more precisely the extent to which long-distance activism is once again regaining significance in the wake of the 2021 coup. A new wave of political exiles has left Tunisia apparently bringing with them a still deep ideological polarization between Islamist and non-Islamist activists. However, the illiberal and populist Kais Saied regime looks different to the Ben Ali model. Saied has no mass party behind him and appears to rely less on clientelism and co-optation than on brute coercion. There is more to investigate about whether this apparatus of repression again reaches into the activist community abroad in France and elsewhere, and how this strategy compares with evidence of a resurgent transnational repression at the hands of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and beyond.