Improvising Peace: Towards New Social Contracts in Tunisia

Be a man: A theory of climate change, masculinities and violence

“…The paper aims to examine the impacts of climate change and gender roles in both Tunisia and Syria to create more clarity on the social processes that occurred in the two settings. This approach will explore factors that contribute to an explanation of the difference in outcome whereby Tunisia emerged from the Arab Spring into a decade of fragile democracy (Bellin, 2018) that, though not without significant contestation, has been defined by relatively low levels of political violence (Mahmoud & O ´Su´illeabha´in, 2020). In juxtaposition, the Syrian civil war grew out of similar Arab Spring protest events but has led to a decade of extreme violence and conflict (Van Dam, 2017) The paper draws from the Most Similar Case method in which case studies are selected based on their similarity in many regards as a way of identifying an explanatory variable in which they differ.…”

Resilient Social Contracts and Peace: Towards a Needed Reconceptualization

“…Power sharing both enforces implementation and expands state institution functioning with a commitment to decentralization that, the authors expect, will enable more effective and fair delivery of services. However, the authors underscore that progress must be made on this delivery, towards the achievement of a resilient social contract that sustains the transition on a peaceful path (Mahmoud and Ó Súilleabháin 2020).…”

“…This has reinforced non-inclusive political settlements, occurring in various ways in the design of agreements, through poor implementation, and where there are contradictions around provisions that serve to undermine the ability to implement the agreement. A key related, visible finding is that mechanisms are often treated in disconnected or parallel ways that undermine the implementation of coherent and effective peace agreements and the development of an increasingly inclusive political settlement (Mahmoud and Ó Súilleabháin 2020). Tunisia is an exception, where the highly inclusive transition has supported coherence in navigating a new vision through social contracting mechanisms; yet it is not out of the woods in addressing its CCIs, as noted below.…”