Senior Fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs (Doha). He is the author of numerous academic articles and books, including Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy (OUP, 2009), and the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics: Interdisciplinary Inscriptions (2020). He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Protest and co-author, with Layla Saleh, of a book on Tunisia’s revolution, forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Kais Saied’s power grab in Tunisia did not take place in a vacuum. A combination of constitutional dysfunction, a self-serving party system and festering social tensions had left the country at breaking point. Now the man many hailed as a saviour threatens the achievements of the democratic revolution of 2011.