The Democracy-Promotion Metanarrative as a Set of Frames

Is There an Indigenous Counter-Narrative

Bibliographic Data

ID3394062
AuthorsHajer Ben Hadj Salem (Tunis University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume16
Issue7
Pages850
Publication date2025-06-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel16070850
OpenAlexW4411961753
LanguageEN
References cited21

The Tunisian uprisings projected an elusive surrealistic scene that was an aberration in a part of the world where Islamic ideology had been considered the only rallying force and a midwife for regime change. However, this sense of exceptionalism was short-lived, as the religiously zealous Islamist expats and their militant executive wings infiltrated the power vacuum to resume their suspended Islamization project of the 1980s. Brandishing electoral "legitimacy", they attempted to reframe the bourgeoning indigenous democratization project, rooted in an evolving Tunisian intellectual and cultural heritage, along the neocolonial ideological underpinnings of the "Arab Spring" metanarrative, which proffers the thesis that democracy can be promoted in the Muslim world through so-called "Moderate Muslims". This paper challenges this dominant narrative by offering a counter-narrative about the political transition in Tunisia. It takes stock of the multidisciplinary conceptual and analytical frameworks elaborated upon in postcolonial theory, social movement theory, cognitive neuroscience theories, and digital communication theories. It draws heavily on socio-narrative translation theory. The corpus analyzed in this work consists of disparate yet corroborating narratives cutting across modes, genres, and cultural and linguistic boundaries, and is grounded in insider participant observation. This work opens an alternative inquiry into how the processes of cross-cultural knowledge production and the power dynamics they sustain have helped shape the course of the transition since 2011

Democracy · Indigenous · Linguistics · Metanarrative · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Political Conflict and Governance

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