Challenges to legitimate governance in post-revolution Tunisia
The power to craft Tunisia's post–Ben Ali government has been vested in the National Constituent Assembly, which was elected on 23 October 2011. The constituent assembly has sovereign authority to draft a new constitution and govern Tunisia until its replacement is elected. The first challenge confronting the constituent assembly will be to build legitimacy for itself and the transitional government that it will appoint. This paper places the constituent assembly in the context of post-revolution politics and summarises its role, responsibilities, and structure. The paper also anticipates key challenges to the constituent assembly's legitimacy as it works to meet the high expectations of Tunisians and the rest of the world.
Educational Governance Activities and the Rise of Educational Contagion in the Islamic Maghreb: The Case of Tunisia
Tunisia’s recent movement from dictatorship to democracy presents a unique 
opportunity to understand educational developments in post-revolutionary 
settings. Within Tunisia, the study of the post-revolutionary scenery is 
integral because it is likely that education now has to deal with the 
baggage and verbiage of education for democracy as it attempts to partake 
in the global souk in a post-Ben Ali era. Using Tunisia as a case study, 
this research examines educational developments within transitory 
democratic spaces to advance the research hypothesis that revolutions act 
as an ‘educational contagion' as new ideas are imported and old ones 
realigned to seek national competency and international legitimacy. In 
this context, the study explores how the current post-revolutionary 
reforms are engendered, as in the case of Tunisia’s recent movement from 
revolution to elections, and engages in the themes and purposes of 
educational transformations. Theoretically, this study draws upon two 
strands of research in comparative and international education that strive 
to understand why states import new educational reforms and who is 
responsible for these reforms. A qualitative methodological scaffolding of 
latent and manifest content analyses is utilized to examine Tunisia’s 
education policies in the pre-and post-revolutionary period―revealing the 
“actors” and “institutions” that facilitated, giddied, and undergirded new 
reform initiatives. It explores the confluence of ‘when’ and ‘why’ 
educational reform is imported and exported and address who benefits from 
such reforms. The findings show that the post-revolutionary education 
reforms have taken on a whole new role and have given Tunisia the 
potential to become an exemplar for all countries faced with the 
challenges stemming from economic globalization.
A Critical Examination of the Democratic Transition in South Africa: The Question of Public Participation
South Africa has emphasised the notion of participatory democracy and has introduced novel experiments to achieve this objective. However, more recently its focus has shifted to that of institutional and legislative reform in order to enable disadvantaged communities to become more involved in the political process. This paper considers these changes and concludes that since 1994 general political activity has declined rather than increased, especially among the young. The extent to which the local government initiatives of 2000 will be successful in 'taking democracy to the people' is also uncertain.