Anne Wolf is a graduate of Cambridge University specialising in the Middle East and North Africa. She has been in Tunisia since September 2011 as a researcher and freelance journalist.
Media reports emphasizing the “violent” dimension of “salafism” miss an important point: the Tunisian salafist landscape is highly heterogeneous and makes little room for violent avatars. Making this more complex, not everybody claiming to be a “salafist”, or denounced as such, actually is a salaf
While the UGTT often prides itself on having played a prominent role in the unfolding of the mass protests which eventually led to the ouster of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14 2011, the picture is more blurred when it comes to what links the union‘s executive leadership actually entertained