About Nathalie Tocci
Nathalie Tocci is deputy director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome. Her books include (co-edited with Senem Aydin-Düzgit) Turkey and the European Union (Palgrave, 2015)
Articles by Nathalie Tocci
This week’s front page editor
Francesc Badia i Dalmases is Editor and Director of democraciaAbierta.
No to TTIP
Constitutional conventions: best practice
Nathalie Tocci
In 2011 a wave of democratic uprisings swept across the Arab world. Overcoming authoritarianism in one of the regions in which it had been most deeply entrenched, sparked a broader trend of political change in the world. Against all odds, the mobilization, with the aid of new technologies, of a largely unorganized civil society, in the past suppressed by authoritarianism made this possible. Yet in order to overcome the resilience of authoritarianism, another change was necessary: the desecuritization of Western foreign policies and a genuine Western commitment to democratic change. Much like in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East too, the US and EU began seeing a congruence between their strategic interests and normative rhetoric and thus developed well-thought out policies to spur (or at least not hinder) a democratic transformation of the region.
