Abstract

How does democratisation affect the politics of migration? This paper analyses Tunisian immigration and emigration politics in the decade before and after the 2011 revolution, drawing on 57 interviews with Tunisian high-level civil servants, as well as representatives of civil society and international organisations. It shows that the democratisation of policy processes and the expansion of citizens’ political freedoms did not result in pro-migrant rights reforms, but instead led to the continuation of restrictive migration policies inherited from Tunisia’s authoritarian past. The paper explains this by dissecting the ambiguous effects of democratisation on political legitimisation, as well as on inter-institutional and transnational dynamics of migration policymaking. It demonstrates that despite the unprecedented dynamism of Tunisian civil society and efforts of various institutional actors to reform Tunisia’s security-driven migration policy, there were both domestic and international forces that put brakes on migration reform. By focussing on the intricacies of Tunisian migration policymaking, this analysis allows to advance theory-building on the link between political regimes and migration politics, to revisit regime transformations from the inside and to overcome the still-dominant Eurocentrism in scholarly debates on North African migration policies.

摘要

民主化如何影响移民政治？本文通过对突尼斯高级公务员以及民间社会和国际组织代表的 57 次采访，分析了 2011 年革命前后十年的突尼斯移民和移民政治。它表明，政策过程的民主化和公民政治自由的扩大并没有导致支持移民权利的改革，而是导致了从突尼斯过去的专制历史继承下来的限制性移民政策的延续。本文通过剖析民主化对政治合法化以及移民政策制定的机构间和跨国动态的模棱两可的影响来解释这一点。它表明，尽管突尼斯民间社会空前活跃，各种机构行为者努力改革突尼斯以安全为导向的移民政策，但国内和国际力量都在阻碍移民改革。通过关注突尼斯移民政策制定的复杂性，该分析可以推进关于政治制度与移民政治之间联系的理论构建，从内部重新审视政权转型，并克服在关于北非移民的学术辩论中仍然占主导地位的欧洲中心主义政策。