Search

La mayor libertad de expresión que existe en Túnez tras los altercados de 2011 ha dado lugar a una gran agitación cultural que se ha sentido de lleno en el cine realizado por mujeres. Los ecos vienen de lejos y habría que remontarse a la primera generación de directoras tunecinas como Selma Baccar, Néjia Ben Mabrouk, Kalthoum Bornaz o Moufida Tatli, quienes empezaron a rodar en los años setenta películas muy críticas sobre las desigualdades de género, la dominación masculina y el patriarcado; temas que han sido recogidos y ampliados por una nueva generación de directoras surgidas en los albores de la Revolución del Jazmín, mujeres que sin olvidar los asuntos que intrigaban a sus predecesoras, dialogan con aspectos aún tabúes en las sociedades arabo-musulmanas como el cuerpo, la sexualidad/es y la religión. En un momento en el que la islamofobia crece en occidente, poner de relieve la manera en la que las directoras de cine lucharon y luchan a través de sus obras por una sociedad más justa e igualitaria es de gran importancia, no sólo para comprender su sociedad, sino también para reflexionar sobre la nuestra. The greater freedom of expression that exists in Tunisia after the Revolution of 2011 has given rise to a great cultural upheaval that has been felt fully felt in women’s cinema. The echoes come from far away and we should go back to the first generation of Tunisian women directors such as Selma Baccar, Néjia Ben Mabrouk, Kalthoum Bornaz or Moufida Tatli, who started shooting very critical films in the 1970s about gender inequalities, male domination and patriarchy; These themes have been picked up and expanded by a new generation of female directors who emerged at the dawn of the Arab Revolution or Jasmine Revolution, women who, without forgetting the issues that intrigued their predecessors, they are in dialogue with aspects that are still taboo in Arab-Muslim societies, such as the body, sexuality and religion. Nowadays Islamophobia is growing in the West and highlighting the way women filmmakers in Tunisia fought and fight through their works for a more egalitarian society is of great importance, not only to understand their culture, but also to understand our culture in a better way. La estancia en el Instituto del Mundo Árabe durante el verano de 2018 y 2019 fue posible gracias a la beca de investigación concedida por la Uni-versidad Zayed University.

This study investigates the impact of terrorist attacks and political violence on the number of tourist arrivals and overnight stays in Tunisia. The dataset employed consists of monthly data that covers the period from January 2000 to September 2016, which includes several political and terrorist attacks in Tunisia and the region. Empirically, we investigate the true data generating process (DGP) of these two proxies of tourism activity by accounting for four statistical properties that characterize these series: (1) seasonality, (2) unit roots, (3) breaks, and (4) long memory behavior. Our empirical findings show strong evidence of stationarity, five breaks in the tourist arrival time series and spurious long memory behavior. By estimating a 3-state Markov switching model consisting of the mean, trend, and variance, we find that the Tunisian Jasmine revolution and two recent terrorist attacks, one at the Bardo National Museum on March 18, 2015 and the other at the tourist resort at Port El Kantaoui, Sousse on June 26, 2015, played an important role in influencing the tourism activity of the country. Our empirical findings show also that local shocks have a more important impact than international shocks in influencing tourism activity. Interestingly, we find that the effects of terrorist shocks have a long duration compared to political violence shocks. Several security, marketing, and economic policies have been proposed and discussed in the paper. Dr. Charfeddine Lanouar is associate Professor of economics and econometrics at Qatar University. He holds a Ph.D in applied Econometrics in 2007 from University Paris II-Pantheon - Assas, France. His research area include nonlinear models (Switching and long memory processes), financial modeling and forecasting, energy economics, and fiscal and monetary policies. He has published several articles in these topics in internationally respected peer-reviewed journals including the journal of Energy Economics, Energy, Energy Policy, Economic Modeling, Emerging Market Review and Cleaner Energy Production etc. His research was funded by internal and external grants including the QFC and QNRF grants. Scopus

La revolución de los jazmines, como se denominó a la revolución árabe en Túnez, se ha llevado a la pantalla desde muy diferentes puntos de vista en los últimos diez años, y ninguna revuelta social anterior ha sido tan mediática tanto dentro como fuera de sus fronteras. Los cineastas de distintas generaciones han recogido el sentimiento de la población tunecina antes, durante y tras los altercados del 17 de diciembre de 2010, en el que el joven Mohamed Bouazizi, vendedor ambulante en la pequeña localidad de Sidi Bouzid, se inmoló tras confiscarle la policía su puesto de frutas, y su muerte desató la revuelta popular en todo el país, y posteriormente en muchos países árabes. Nuestra hipótesis de partida es que el mayor nivel educativo de las mujeres tunecinas, con respecto a otros países de su entorno, el trabajo que desde hace más de cinco décadas han realizado los distintos movimientos de mujeres y asociaciones feministas en Túnez, y el camino emprendido por las directoras pioneras desde los años setenta hasta la actualidad, han sido claves para la contribución activa y comprometida de los directores, pero sobre todo de las directoras de cine, durante este proceso histórico. Directoras y directores que han puesto en el centro de sus obras cinematográficas la participación femenina en la política, en tanto que votantes pero sobre todo como candidatas, que han documentado la implicación de las mujeres en la sociedad civil, y no han dudado en filmar a las impulsoras socias y militantes de los distintos movimientos de mujeres para que ellas, en primera persona, narraran los avances, las dificultades, y los retos de la sociedad tunecina contemporánea. The Jasmine Revolution, as the Arab revolution in Tunisia was called, has been brought to the screen from many different points of view over the last ten years, and no previous social uprising has been so widely covered by the media both at home and abroad. Filmmakers of different generations have captured the feelings of the Tunisian population before, during and after the riots of 17 December 2010, when the young Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the small town of Sidi Bouzid, blew himself up after the police confiscated his fruit stall, and his death sparked a popular revolt across the country, and subsequently in many Arab countries. Our starting hypothesis is that the higher educational level of Tunisian women compared to other countries in the region, the work carried out for more than five decades by the various women’s movements and feminist associations in Tunisia, and the path taken by pioneering female directors from the 1970s to the present day, have been key to the active and committed contribution of directors, but above all by female directors, during this historical process. Filmmakers who have placed women’s participation in politics at the center of their films, both as voters and above all as candidates, who have documented women’s involvement in civil society, and who have not hesitated to film the driving forces behind the various women’s movements so that they could narrate in the first person, the progress, difficulties and challenges of contemporary Tunisian society.

On Saturday December 17, 2016, Tunisia celebrated the six year anniversary of the Jasmine Revolution which was sparked off by the self-immolation of Bouazizi that started in Sidi Bouzid, a small town in the center of the country. The revo­lution in Tunisia led to a regional wave of uprisings spreading rapidly to Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Jordan and Syria. For over half a century, Tunisia lived under a dictatorial re­gime with a single powerful political party. The other par­ties, allowed in-between, had no power, being restricted in their movements and actions and only served to make the world believe that Tunisia was indeed democratic, as daily reported by Ben Ali’s media. Since the independence of their country from colonial rule in 1956 Tunisia sustained major progress in relation to women’s access to health and education services and the labor market; maternal mortality and fertility rates were halved, girls’ enrolment in secondary school more than doubled and women were increasingly in paid employment. Moreover, despite the limited democratic space, the number of women in government grew significantly and women’s organizations began to play a role in shaping social and political transformation. This paper argues that women’s empowerment in Tunisia is largely rooted in the particular features of the elite post-independence bargain, early political choices regarding state–society relations and the associated policies in the areas of education, health and labor, which increased women’s access to resources. It also highlights the interaction between changes in law, policies promoting gender equality and women’s capacity to mobilize. Women’s increasing individual and collective agency in both the public and private spheres explains the existence of opportunities to consolidate women’s empowerment in contemporary Tunisia. Cumulative change in different spheres has been mutually reinforcing, and may also have created resilience regarding potential reversals associated with the political changes brought about by the ‘Arab Spring’. Tunisia’s progress in women’s empowerment provides valuable lessons on how women can obtain access to new resources and the way in which politics and power, and the struggles, dynamics and contestation that these generate can be used to challenge gender and social power relations. It demonstrates the importance of locating political paths of change – such as processes of women’s empowerment – in the context of wider political settlements.