Suchergebnisse

Tunisia has a unique set of family law codes that continue to operate from 1956 to the present day. The 1956 Code of Personal Status deals with crucial issues such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony, child custody and adoption. The enactment of this code and Tunisian women's emancipation and its uniqueness in the Arab Muslim world can be attributed to a combination of various historical, political and social factors: the country's 'so-called' homogeneity, its particular colonial experience, and above all the country's modernization policy implemented by Tunisia's first president Habib Bourguiba. This article focuses on the early years of independence and the role played by Tunisia's first president in implementing those laws benefiting women and the society at large. It examines the Code, its prominence for the modern independent Tunisian society and the historical trajectory which led to its enactment. This article also focuses on the role played by early Tunisian intellectuals and social reformers who paved the way for the significant amendment of Islamic family laws, the enactment of the Code of Personal Status (The CPS) and the later construction of the post-colonial modern nation-state. The article investigates the radical attempt to modernize and reinterpret the Sharia jurisdiction through a re-reading of this new set of laws as they came in Majallat Al-Ahwal Al Shakhsiya (The CPS) in an attempt to better understand the context in which it was promulgated and the reasons accounting for its success. The article utilizes a few secondary sources which document and scrutinize the roots of Tunisia's trajectory towards the advancement of women's causes. Throughout the analysis, I re-examine the code itself to better comprehend the newly promulgated civic rights and obligations granted to women by this revolutionary legal document.

This dissertation contributes to the study of transnational migration and human mobility by ethnographically documenting the lives of 60, male, Tunisian, irregular migrants—part of a mass migration of 30,000 people—who fled the 2011 Tunisian uprising by crossing the Mediterranean Sea and landing in Italy where they created, according to Italian authorities, an "emergency situation." Although most of these migrants intended to use Italy as a gateway to other countries, such as France and Germany where they already had established social networks, many found themselves stuck in Italy where they were considered "illegals" under Italian law. A number of them faced human rights abuses such as deportation back to Tunisia, suffered violence and oppression at the hands of the Italian police and Italian society at large, and were stigmatized as "potential criminals" and "hidden terrorists" by both state and non-state actors, i.e., employers, media and the larger public. Using narratives and oral histories from the study population, this research explores 1) the processes of criminalizing and dehumanizing the migrant "Other" such that violence perpetrated against him is permitted and rationalized; 2) the irregular migrants' experience, discussion, negotiation of, and resistance to, their socially constructed "illegality" and "criminality"; and 3) the trends in anti-migrant violence and oppression and their consequences for the migrants' identities, survival strategies, and daily struggles. Transnational migration scholarship and its idea of the "permeability" of national "borders" as shifting political spaces provided a theoretical foundation for this multi-sited research. The project transcends geographical boundaries to reach a macro-level understanding of the study population and to demonstrate the processes through which transnational movements are produced, forged, and maintained. The relevance of this research cannot be overstated as political turmoil in the Middle East continues, and irregular migrants and refugees pour into Europe. Thus, although the number of Tunisian migrants to Italy has significantly dropped since the 2011 uprising, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been landing on Italian southern shores since 2015 when Syria entered into a civil war.