Tunisia, where the Arab Spring uprising started, became the only country in the Middle East and North Africa to transition to democracy. This chapter explains why Tunisia’s pathway to democratization was successful by focusing on its constitutional reform process. First, the chapter shows that in order for new constitutions to facilitate democratic transitions, both participation and inclusion in the process are necessary. Using empirical evidence from a statistical content analysis of the public input and constitutional drafts, as well as interviews from Tunisia, Chapter 3 shows the inclusive and participatory process significantly improved the democratic quality of the Tunisian Constitution, yielding a successful transition to democracy. Next, this chapter explains the role of civil society in facilitating the constitutional consensus and the broader transition. Civil society organizations in Tunisia could play this decisive role by fulfilling three core functions. First, they acted as a third-party arbiter of constitutional and political disputes among different groups. Second, different civil society organizations acted as watchdogs, ensuring the integrity and transparency of the process. Third, they created a public sphere for constitutional debates by offering an inclusive venue for citizens to engage in the constitution-making process.

This chapter shows how the decisions and actions taken between January and October 2011 by the Tunisian Provisional Administration (TPA) in Tunisia and by the National Transition Council (NTC) in Libya between February 2011 and July 2012, which were the first interim governments in each country, influenced events between 2014 and 2019. In Tunisia, where the TPA had insisted on abiding by a “spirit of consensus” that helped its successor government, the National Constituent Assembly (NCA)/Troika, overcome its crisis of 2013, a second republic had been inaugurated under a constitution that was written in this spirit. However, governing in this spirit – implementing and operating through consensual institutions – proved much more difficult and caused many challenges in later years. In Libya, the NTC had been unable to assert a moderate, unifying narrative and governing presence; it was instead drowned out by extremist forces as the NTC gave way to its successor, the General National Congress (GNC). The GNC became so plagued by the features and decisions of the NTC – among others, its inability to control armed groups or assert a shared Libyan vision – that the next several years were defined by spiraling conflict among groups of varying goals and identities.