On women's agency and western representations: EU approach to women's rights in Tunisia

Starting from a historical overview of women’s activism in Tunisia, this paper focuses on the agency played by female associations during and after the 2011 uprising. This agency contributed to making Tunisia the only “promising” democratic transition among the so-called “Arab Springs”. At the same time –through document analysis and interviews in the field–, it investigates EU support to these associations, with a double objective. On the one hand, it aims to deconstruct Western stereotyped narrative (Mohanty, 1999) on Tunisian women. On the other hand, it seeks to investigate how such a kind of narrative influences EU support for women’s associations in loco and, consequently, for the more general Tunisian democratic transition. Therefore, it is aimed at questioning the European approach to the southern neighbourhood and the “meta-narrative” (Cebeci, 2012) that has been built upon it over the years.