Covid-19 and shrinking space for civil society mobilisations in hybrid regimes and fragile democracies. The cases of Algeria and Tunisia.

The Covid-19 outbreak has legitimised governments around the world to ban national rallies and demonstrations under the label of the health emergency. This measure, however, sounds rather sneaky in those regimes characterised by a vacillating rule of law and facing socio-political grievances during a revolution or after the fall of a decade-long authoritarian regime. This article sheds light on two case studies, Tunisia and Algeria, which have been hit very hard by the pandemic in the last two years and have witnessed increasing restrictions on civil liberties in times of profound political changes. Based on semi-structured interviews with civil society activists mobilising in the two different countries and the document analysis of national authorities’ securitization strategies, this article focuses on the following research questions: How has the pandemic transformed the political opportunities of civil society and social movements in two countries characterised by a revolutionary process - the Hirak movement in Algeria and a bumpy democratization process in Tunisia? In other words, how have power relations between national authorities and their internal opponents changed in two countries classified as a faltering democracy (Tunisia) and a hybrid regime (Algeria) after the outbreak of the pandemic? More broadly speaking, how the reconfiguration of power relations given by the pandemic, including the countries turning in on themselves, has affected the state of democratisation in the two countries? By answering these questions, this article sits at the intersection of the literature on contentious politics and democratization studies. Finally, the analysis contributes to broaden the investigation of the impact of global challenges on the reconfiguration of domestic power relations from a theoretical and empirical perspective.