Queer Citizenship, Queer Exile: LGBTIQ++ Forced Migration and Activism from Tunisia to Europe.

This paper examines LGBTIQ++ forced migration from Tunisia to Europe as a result of anti-LGBTIQ++ politics under conditions of democratic backsliding. The democratization processes following the 2010/11 Tunisian revolution introduced liberal rights such as freedom of expression, the right to assembly, and the right to civic organizing. The opening of civic space after the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali enabled the emergence of a broad infrastructure for LGBTIQ++ communities and, in particular, the establishment of numerous LGBTIQ++ organizations. Despite ongoing discrimination, criminalization, and prosecution, these organizations created spaces for empowerment and capacity building, provided legal and medical advocacy and support, and publicly campaigned for LGBTIQ++ human rights. With the 2019 elections, this process of liberalization came to a halt as a new authoritarian government consolidated power and, by 2022, entrenched it through a constitutional coup. The resulting contraction of civic space has significantly affected LGBTIQ++ communities. Established forms of activism and advocacy increasingly face repression and, in many cases, have had to discontinue their work. One key consequence has been a marked increase in the forced migration of LGBTIQ++ activists from Tunisia. This migration, often experienced as constraint, is largely directed toward Europe, where new community spaces of survival, resistance, and solidarity have been reconstituted. Over time, distinct Tunisian queer sub-communities have formed in major European cities, each with specific internal dynamics, trajectories, and social resources. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research in Berlin and Paris, as well as extensive interviews with activists, the paper analyzes motivations to leave and strategies of survival and activism in diasporic space. It argues that a new generation of queer Tunisian migrants has emerged, whose lives are shaped by multiple ruptures through exile, asylum, and forced displacement, and that this forced exile is generating new forms of communal existence and transnational queer migration.