The Tunisian government, which is deeply divided, especially along ideological lines, responded to growing concerns over increased violence against women during the Coronavirus pandemic by establishing a new domestic violence shelter and 24/7 hotline. This article asks: Why did the state respond to gender-based violence(gbv) concerns during the Coronavirus pandemic in Tunisia, despite ideological and political divisions? We argue that the state addressed some concerns around violence during the pandemic because combatting gbv has bipartisan support in Tunisia. Tunisian Islamist and secularist women’s rights organizations succeeded in building a bipartisan coalition of support on this issue because they worked either together in a short-lived coalition or in tandem with similar goals over the past decade during the democratic transition in Tunisia. Building on the existing coalition literature, we show that feminist coalition formation before a pandemic has implications for feminists’ success in times of crisis.
Many states, including Lebanon, have used the Covid-19 pandemic as an occasion to reassert their power and to consolidate their policing and repressive apparatuses. We are far from a seamless scenario, however. Rather than a mere reproduction of the sectarian political system, we argue in this paper that the governance of the pandemic in Lebanon reveals tensions between powerful political parties, weakened public agencies, as well as multiple solidarity groups with diverging aspirations, colliding over the imagined future of the country. Using various sources of information (broadcast, print and online news media, social media), we build a database of the types of actors and the categories of actions across locations, and analyze the territorial and political variations of the governance of the pandemic. The paper demonstrates that the Covid-19 response in Lebanon operates through ongoing negotiations over the national territory in which timid yet visible aspirations for a non-sectarian country confront sectarian territorialities through back-and-forth cycles.