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This article focuses on under-discussed external dimensions of the 2010-11 North African uprisings. In particular, it considers European Union liberal governancein the form of economic 'aid', and 'technical' and transitional 'assistance'-as both a form of intervention and a juridical-institutional force that has informed post-uprising states' development. This article also considers ways in which the EU's role in a broader security regime, consolidated in the post-9/11 period, overlaps with and reinforces the liberal-governance imperatives of 'stability' and 'development'. It concludes by briefly assessing forms of resistance to liberal governance that have emerged in Egypt and Tunisia.

Th is article discusses the politics of “transition” in Tunisia and locates Tunisia’s post-uprising justice initiatives within existing critical literature on global liberal governance and transitional justice. Methodologically, it treats transitional justice as a site of contestation, involving the exercise of domestic and transnational strategies of power as well as the oft en subversive agency of former and ongoing victims of state crime. By examining noninstitutionalized forms of contestation, this article seeks to understand and contextualize the fears expressed by some victims that the formal transitional justice process may be a diversion from, rather than bridge to, revolutionary aims.