My guest today is Tarek Kahlaoui, an academic and activist who has been involved in student protests in the 1990s and the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia in the early 2000s. After teaching for various years at Rutgers University in the US, he returned to Tunisia to join the Southern Mediterranean University in Tunis, where he is now an assistant professor in history. Pre-COVID, he wrote me an email that he was writing a book on populism in Tunisia, which he described as “the only Arab surviving democracy after the wave of the Arab Spring” -- note that this interview took place a week before president Saied's "constitutional coup". You can follow Tarek on Twitter at @t_kahlaoui.