Several questions suggest themselves when it comes to Islamism, a particularly anxiogenic but relatively ambiguous phenomenon, despite the abundant literature devoted to it. In point of fact, the anti-establishment position taken by some Islamist parties in the Arabo-Islamic area casts doubt on their “dual discourse” oscillating between legalistic endeavors and protesting logic. It stems from the tension between the fundamentals of militant Islam (defense of the Arabo-Muslim identity) and the exigencies of the insertion into politics. This is especially the case with Tunisia's Ennahdha movement, which, since its legalistic turn starting in 1981, seeks to affirm its adoption of the democratic idiom while still maintaining its Islamist identity. After a brief period of calm in its relations to power, as the result of Zine el- Abidine Ben Ali ascending to head of state in 1987, the movement would go through a phase of violent repression that saw the imprisonment and exile of a number of its members.

The first free elections in Tunisia's history were held on October 23, 2011 to choose the members of the National Constituent Assembly (ANC), which was tasked with writing a new Tunisian constitution. The Ennahdha party, legalized in March 2011, received 41.1 per cent of the seats in this body (89 out of 2,017), thus passing from the status of pariah party to that of dominant party.

The movement's coming to power ratcheted up this tension, for the party no longer limited itself to its relations with “democratic” or “secular” opposition groups but extended it to international relations as if it were the head of a sovereign state.

Analyzing the foreign policy of the Ennahdha movement is of great interest since it is particularly enlightening about the process of adaptation— indeed, normalization—to the logic of power and the practice of a party until then relegated to the sphere of the opposition. One of the aspects of Ennahdha actions that raises the most questions is the equivocal character of its positioning, which would be due to the permanent tension between democratic pretensions and the project of state and societal Islamization. This ambition has registered since its genesis in the anti-globalism in reaction to the West and the identification with the Muslim Umma and no longer with the Tunisianism proclaimed by Bourguiba.