It is a general dilemma in politics that the values of freedom and pluralism may collide with a regime's need to maintain security and stability. A prime example of this is the controversy around the Patriot Act in the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The act gave the security establishment more prerogatives, and conservative libertarians and liberal leftists alike feared that individual rights, including the right to free speech, would be trampled on as a result (Etzioni 2005). The Patriot Act is a vivid example of how the right to free speech may clash with the need for security, but it is far from unique. The media in democratic states has at times relinquished some of its freedom in order to support the state's struggle against terrorism (for example, in West Germany during the terror campaign of the Red Army Faction in the 1970s); and whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Wikileaks have been prosecuted for leaking information that the state regards as sensitive for national security, but proves that governments breach their own laws pertaining to the freedom of speech (Nacos 2016: 173–90).

If established democracies are sometimes willing to jeopardise the right to free speech in the interest of national security, how does the tension between security and rights play out in countries where people are in the process of negotiating the rules of the democratic game? And not least: what wider political consequences does that tension have? Tunisia's most important gain from the revolution was perhaps freedom of expression. Journalists were given unprecedented space to act as interpreters of current affairs and arbitrators in public debate. However, press freedom and pluralism are brittle gains, always threatened by political forces that would like to control the public sphere as much as possible.

While we were doing the research for this book, the fragility of freedom and pluralism was highlighted by a dramatic event and what happened in its aftermath. On 18 March 2015, three Islamist terrorists infiltrated downtown Tunis, entered the Bardo Museum and killed nineteen tourists, one Tunisian citizen and one policeman. The attack was the first large-scale terrorism incident in Tunisia after the 2011 revolution, and it happened amid a political transition process fraught with crises. Soon afterwards, terrorists attacked again at the beach resort of Soussa, killing thirty-nine people.