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How do grievances turn into collective action? This article examines how citizens' expectations in social contracts lead them to embark on street protests. It draws on original, nationally representative telephone surveys in Tunisia and Lebanon and unpacks popular preferences about the states' obligations to deliver social service provision, protection, and political participation. We measure empirically whether participation in protest can be explained predominantly by people's grievances with their states' social contract obligations or the position of people in society. Findings reveal intriguing differences between the two countries but also among social groups within societies. We find that socially privileged people are more likely to take to the streets in pursuit of their demands, lending support to theories that identify society's middle classes as drivers of protest action. We believe that the article's findings will have significant implications for studies of contentious state-society relations in the MENA region and beyond.

In den sozialen Medien berichtet Lia Wälti von einer unangenehmen Zugreise mit einem Mann. Nati-Captain Wälti schildert in einer Instagram-Story, wie sie lange angestarrt wurde und sich zunehmend unwohl fühlte.

A növekvő gazdasági aggodalmak ellenére az európaiak nagyra értékelik az EU jelentette békét, biztonságot és együttműködést, illetve az ennek köszönhető életminőséget.

Forrás : © Európai Unió, 2026 - EP

Die wirtschaftlichen Sorgen werden zwar größer, doch die Menschen schätzen Frieden, Schutz und Zusammenarbeit in der EU ebenso wie die Lebensqualität, die ihnen die EU bietet.

Quelle : © Europäische Union, 2026 - EP

While economic concerns grow, Europeans value the peaceful, protective and cooperative nature of the EU, and recognise the quality of life it enables.

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

While economic concerns grow, Europeans value the peaceful, protective and cooperative nature of the EU, and recognise the quality of life it enables.

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

By Vani S. Kulkarni
PHILADELPHIA, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

India’s new education policy asks a great deal of its teachers. The National Education Policy of 2020 and its NISHTHA (National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement) training scheme, want teachers to be more than deliverers of syllabus. They are to be empowered professionals, agents of change who shape the future of children and, the policy says, of the nation itself. It is a generous and welcome ambition.

Vani S. Kulkarni

But there is a difficulty no policy can resolve simply by stating it. You can decree that teachers be empowered. You cannot, by decree, make them so.

For two decades, the dominant approach to teacher quality in India, as in much of the world, has run in the opposite direction. It judges teachers by individual performance and accountability, by what they deliver and how their classrooms score. Under that logic, a teacher’s agency quietly shrinks until it means doing well what someone else has already decided. The teacher becomes an executor of other people’s choices. This is the very habit NISHTHA hopes to break, and it will not break easily, because a system built to measure compliance tends to produce it.

The real question, then, is not whether we wish teachers to have agency because we do. It is where agency actually comes from.

I spent a year, between 2023 and 2025, looking for an answer in an unlikely place: a small, non-governmental teacher-preparation programme in Gurugram, north India called I Am A Teacher (IAAT), which has spent a decade training teachers in a humanistic tradition that cuts against the accountability grain. What I found there was a claim that sounds almost too soft to matter, until you watch what it does. Agency, in this programme’s account, does not begin with autonomy handed down from above. It begins with self-knowledge. A teacher who has examined her own assumptions, her own fears and habits of judgment, is a teacher who can finally exercise judgment of her own.

That self-knowledge expressed itself, in the teachers I met, in three widening circles.

The first was the classroom. Teachers spoke of designing their own curricula and lesson plans, and of sharing in decisions about assessment, as the very substance of their professional dignity. To be handed instructions to execute, one teacher said, is to have your voice taken away. And teacher autonomy, several insisted, is not for the teacher’s sake alone. When a teacher can read her own classroom and meet children where they are, the children begin to experience an agency of their own, becoming creative and imaginative rather than merely obedient.

The second circle was the inner life of the student. These teachers refused to see their work as the transmission of knowledge and content alone. A child’s social and emotional wellbeing, one told me, matters as much as the subject on the board. They understood it as part of their agency to steady a struggling child, inside the classroom and beyond it, on the conviction that learning and wellbeing cannot be pulled apart.

The third and widest circle was the world the school is embedded in. The most striking thing about these teachers was that their sense of agency did not stop at the classroom door. They spoke about how political and economic forces shape what gets taught and what gets funded, and about the inequality that public education is meant to counter and too often deepens. Education can never be equal, one teacher said plainly, naming the way wealth sorts children into schools and teachers into salaries. Some met that knowledge not with resignation but with initiative, volunteering in underserved areas or starting small independent learning centres of their own. That is agency in its fullest sense, a teacher who sees the system she is part of and acts to make it fairer.

A training module alone can produce none of this, and that is exactly the point. The NEP is right that teachers should be agents of change. But agency is not a permission a policy grants. It is a capacity, and capacities have to be formed, through self-reflection, mentoring, time, and the experience of being trusted to decide. These are precisely the things an accountability-driven system finds hardest to fund, because they do not show up on a dashboard, and their results appear years later, in a classroom run by someone who knows her own mind.

A teacher who has been told only what to do can comply. A teacher who has come to know herself can decide. India’s classrooms, and the children in them, need far more of the second kind. No policy can issue that teacher by order. But a country that understood where her/his agency begins could choose, at last, to help make her/his.

If NISHTHA is to be more than a circular, its success will be measured on the ground, in whether teachers actually come to exercise the agency the policy promises them. And one concrete step is within reach now. The country need not invent this formation from nothing. Small programmes such as IAAT, quietly and against the current, already practise it and have done so for years. Recognising them, learning from them, and resourcing them would cost little and teach a great deal.

Vani S. Kulkarni is a sociologist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, and has held research and teaching appointments at Harvard and Yale universities. Her research navigates the intricate crossroads of Global Health, Education, Race and Caste, Gender, Sociology of Trust, Development, and Democracy.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Auf einem Flug der britischen Fluggesellschaft Jet 2 attackierte ein Passagier einen anderen Fluggast. Als Polizisten nach der Landung die Maschine betraten, stellten sie fest, dass der Mann ohnmächtig geworden war. Er kam sofort ins Spital, wo er jedoch starb.

REPORT on a European Parliament recommendation to the Council, the Commission and the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy on the changing geopolitical situation in East Asia and the need for closer cooperation with like-minded partners in the region
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Adam Bielan

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Le calvaire administratif des légalisations consulaires touche à sa fin. Le ministère des Affaires étrangères a annoncé mardi que la Convention Apostille de La Haye, […]

L’article Documents algériens pour l’étranger : l’Apostille remplacera la légalisation consulaire dès le 9 juillet est apparu en premier sur .

DRAFT REPORT on shaping the EU's external action to address the human rights challenges posed by artificial intelligence
Committee on Foreign Affairs
Nacho Sánchez Amor

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Mit klarer Kommunikation und einem cleveren Chat-Modell trennen die Beachvolleyball-Schwestern Anouk und Zoé Vergé-Dépré Berufliches von Privatem. Wie sich die beiden beim Elite16-Turnier in Gstaad schlagen, zeigt sich ab Mittwoch.

Seit rund vier Wochen werden die Fabrikhallen der Chemieindustrie besetzt. Am Mitwochmorgen startete der Räumungs-Einsatz. Die Aktivistinnen und Aktivisten bleiben.

Nach dem Exportverbot dürfen Nutzer weltweit bald wieder auf Claude Fable 5 und Mythos 5 von Anthropic zugreifen. Das US-Handelsministerium hat die Blockade aufgehoben.

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

La participation de la RD Congo à la Coupe du monde 2026 survient 52 ans après ses débuts désastreux en phase finale et l'un des plus grands événements sportifs qui s'est tenu à Kinshasa.

Sicherheitenrahmen gibt vor, welche Vermögenswerte Europäische Zentralbank (EZB) als Sicherheit für Refinanzierungsgeschäfte von Banken akzeptiert – Lockerung dieses Rahmens lässt Aktienkurse der Banken steigen und senkt ihr Ausfallrisiko – Änderungen wirken aber asymmetrisch in verschiedenen ...

A protester holds up a placard thar reads ‘Resist, don’t compromise’ at a mass march held under the slogan ‘The people are hungry, the prisons are full’ through popular neighborhoods in Tunis, Tunisia, on 16 May 2026. Credit: Chedly Ben Ibrahim/NurPhoto via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Jul 1 2026 (IPS)

In May, Tunisian lawyer and journalist Sonia Dahmani was handed her second conviction of the year. Her latest sentence, a two-year jail term, came in reaction to her criticism of poor prison conditions. She previously received an 18-month sentence for calling out the government’s anti-migrant policies. Dahmani faces five more charges under a 2022 cybercrime law that criminalises the spreading of what it calls ‘false information’.

Dahmani is one of many victims of President Kais Saied, who continues to steer Tunisia in an ever more repressive direction. Saied won a free and fair election in 2019, but in 2021 he removed the prime minister and parliament, ruling by decree instead. The following year, he rewrote the constitution to give himself near-absolute power, approved in a low-turnout referendum held after key opposing voices had been jailed. When he won his second term in 2024, credible opponents had been criminalised and barred from running. It’s all a long way from the democracy that sprang into life after the 2011 Jasmine Revolution.

Growing criminalisation

Saied’s repression operates behind a facade of legality, with the criminal justice system serving as a tool of presidential control. In 2022, Saied sacked judges who disagreed with him and gave himself the power to control judicial appointments. Courts now do his bidding and jail opponents. At least nine staff of civil society organisations have received prison sentences so far this year.

Journalists Borhen Bssais and Mourad Zeghidi received three-and-a-half-year sentences on trumped-up money laundering and tax evasion charges in January. In 2025, 37 journalists, lawyers, opposition politicians and other dissidents were found guilty of terrorism and plotting to destabilise Tunisia. Following a mass trial, some were given decades-long jail terms. A November 2025 appeal court hearing that defendants weren’t allowed to attend upheld almost all convictions and increased some sentences.

The latest phase of the crackdown is targeting anti-racism campaigners. Since 2023, Saied has deployed the populist strategy of attacking Black African migrants to distract from the economic problems he’s failed to address. He’s repeatedly accused migrants of being responsible for crime and disorder, fuelling violence against them from security forces and the public.

Saied has branded organisations that stand up for migrants’ rights as traitors and foreign agents. Vilification prepares the ground for incarceration. In March, Saadia Mosbah, president of Mnemty, a Tunisian association that fights against racism, received a staggering eight-year sentence on bogus illicit enrichment and money laundering charges. Five of her colleagues were convicted alongside her.

Mnemty faces the threat of being closed down, part of an assault on associational freedoms that has seen dozens of other civil society organisations suspended. Hundreds more could face the same treatment. In 2024, courts ordered the closure of the Tunisian Council for Refugees. Last November, two of its leaders, Mustapha Djemali and Abderrazek Krimi, received two-year sentences for offences under a 1975 law on passports and travel documents.

No one appears to be beyond the state’s reach. In March, a judge ordered the pretrial detention of seven people on money laundering charges for their involvement in the first Global Sumud Flotilla, which last October attempted to take humanitarian aid to Gaza’s besieged population. Meanwhile being one of the organisations that won the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize offered no protection for the Tunisian League for Human Rights. The group was slapped with a one-month suspension in April.

For civil society organisations, suspension marks the start of a process that can lead to dissolution. Civil society organisations also face asset freezes, lawsuits and tax investigations. The combination of criminalisation, legal harassment and top-down vilification results in a pervasive chilling effect.

Judges that don’t do Saied’s bidding are also at risk. Anas Hmedi, President of the Association of Tunisian Magistrates, has been subjected to criminal proceedings since 2022, with a summons on fresh charges issued in January.

Europe says little

Tunisians continue to protest. Hundreds marched in the capital, Tunis, on 6 June to demand media freedoms and the release of political prisoners. Protesters in May also called out Saied’s failure to address the economic crisis. But they need international support.

Last October, Saber Ben Chouchane was handed a death sentence for criticising Saied on Facebook. Authorities interpreted his posts as constituting crimes of attempting to change the form of government, insulting the president and spreading false information. But this time the repression backfired. The severity of the sentence caused such an international outcry that Saied was forced to pardon and release him. This shows that international criticism can make a difference.

The European Parliament spoke up last November, passing a resolution calling for the release of political prisoners and the repeal of the false information provisions. But such gestures have limits, as shown by Saied’s dismissal of the resolution as ‘blatant interference’.

Resistance to autocratisation takes more than words, but the EU isn’t acting. It’s in a weak position towards Saied because it pays the Tunisian government to help prevent migrants crossing into Europe, and in April 2025, it classified Tunisia as a safe country of origin. This means it believes migrants can be deported there on the basis that they won’t be at risk of persecution, a claim that rings hollow for the many from civil society now in jail.

EU policies have contributed to the rising number of migrants in Tunisia, since people can make it there but no further. This makes them a ready target for Saied’s scapegoating. The EU must acknowledge its responsibility and change course. It must recognise that migrants’ rights in Tunisia aren’t being protected and that, in the current situation, only civil society can do that. In its dealings with Tunisia, it must insist that civil society freedoms are respected and people are free both to defend migrants’ rights and criticise the government’s decisions. Continuing silence will make it complicit in the consolidation of a dictatorship.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

 

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The Amnesty report adds to evidence of atrocities in el-Fasher, which the UN says bore the hallmarks of genocide.