The impetus for the research that led to this book came from Duncan Pickard, who appeared in my office unannounced in the fall of 2011 and told me I had to come to Tunisia to study the constitutional process there and offer what help I could. I took Duncan’s direction and through him came to meet an extraordinary range of Tunisian participants in their constituent assembly. I am deeply grateful to Duncan. I could not have written this book without him.
Our travel and research were supported by a generous grant from the Smith-Richardson Foundation, administered first by the Atlantic Council and then with great enthusiasm by Peter Bergen and the New America Foundation. For excellent research assistance I am grateful to Gal Koplewitz, Zoe Simon, Nate Orbach, Medha Gargeya, and Samarth Desai. My colleague and friend Jill Goldenziel read the manuscript and commented extensively, as she has generously done for every book I’ve written. As usual her comments improved my work tremendously, although my errors and omissions remain very much my own.
The Kamel Center at the Yale Law School, directed by Owen M. Fiss and Anthony Kronman, twice invited me to present early versions of the argument here: as the Dallah al-Baraka lecture, “Fall of the Arab Spring,” in October 2013; and then in a series of three lectures titled “Arab Winter,” delivered in September and October 2017. I am grateful to the participants in the conversations that followed all these lectures. My intellectual and other debts to my teachers Owen and Tony are of the kind that can only be acknowledged, never repaid.