During the last five years, the issue of energy and natural resources was a theme of Tunisia’s most significant and violent protest movements. The first of these movements was the “Where’s the Petrol?” campaign in 2015 and the violent protests that Douz and El Faouar in Kebili Governorate witnessed the same year. Then came the Kerkennah Islands clashes, which halted production in the Petrofac oil company in 2016, and the El Kamour sit-in in the far south of Tunisia in 2017, and dozens of sit-ins in the mining basin. One of these sit-ins (El Kamour) resulted in the death of one of the protestors and prompted late president Beji Caid Essebsi to charge the army with protecting the region’s oil establishments. These protest movements put the governments of Habib Essid and Youssef Chahed in predicaments, calling for a review of the contracts for exploiting natural resources, the mechanisms for distributing the proceeds, and the development paradigm and extraction model as a whole. On the other hand, the government’s confused handling of this issue and the
