Demos Team

Prof. Larbi Sadiki is Executive Director of Demos-Tunisia. He is an internationally-recognized expert on Arab democratization who has researched and published extensively on the topic. Amongst his books are The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (Columbia University Press, 2004), Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy (OUP, 2009), and the Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics: Interdisciplinary Inscriptions (Routledge, 2020). He is Editor of the book series Routledge Studies on Middle East Democratization and Government and Editor-in-Chief of the Brill journal ProtestHis blogs, which circulated widely during the Arab Spring, appeared in Aljazeera English. He has been a fellow with the Heinrich Boll Foundation, Carnegie Middle East, Brookings Doha, the Middle East Council on Global Affairs and has been an academic at the Australian National University, the University of Exeter, the University of Westminster, and Qatar University.

Dr. Layla Saleh is Director of Research at Demos-Tunisia. A political scientist by training, she specializes in Arab politics, protest movements, and democratization. Her publications include the book US Hard Power in the Arab World: Resistance, the Syrian Uprising, and the US War on Terror (Routledge, 2017), COVID-19 and Risk Society Across the MENA Region: Assessing Governance, Democracy, and Inequality (IB Tauris, 2022, co-edited with Larbi Sadiki), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She has taught at Qatar University’s Department of International Affairs, and is currently Research Fellow at the Center For Relational Studies on Global Crises, Chiba University (Japan). She is also Associate Editor of the Brill journal Protest.

Dr Aisha Kadaoui is Maghreb Outreach Coordinator at Demos. She is a Research Associate with the Department of Public Law, University Hassan II of Casablanca. She is a part-time Political Sciences and Constitutional Law professor at the Faculty of Social sciences of Casablanca. She is the author of a thesis on “Political Change in Morocco in Light of the Constitutional Reform of 2011,” and several chapters on democracy and democratization in Morocco.

Safouene Ghannouchi has a PhD in Public Law. He is Assistant Lecturer at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Sousse University. He teaches constitutional law and human rights law. His PhD was on emergency provisions in the Constitutions of the MENA region. For his MA at Sousse University, he worked on transitory provisions in the Tunisian Constitution of 2014. During his postgraduate studies, he was enrolled in a joint program with the Institute of Law and Economics at Hamburg University. In 2020, he joined UNDP in Tunisia where he is currently working as a project coordinator.

Mr. Abdelhamid Ben Rabah is Digital and IT Head at Demos-Tunisia. He is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Tunis-Manouba, where he is developing digital and algorithmic methods for the extraction of events and the generation of semantic maps. 

Ayet Bouhajeb is a Fellow at Demos Tunisia. She is an honors graduate from Georgetown University Qatar’s School of Foreign Service, where she majored in International Politics. Her studies specialized in democratization studies with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Ayet’s thesis, “Paving the Way for Authoritarianism: Rethinking Tunisia’s Democratic Transition Post the Arab Spring (2011-2019),” examined political transitions in the wake of the Arab Spring. Her academic background combines regional expertise with analytical skills in political science and international relations. Currently, Ayet serves as an Associate Consultant at PwC Middle East, where she applies her knowledge of regional dynamics to the firm’s consulting projects.