Legal review as a means of coming to terms with the past should be an essential aid to the Tunisian democratic process, but it has, alas, so far often been a stumbling block.

Coming to terms with the past has the task of breaking the shackles of the past and making the repetition of history impossible by means of review and information. Its instruments include the prohibition of guilty organizations, the punishment or disqualification of perpetrators and accomplices, and the rehabilitation and compensation of victims. The young democracy of Tunisia soon resolved to make use of these instruments for consolidating a democratic political system. But the initiation of the Compensation Act and the introduction of a lustration process have taken such detours that they sometimes seem to have landed in a dead end.

http://blog.goethe.de/humanities/archives/34-Transitional-Justice-in-Tunisia.html

With the project Scholars in Residence, taking the processes of transformation as point of departure, the Goethe-Institut seeks to promote intercultural dialogue in the area of academic research and to strengthen scientific relations between Germany and the Arabic world on a long-term basis.

Scholars in Residence is part of the German-Egyptian and German-Tunisian transformation partnership 2012-2013. The project is an initiative by the Goethe-Institut and being carried out in cooperation with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KWI) and the Ruhr University Bochum"s Centre of Mediterranean Studies (ZMS). Funded with special grants provided by the German Federal Foreign Office.