In a sweltering café just outside Tunis’s old medina last summer, a local human rights defender spoke of living in a climate of fear.

You couldn’t remain in one place for too long. At a galloping pace, he told me stories of vicious police raids into informal camps of people looking for better lives, of people randomly apprehended and dumped in the desert, and of civil society surveilled and criminalized for speaking out.

It’s a far cry from fifteen years ago, when Tunisian street grocer Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation helped spark revolts against autocracy across the Middle East and North Africa.