Sami Ben Gharbia: From political exile to cyber-activism, leaks, and citizen journalism that cracked open Tunisia’s dictatorship
Sami Ben Gharbia is one of the pioneers of digital dissent in the Arab world—a Tunisian activist who turned blogs, leaks and platforms into instruments for cracking open a dictatorship’s information lockdown. For Afrispora News, his story captures how African‑born voices in the diaspora helped invent the playbook of contemporary cyber‑activism.
From political exile to global cyber‑activist
Born in Tunisia, Sami Ben Gharbia became a human‑rights activist and blogger in the 1990s, eventually fleeing political persecution and living as a refugee in the Netherlands from 1998 to 2011. He has described himself as “one of the earliest censored bloggers in the Arab world,” noting that his personal blog was blocked in Tunisia as early as 2003. Exile did not silence him; instead, it offered the relative safety and connectivity needed to experiment with new forms of online organising, from blog aggregators to map‑based documentation of prison abuses.
Nawaat: citizen journalism against dictatorship
In 2004, while still in exile, Ben Gharbia co‑founded Nawaat, a collective Tunisian blog dedicated to independent news, analysis and human‑rights reporting. Operating outside state control, Nawaat became a hub for citizen journalists, dissidents and ordinary Tunisians to publish leaked documents, videos and testimonies about corruption, censorship and police violence. The site played a pivotal role in exposing abuses under President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and later in supporting the Tunisian Revolution (2010–2011) by aggregating and amplifying protest content that state media refused to show.
One of Ben Gharbia’s most noted projects was “Amn Dawla”, a leaked archive of secret‑police documents that Nawaat helped to curate and publish. By putting these files online, he and his collaborators used transparency as a weapon, enabling Tunisians and the wider world to see the mechanics of repression and surveillance that had been hidden behind official narratives. Nawaat’s work earned international recognition, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011.
Global Voices Advocacy and the Arab Techies network
In 2007, Ben Gharbia became the founding director of Global Voices Advocacy (now Advox), an arm of the Global Voices community focused on defending online freedom of expression. From that role, he helped build a global network of bloggers, technologists and activists from China, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East, sharing tactics on anti‑censorship tools, secure communications and cross‑border solidarity.
He co‑founded the Arab Techies Collective and co‑organised the Arab Bloggers Conferences in Beirut and, after the revolution, in Tunis, spaces where coders and activists collaborated to localise tools, design new platforms and strategise around digital rights. These gatherings helped forge a regional movement that saw technology not as neutral infrastructure but as contested terrain in struggles over surveillance, access and speech.
Speaking freely: digital rights, censorship and backlash
Ben Gharbia’s reflections, captured in interviews such as the EFF “Speaking Freely” conversation, underline that for years Western governments accepted authoritarian control of Tunisia’s borders and information space in the name of “stability.” Against that backdrop, the internet became a counter‑public: a place where activists could document torture, share banned writings and coordinate campaigns like the yezzi.org online protest and the “Freedom of expression in mourning!” actions against censorship.
Post‑revolution, he has continued to warn that democratic openings are fragile. Tunisian authorities have at times attempted to suspend or legally harass Nawaat, invoking NGO laws and bureaucratic pretexts to undermine its work, prompting solidarity from groups like EFF and other NGOs. For Ben Gharbia, this underscores that digital rights victories are never permanent; they must be defended against both old and new forms of repression.
Afrispora lens: diaspora as laboratory for tomorrow’s freedoms
Through an Afrispora News lens, Sami Ben Gharbia’s story illustrates how African and Arab diaspora spaces can become laboratories for future freedoms at home. From the Netherlands, he helped design tools, narratives and alliances that would later prove crucial inside Tunisia and across the region. By the time he returned after 2011, the infrastructure of citizen journalism and digital solidarity he had helped build was already part of the country’s new political DNA.
His trajectory—Tunis to exile, to global digital‑rights organiser, and back to a contested but freer public sphere—embodies the Afrispora conviction that documenting African and diaspora achievement is not just about celebrating individuals. It is about tracing how their ideas, platforms and courage quietly rewire the information systems on which democracy and human dignity depend.
