2013 — Tunisia's Chokri Belaid Assassinated

On February 6, 2013, Chokri Belaid, Tunisia's most prominent secular opposition leader, was assassinated outside his Tunis home. The killing of a leading voice against the government shocked a country still finding its feet after revolution.

Mass protests erupted nationwide, and the prime minister offered to dissolve his own government. Tunisia's young democracy teetered, before a national dialogue pulled it back from the brink. Belaid's death became a defining test of that democracy: a political murder that pushed the country toward collapse, and a crisis that dialogue, rather than force, finally contained. For a young democracy, the lesson was stark: its survival could not be taken for granted any longer at all.