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Yasmine Ryan is a web journalist for Al-Jazeera English, where she focuses on North African and French politics, and on cyberactivism. She was one of the first journalists in the English-speaking world to report on the uprising in Tunisia, and has spent much of 2011 in Tunisia covering its transition towards democracy. She has previously reported on Algeria for the International Herald Tribune. Yasmine majored in Political Studies and French at the University of Auckland, and completed her Masters in Journalism at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques d’Aix-en-Province.
Ten months after a young fruit seller set himself alight in a small, marginalized town in central Tunisia, his compatriots will be voting in what many are hoping will be the country’s first free and fair elections. In the poll set for October 23, Tunisians will be electing a national constituent assembly that will be charged with writing the rules of the new political era. That assembly will spend up to a year writing a new constitution and deciding which form of government the country will have.
