The moderate/radical dualism is rooted in Tunisia’s history, since Bourguiba elaborated a specific idea of national identity, Tunisianité, after the independence. It has been common practice for the two authoritarian rulers to portray themselves as protectors of the country and creators of a state-led Islam. In order to do this, they employed a highly repressive security apparatus, described as the only defense against radical Islamists. The 2011 revolution had the objective to break this cycle of control and repression and demonstrated, among other things, how many people were excluded by this mainstream idea of Tunisianité. The election of Ennahdha in the same year seemed to go in that direction, allowing an Islamist party to rule the country for the first time. Interestingly, not only Ennahdha used similar techniques and narratives to the ones used by Bourguiba and Ben Ali, but it self-promoted as an example of successful, moderate Islam. By doing so, Ennahda cut out the rest of the Islamists, reproducing the exclusionary tale. This article analyzes how the narrative portraying a moderate/radical divide in Tunisia is crucial to legitimizing the security apparatus’ control over religion. Moreover, we show how the state uses the idea of moderate Islam to target religious individuals who do not follow this mainstream approach. Through qualitative interviews and ethnographic research, we analyze how security measures take advantage of the work of civil servants (wa’dh and wa’ydhat), and tightly control Salafi groups in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Our paper shows two main results. First, a tight connection between the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Ministry of Interior, through the exchange of information and the control of imams on part of civil servants. Second, the use of an anti-terrorist register (S17) as a repressive measure for non-mainstream religious citizens. The aim of this paper is to highlight the elements of continuity between the authoritarian and post-revolutionary security apparatuses, showing how post-revolutionary Tunisia still utilizes control techniques and narratives of the previous regime.

The comparative politics literature of the Mena area studies has been dealing in the last 40 years with the issue of the Islamic politics. This is one of the main issues of contemporary politics because the integration of Islamist and Salafi movements in the modern political community is a condition for a successful process of democratization. However, nationalist elites are opposed to it in the name of a modernist vision of the polity based on the classical modernization and secularization theory. While Islamist and Salafi literature has been dealing with this topic from different points of view (historical, political, sociological, anthropological) never the relationship between religion and political community building was dealt of as such. Based on a political theory approach, this book proposes to analyze the Islamic politics as part of the process of modern political building and tests its hypothesis to the specific case of Tunisia. In particular, it uses the framework of Political Theology and argues against the modernists that the modern politics derives from religion. It postulate therefore that Islam has its own specific relation to the politics that has influenced the process of political building on two level. On the first level, it created the categories for understanding the modern political institution; on the second, it provided a model of political mass mobilization. I call those two levels ‘modernist’ and ‘revivalist’. While the former aims to justify modernization as it appears in its liberal and democratic institutional shape, the latter is a form of revolutionary politics because demands for personal and collective engagement for the practical transformation of society.

Why has the party system that emerged following Tunisia’s 2010–11 uprising not featured a starker left-right cleavage, defined in terms of competing orientations to economic development? In this paper, I argue that at least part of the explanation lies in subnational dynamics. In addressing voters in marginalized regions during the 2011, 2014, and 2019 elections, the main parties in the country have offered broadly similar rhetoric regarding social and economic problems. In each of these elections, voters in these regions have chosen alternatives to the main parties at a higher rate than has been the case in wealthy areas. To establish this argument, I draw upon two types of data. First, I analyze a sample of subnational campaign videos broadcast on public television during the official campaign periods in 2011, 2014, and 2019 and establish that a) candidates for the main political parties contesting elections in economically marginalized governorates have indeed dedicated more attention to economic problems than have their peers running in wealthier regions but b) have expressed broadly similar responses to them. Second, I match delegation-level election returns in 2011, 2014, and 2019 to a social and economic development index created using the 2014 census and demonstrate that voters in economically marginalized delegations in each election have voted systematically differently than have those in wealthier regions; they have been significantly less likely to support the mainstream parties in each election. But marginalized delegations have not coordinated around a unified alternative to these mainstream parties. Instead, they have voted at a higher rate than have voters in wealthier regions for a heterogeneous mixture of socially conservative populists such as the Popular Petition in 2011; parties led by plutocratic populists such as the Free Patriotic Union in 2011; Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, and Arab Nationalist parties in each election; and independent lists in each election.

This paper studies the relationship between political cleavages and voting behavior during the 2019 Tunisian elections. Two main strands can be identified from the literature on political cleavages. Scholars from the first strand of literature argue that parties’ political space is structured along four main societal cleavages, also known the “classic cleavages.” The four cleavages are: center/periphery, religious, urban/rural, and owner/worker (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967; Lijphart, 1979). Proponents of the second strand of literature argue that class and religion are no longer good predictors of voting behavior. Instead, they identify a “new politics” cleavage or what they call “value-based cleavage” (Clarke et al., 2004; Inglehart, 1977, 1990). As a result of secularization and globalization processes, significant societal changes have caused a shift in people’s values, therefore, producing new structural divides within society. This paper tests whether the traditional social and religious cleavages are better predictors of ordinary Tunisian citizens’ electoral choices than the value-based cleavage. Using face-to-face representative survey data collected right after the 2019 elections, I examine the predictive power of voting behavior about the traditional cleavages versus the value-based cleavage in Tunisia.

In Tunisia, the Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC) was established for truth-seeking operations in charge of investigating and documenting past wrongdoings committed by the state’s institutions, officials and non-state actors working for the state from July 1st, 1955 until December 24th, 2013. Detailing the systems of corruption and repression in place under Ben Ali’s rule publicly exposing the authoritarian machinery, the final report of the TDC in Tunisia sets a new standard for truth-seeking mechanisms in the region. The findings and recommendations report, made public in December 2018, revolved around two main axis a system of repression from one side and system of corruption on the other. Using thematic analysis to code terms referring to socio-economic violations, human rights violations and the link between the two groups of violations, I put forward in this paper that the Commission established a direct link between repression related violations like enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, forced migration for political reasons as well as corruption related violations like misuse of public funds, embezzlement and election fraud. The report clearly highlights that to survive, an authoritarian regime relies on socio-economic violations to control financially the population and human rights violations to scare opponents using state and non-state institutions, also called state violence. In the report, dismantling the despotic system involves the network of security, professional, economic, financial and media control reinforced by the judicial and political forces. Dismantling the corruption system details financial corruption, abuse of public funds and the correlation between financial corruption and human rights violations. The clear and direct correlation between repression and corruption in the report confirms that violations of socio-economic and human rights cannot be separately understood in the context of authoritarianism; a conception that was clearly reflected by protesters who took to the streets in Tunisia ten years ago claiming jobs, freedom, social justice, the end of police brutality and democracy.