This paper addresses the question of what a sociology of colonial critique as emanating from the Arab world would encompass. It also attempts to bring this critique to bear on a contemporary sociology of the Arab world and the Global South more broadly. Its starting point is that Europe and the US are the main political, social and cultural referents of Arab societies. This is in contrast to the importance placed on south-south solidarity by regional states and activists during the 1950s and 1960s, a period in which Arab movements and thinkers looked to, and were part of, third-worldist solidarity movements and different forms of cultural exchange. This paper revisits this era and constructs a south-south genealogy of Arab anti-colonial critique. Here, the questions to be asked are no longer solely about the postcolonial world’s vertical imaginary vis-à-vis the colonial world, but about its horizontal cultural configuration in relation to other postcolonial societies, thinkers, movements and ideas. Thus, by examining these historical transnational processes, structures and cultural flows within, across and beyond the territorial and imaginative postcolonial spaces of Asia and Africa, I contend, the postcolonial world becomes a site for the theorization of the social world more broadly. Such an approach, I argue, could contribute to a colonial-critique centered contemporary Arab sociology. Although inspired by the social theory that emanated from the decolonization era, such an approach must contend with a very different conceptual problematic given the changed realities of the region today.

This paper addresses the imbrications of Tunisia’s agricultural sector within neo-colonial relations of power entailing the subordination of local legal frameworks to European legislation and bodies of knowledge. It attempts to explain the reasons behind the persistent failures of Tunisia’s food security strategy through the study of the political economy of the management of plants and genetic resources for food and agriculture. Despite the 2008 food crisis and the increasing prevalence of movements and states adopting the framework of food sovereignty, the Tunisian government has failed to acknowledge or address the roots causes of food dependency. This paper demonstrates how free trade agreements with the EU function to reproduce colonial hierarchies in relations between Tunisia and European states, reducing the country’s policy space and constructing impediments to designing nationalist oriented seed laws. The Tunisian government could look to inspiration from other Global South states, which have adopted sui generis laws and treaties that protect farmers, biodiversity, and local forms of agricultural knowledge production. It analyses the factors and policies that led to the fragmentation of the institutional framework for plant genetic resources, and their role in isolating local seeds and varieties, marginalizing farmer’s traditional knowledge and undermining research and development. In addition to neoliberal reforms, this fragmentation enables the further intervention and domination of external actors and corporations. In the context of negotiations for the new EU-Tunisia free trade agreement (DCFTA), this paper argues for the urgency of rethinking a broader vision for food sovereignty outside the Global North capitalist, colonial-modern paradigm. This would require laws and institutions more in line with the country’s needs, putting local seeds and the invaluable knowledge of small farmers at the heart of policies aiming to regain sovereignty over plant genetic resources and reduce the country’s dependency.

In recent years, the West Asian and North African university has attracted increased attention from critical scholars interested in studying the dynamics of post-colonial institutions in the context of ongoing coloniality, capitalist expansion and imperial interventions. This paper focuses on the Tunisian University, in many ways a microcosm of the trajectory of power and resistance in the colonial-modern university. Tunisia is home to one of the oldest teaching establishments in the Arab world, with Al-Zaytuna university founded in 737 C.E. Despite the deep influence of French colonial legacies in shaping early personnel, pedagogy and structure, the Tunisian university, like other of the country’s institutions in their early post-independence years, also adhered to a developmentalist agenda. In the 60s and 70s, the Tunisian university became a battleground for leftist and nationalist mobilization, cut short as a result of authoritarian impulses, infitah/liberalizing politics under Prime Minister Hédi Nouira in the 70s and strengthened alignment with western states in the context of cold war geopolitics. From the 80s onwards, the Tunisian University has been the site of increasing intervention of a variety of neoliberal, imperial actors (from the World Bank to EU, private education companies to the US State Department), ideologies and pedagogies, requiring a reduction in state resources invested in education. These interventions have contributed to a rapid decline in quality and the vocationalization of higher education, with the shift away from degrees suitable for the developmentalist state and geared instead towards the needs of (largely foreign) industry in an increasingly denationalized economy incorporated at the lower end of the global value chain with an emphasis on cheap labor and natural resource extraction. In other words, the Tunisian university has become a primary site through which capitalism (re)produces the stratified differences required for surplus accumulation. This paper argues the benefits of engaging the methodological and theoretical insights from Black studies and Decolonial theory for approaching the regional academy. These bodies of literature help to grasp not only the particular dynamics of how the Tunisian university functions to (re)produce the stratifications of racial capitalism and empire, but also to ground analysis within a genealogy of its colonial origins. They also illuminate parallels with struggles taking place within and over the capitalist, colonial-modern academy not only in the Global South, but within the metropole as well. In this sense, they contribute to our understanding of what may be conceptualized as a transnational “undercommons.”