Tunisia’s political transition (2011-2015) has been much lauded for the unique capacity of political leaders to reach compromise. Tunisian political and social actors did indeed achieve a considerable task with the adoption of a new constitution and the organization of three peaceful elections. The reality of the democratic experiment in Tunisia cannot be approached, however, without taking into consideration the question of sovereignty. How does the new political and economic elite understand Tunisia’s relation to the world, and the country new role in a rapidly changing geopolitical neighborhood? During the Ben Ali era, the relation of Tunisia to the rest of the World was entirely structured around a strategy of extraversion (Jean-François Bayart, 1989, 2006). Extraversion designates the ways in which business and political elites have actively participated in the processes that created and maintain the country in dependent position within the world. Sovereignty thus comes down to the ability to manage dependence. As key brokers, these elites managed to consolidate their domination on the national society through the distribution of the rents coming from their insertion in the global economy: credits, privileges, recognition. This paper seeks to examine whether the revolution and democratic transition have challenged this well-established pattern of willful negotiation of national sovereignty. We will demonstrate that the democratic opening has not allowed for the emergence of a new model of development but, rather, has led to the multi-lateralization and redefinition of the mechanisms of extraversion. We will show how democratization has enabled the shift from a monopoly of the RCD personnel to a monopoly detained by the political elite of the four parties of the government (Ennahda, Nida Tounes, Afeq and UPL), and allowed for a large participation of subaltern actors through illicit trade, trafficking and illegal migration. The paper will examine the debates that occurred among the four governing parties around issues such as Tunisia’s position in the Libyan conflict, or the rethinking of a debt-based development model. Through these case studies, we will try to understand why and how Tunisian new political elites have chosen to remain the main actors of their own clientelization and subjectivation.

This paper will examine the intersection between neoliberalism, higher education and national security in post-uprising Tunisia, with a focus on questions of political subjectivity, hierarchies of citizenship and ‘stratified’ sovereignty (Hobson 2014). It starts from the premise that national security and higher education are two central institutions where local and global power are often (re)produced, entangled and contested. In particular, in relation to the processes associated with neoliberal ‘reform’, including denationalization of state policies, marketization of public goods, individualization of formerly collective responsibilities, and the exclusion and criminalization of ‘problematic communities’. Though focusing on the post-uprising period, this paper will briefly sketch out the historical dimensions of Tunisia’s ‘asymmetrical' state formation (Hibou 2015) in relation to higher education and national security as prominent sites of power. Guided by Wilder’s (2015) concept of (neo)colonial ‘legal diversity,’ it will examine the mixture of legal orders, institutions and discourses that continue to bind Tunisia to a hierarchically ordered global system. The paper will also weave in consideration of the role of powerful states, including France and the US, as well as international and multi-lateral institutions (e.g. NATO, the EU, WTO and World Bank), and (trans)national private interests in shaping current struggles over the meaning and substance of ‘economic development,’ ‘security’ and ‘citizenship.’ It will be argued that projects of ‘reform’ around national security and higher education are useful heuristics through which to examine these struggles, and to better understand change and continuity in the post-uprising period. This paper will conclude by considering alternative political projects and forms of knowledge-production that such struggles have engendered, in particular those that call for a re-imagining and re-structuring of the state in a way that works towards equality of sovereignty and of citizenship.

In the early 1960s, Tunisia was desperately short of capital and faced a constant need for food amidst post-Independence agricultural disorganization. Faced with the socio-technical challenge of increasing agricultural productivity, it opted for a Green Revolution in agriculture – a technological package which used high-productivity wheats to increase yields. Those yield increases relied, however, on a capital-intense input package: selected seeds, perfectly timed irrigation, herbicides, carefully syncopated fertilizer applications. The technology was also capital-intense rather than labor-intense, leading to a continuing rural exodus as the Tunisian population continued to concentrate in slums and peripheral bidonvilles. This paper looks at the longue duree patterns of Tunisian agricultural development in the cereal sector. Far from a rupture with the colonial model. I trace a fundamental continuity between colonial-era farms and their large Tunisian doppelgangers, and the post-Independence move to modernized, capital-intense and labor-light cereal production systems. By examining the process of colonial land purchases and the patterns of colonial dry-farming, and the resultant flow of populations both to peripheral hillsides and to cities, I trace the first step in the move to capital-intense speculative agriculture in the Tunisian countryside. Such policies, which concentrated the Tunisian population in the cities or in the least-fertile lands in the northern cereal zones, prepared the way for the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution, with its emphasis on mechanization and extensive agriculture, essentially mimicked and broadened the colonial model, rehearsing it throughout the Tunisian cereal belt, and leading to another wave of rural-urban migration, whether to Tunisia’s cities or the metropolises of Libya and France. In the process, by concentrating large swathes of the population in regions of the country where there was an absolute lack of jobs, the country set the stage for the unrest which now recurrently sweeps the country, and especially poor slums such as D’Ettadhamen and Douar Hicher, in Tunis. Such unrest can be traced back to the country-wide dislocations which both colonial and post-colonial capitalist agriculture set in motion through the country’s North. This study relies on analyzing both USAID documents from the 1960s-1980s on the Cereal implementation project as well as domestic Tunisian studies which the Ministry of Agriculture carried out on the effects of the Green Revolution. It also analyzes cost-of-production data from the same Ministry. It relies on the secondary literature as a synthetic background to historically situate colonial dry-farming.

From Sidi Bouzid to Kasserine: Food Sovereignty, land rights and social uprisings in Tunisia Tunisia is strongly dependent on world food markets, and it imports no less than 45% of its needs. Nonetheless, the country is also a “big” agricultural exporter, including of non-food products. This paradox reveals its continued submission to the "world food regime" (Friedmann 1993 & McMichael 2009) which limits, at the same time, Tunisia’s "national" political sovereignty and national, local, and family-level food sovereignty. Food sovereignty (Via Campesina, 1996) includes the right of peoples and nations to freely choose their agricultural development models, food policies, modes of production and consumption, and the nature of their relations with the "outside" – foreign countries. It assumes, moreover, the unconditional right of access of local populations, and above all peasants, to the natural and agricultural resources needed to ensure food security for families and supply the local markets with necessary foodstuffs. Thus, the concept is primarily based on the principle that agricultural resources must first be used to feed humans rather than to accumulate capital. Since the mid-1980s, the neoliberal policies have neglected the political, social and environmental dimensions of agriculture, for the benefit of an investors' agriculture, one that is mechanized, intensive, and often irrigated. Its products are firstly intended for export. This comes at the expense of the small and medium peasantry, and of local and national food sovereignty. One could mention as an example the case of the Sidi Bouzid region (made famous by the suicide of Bouazizi December 17, 2010), which has attracted the largest share of public and private investments over the past 30 years but which has known the 4th highest poverty rate in the country, with about 43% of the population under the poverty line, against 20% in the Northeast and major coastal big cities. Far from being a surprise, this "paradox" – strong investment rates and high rates of poverty – reveals the mechanisms of accumulation, by the investors, through dispossession of rural populations and local farming communities (Harvey D., on 2003) and highlights the "mechanical" links between food dependency and uprisings and protests. My paper aims to explore these mechanisms of continuing dispossession over several decades and their "causal" relations with the more recent uprisings, by revisiting the key moments of the Tunisian "revolution" between Sidi Bouzid in 2010 and Kasserine in 2016.