Tunisia Five Years After: The Forgotten Structures of Revolutionary Practices?
Panel 056, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 18 at 1:45 pm
Panel Description
Five years after the fall of Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali, the hopes of the revolutionary upheaval have largely disappeared. Instead, in the face of a deteriorating economic situation and a political elite that seems removed from the daily problems of Tunisians, a feeling of disappointment has emerged. Large segments of the population have turned their backs to the formal political arena, and are questioning the very fact of a Tunisian Revolution. More and more voices - whether intellectuals, politicians or ordinary citizens - have criticized the idea that Tunisia lived a revolution and argue that Tunisia only witnessed the disappearance of a dictator. Today, we witness simultaneously talks about an idealized 'revolution' or, conversely, the 'betrayal' of revolutionary aspirations. This, of course, does not mean that revolutionary practices and ideas did not have a powerful impact in the forms of mobilization during the episode on the barricades (Dec 2010 - Jan 2011).
This panel takes stock with these disillusions and looks back at the revolutionary moments (understood as the period running from the initial protests in the centre of the country to presidential allocution of March 3rd 2011) by identifying practices and ideas that have allowed new forms of mobilizations to take place. Among these practices, the panelists think of the politics of new beginnings, the extraordinary, a dynamized sense of citizenship, new forms of cross-partisans alliance, national mobilizations, bounds of civility, horizontal alliance, etc. This panel offers in-depth studies on what these revolutionary practices have become since 2011. Have these been institutionalized by formal civil associationsa Have they been put on paper in new legal texts What is the current social and political significance of these revolutionary principlesy Thus, the unit of analysis are principles, ideas and forms of mobilization (as opposed to parties, organizations or institution-building). What does a short history of these revolutionary concepts/ideas tell us about the transformations and challenges that Tunisia as a country faces today How have specific ideas or practices of the revolutionary period evolvedr One objective of this panel is to retrieve the actuality of innovative praxes that can be said to have structured the early revolutionary phase. A second objective is to bring younger researchers (PhD students) with more established scholars.
This paper concentrates on a spontaneous practice that existed in various cities of Tunisia immediately after the fall of Ben Ali and which lasted for a short period (depending on the place, between a couple of days to a couple of weeks): This practice can be called suspension of violence, extreme civility or protective anarchism. By this, I mean the spontaneous actions by which people organized small committees to protect their neighborhoods; help to serve food and drinks to volunteers of these small committees; the forming of queues that were made to buy bread; or the practice of stopping at traffic lights, even if they were not working. Such practices, which were at least initially spontaneous, functioned as social magnets and helped structuring a new temporary revolutionary, egalitarian social order. I attributed such practices to a deep (quasi-unconscious) revolutionary strategy of re-appropriating and reinventing new legitimate means of collective violence, away from state apparatae.
Such moment of civility, altruism, or self-government did not last long. Some of these practices generated the controversial leagues for the protection of the revolution, which performed a much more polarizing political role. The purpose of the paper is not to explain why such practices ceased to be performed and how they were politicized, but whether they still have a legacy at a level which fails to be recognized in macro-analyses of Tunisian politcs. Based on interviews with Tunisians in four different cities (Zarzis, Mednine, Sfax, and Tunis) in the summer 2015 and early 2016, this paper discuss whether certain acts of citizenship (Isin), such as cleaning street (like after the Kasserine violent protests of January 2016, campaigns to keep Tunisian sidewalks / trottoirs (#sayeb_trottoir), or other similar micro-phenomena (some less ordered, such as chaotic traffic behavior) cannot be connected to this initial revolutionary impetus. Thus revolutionary practices might still have, at the micro-level of social interactions, a real significance for certain citizens in renegotiating a more pluralist and democratic order in Tunisia.
In the aftermath of the fall of Ben Ali’s regime, Islamic associations mushroomed as new “mobilizing agencies” (Norris, 2002) thanks to a more favourable socio-political environment. There is an academic literature, implicitly stemming from Putnam’s theory on social capital, that highlights the capacity of associations with religious references to bridge social cleavages, contributing to a dense and vibrant social infrastructure (Clark, 2004; Harmsen; 2008). After the Arab uprisings, new theories emerged to capture these forms of civic engagements. Merone and Soli focused on Tunisian Islamic associations as agencies of a “social counter-power” (Merone and Soli, 2013), while Chalcraft spoke of the success of “horizontalism” to understand the "Egyptian revolutionary process" (MERIP, 2011). This paper investigates the emergence and evolution of a dense network of Islamic charitable and cultural associations in Tunisia since 2011 as new pivotal actors of a changing civil society, with a focus on the capacity to maintain new social links. How have religious grass-roots associations framed social development? How do they facilitate social and political mobilization through the building of horizontal networks? Does their action build only within, or favour only, their constituency or does it build links beyond the Islamic constellation? Based on interviews done in 2015 and 2016 in the centre and south of Tunisia (Qayrawan, Sfax and Medenine), this study then assesses the possibility of “horizontalism” to remain a structuring principle. This acquires more relevance in a post revolutionary Tunisia characterized by a high politicization of civil society actors and a substantial flow of foreign aid. Two factors which generate, by themselves, new vertical internal and external hierarchies and therefore complicate the notion of horizontal linkages.
When analyzing the Tunisian Revolution through an aesthetic lens – beyond the prevailing focus on regimes and states in political theory – the premonitory and subversive agency of the artistic sphere since the 2000’s becomes visible. As stated by Frantz Fanon, an attentive reader can sense and even see the next battle, manifested in rituals, ceremonies an artistic creation. Not only tech-savvy hip-hopping youth dared to take a subtle stance against oppressive power relations. Some of the last productions of the New Tunisian Cinema or the New Theater of Tunis were to a certain extent premonitory of the Tunisian Revolution. This subversion emerged during the liberation phase of the revolution as an important mediator of the fundamental changes the country was going through. Aesthetic subversion produced new ways of seeing the political situation by engaging in revolutionary dynamics. Different attacks by Islamic militants against artistic creations or artists themselves consequently provoked a national debate on the tension between the newly regained (artistic) liberty and the limits of the sacred in Tunisian society. Based on ethnographic research, participant observation and interviews, I will argue that the cultural and artistic sphere did not lose its revolutionary practices and ideas, even though it was deeply influenced by the secular-Islamist fault line that defined the political in post Ben-Ali Tunisia.
While the Islamists were not organized as a political force during the revolutionary upheaval against Ben Ali, they became somehow the ‘guardians’ of the revolutionary aspirations after winning the 2011 elections. The 2011-14 constitutional government provided Tunisia with a unique experience of a Islamist-secular coalition. The outcome has been the drafting of a new constitution based on a democratic deal. During this two years, however, the political scene was highly polarized in a secular/Islamist divide. In particular the Nahda party played an important role because it found itself caught between a secular political pressure and an Islamic grassroots constituency both pushing for specific but different ‘revolutionary’ reforms. If the final outcome was the integration of the mainstream Islamic party into the democratic institutional deal, it was not, however, a foregone exit of the political struggle. Political opportunities and a zero sum struggle could have led to a civil war or a neo-authoritarian restoration. In this presentation, based on years of fieldwork, I reflect on the Islamists period in power and how they have dealt with the main critical junctures of the revolutionary process.
