While We Wait

Stockholm Studies in Politics 187 Karim Zakhour While We Wait

Democratization, State and Citizenship among Young Men in Tunisia's Interior Regions While We Wait Karim Zakhour

ISBN 978-91-7911-106-9 ISSN 0346-6620

Department of Political Science

Doctoral Thesis in Political Science at Stockholm University, Sweden 2020

While We Wait Democratization, State and Citizenship among Young Men in Tunisia's Interior Regions Karim Zakhour Academic dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science at Stockholm University to be publicly defended on Thursday 17 September 2020 at 13.00 in sal G, Arrheniuslaboratorierna, Svante Arrhenius väg 20 C.

Abstract This dissertation has sought to develop new ways of understanding democratization, and by extension democracy, by attempting to capture the experience of democratic transitions. The thesis has investigated the Tunisian democratization processes that followed the overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011. This transition, while on many levels successful, has also been hampered by widespread frustration and disappointment, particularly among the young. More specifically, the study has looked at young men in Gafsa and Kasserine, Tunisia's historically marginalized, interior regions. The study is the result of fourteen months of fieldwork in Tunisia between 2015 and 2019. Building on the work of French political thinker Claude Lefort, the study understands democracy as a destabilizing of certainty on the level of symbolic power. It treats democratization as a heightened experience of this breakdown of symbolic power, and posits that the democratic dissolution of certainty is more visible, pronounced and perilous in transitional periods. Symbolic power comes to be articulated as political imaginaries, which are formed and informed by the past and current relationship between the state and its citizens. During democratization processes, the emergence of a free public space opens up for new political imaginaries. Through participant observation this thesis has sought to capture the quotidian aspects of young men's lives, looking at public space, particularly cafés, as important spaces of waiting. Such waiting, the study argues, makes the expectations of the democratization process visible. The study shows that, for the young men, the Tunisian political imaginaries are informed by expectations of a state that can provide the basics of (male) citizenship, understood primarily in terms of state-employment. The inability of the state to provide, tied to both neoliberal and demographic factors, was a major motivator behind the 2010-2011 Tunisian revolution. These unfulfilled expectations also come to impact the young men’s experience of the democratic transition, centered on a continued demand for “bread and dignity”. Democratization has given rise to vibrant public spaces, spaces that have simultaneously allowed for the articulation of frustrations. The general experiences of democratization that are expressed in these public spaces is one of chaos, loss of personal and economic security, as well as a sense of collapse in national solidarity. Democratization is, in many ways, understood to amplify a neoliberal logic premised on state-retreat, which leaves the young men to their own devices. This has led to a large-scale epistemological crisis, understood as falling away of meaning-making frameworks. This epistemological uncertainty has spawned attempts by the young men to recover a meaningful interpretive framework, whether democratic or not.

Keywords: Democratization, state, citizenship, Tunisia, youth, Claude Lefort, neoliberalism, waiting.

Stockholm 2020 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-183698

ISBN 978-91-7911-106-9 ISBN 978-91-7911-107-6 ISSN 0346-6620

Department of Political Science

Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm

WHILE WE WAIT

Karim Zakhour

While We Wait

Democratization, State and Citizenship among Young Men in Tunisia's Interior Regions

Karim Zakhour ©Karim Zakhour, Stockholm University 2020

ISBN print 978-91-7911-106-9 ISBN PDF 978-91-7911-107-6 ISSN 0346-6620

Cover Photo: 'The Demon Seated' by Mikhail Vrubel (1890)

Printed in Sweden by Universitetsservice US-AB, Stockholm 2020 Always has the world grappled with tyranny Neither their rituals, nor our rebellion, is new Always have we made flowers bloom in fire Neither their defeat, nor our final victory, is new Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... IV 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

SETTING THE STAGE ...... 1 RESEARCH AIM & QUESTION ...... 4 PREVIOUS RESEARCH ...... 7 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS ...... 20 2. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND SCHEMATIC ARGUMENTS ...... 23

INTRODUCTION ...... 23 THEORETICAL ENTRY-POINTS ...... 24 TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR DEMOCRATIZATION AS EXPERIENCE ...... 42 OPTICS OF DEMOCRATIZATION ...... 55 SUMMARY...... 73 3. METHODS AND THEIR INTERPRETATIONS ...... 75

INTRODUCTION ...... 75 METHOD OF INTERPRETIVE ETHNOGRAPHY ...... 76 CASES ...... 78 MATERIAL GATHERING ...... 80 INTERPRETING “DATA” ...... 83 REFLEXIVITY ...... 95 ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY ...... 99 4. THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION ...... 107

INTRODUCTION ...... 107 THE AGE OF BOURGUIBA ...... 108 THE ERA OF BEN ALI ...... 120 REVOLUTION AND AFTER ...... 138 CONCLUSIONS ...... 151 5. CAFÉ COMMUNITAS ...... 153

ETHNOGRAPHIC INTERLUDE 1: JUST ANOTHER DAY ...... 153 INTRODUCTION ...... 155 A HISTORY OF COFFEE ...... 156

i ii

CAFÉS AND MARGINALITY ...... 158 GENDERED PUBLIC SPACES ...... 171 CONCLUSIONS ...... 178 6. COUNTER-PUBLIC CAFÉS ...... 181

INTERLUDE 2: ACTIVE WAITING ...... 181 INTRODUCTION ...... 183 EVERYDAY REVOLUTIONS ...... 184 EXCLUSIONS ...... 191 CONCLUSIONS ...... 198 7. ENTREPRENEURS OF DESPERATION...... 201

INTRODUCTION ...... 201 POET OF DESPAIR ...... 202 SEARCHING FOR THE KEY ...... 208 WAITING TO ESCAPE ...... 214 POLITICAL LABOR ...... 218 THE STRUGGLE FOR MEANING ...... 222 CONCUSIONS ...... 227 8. DEMOCRATIC DOUBT ...... 233

INTERLUDE 3: HUNGER ...... 233 INTRODUCTION ...... 235 OPENING OF TRANSCRIPTS ...... 236 CHAOS AND UNCERTAINTY ...... 242 EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS ...... 250 VERNACULAR DEMOCRACY ...... 255 CONCLUSIONS...... 267 9. GOVERNING THROUGH CORRUPTION ...... 271

INTERLUDE 4: THE MEANING OF COUNTRY ...... 271 INTRODUCTION ...... 273 SYMBOLS AND STORIES ...... 275 CORRUPTING STATES ...... 276 DEMOCRACY AND CORRUPTION ...... 291 CONCLUSIONS ...... 297 10. NO COUNTRY FOR YOUNG MEN ...... 299

INTERLUDE 5: OF SCORPIONS AND FLIES ...... 299 INTRODUCTION ...... 302 CULTURAL INTIMACIES ...... 302 LONGING FOR THE FATHER ...... 312 A STATE OF BELIEF ...... 323 CONCLUSIONS ...... 329

iii

11. CONCLUSIONS ...... 331

SUMMARY...... 331 CONTRIBUTIONS ...... 335 LIMITATIONS & FURTHER RESEARCH ...... 345 POSTSCRIPT ...... 346 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 349 SAMMANFATTNING

iv Acknowledgments

First and above all, I wish to express my gratitude to all the youth in Gafsa and Kasserine and beyond that I have encountered during my fieldwork. The time I spent in Tunisia was the most exciting part of the dissertation process, and some of the most rewarding and challenging times of my life. I came looking for revolutionary optimism and found something else. Something altogether more complex and more real. The most difficult task of writing this thesis has been to try to do justice to your voices and your stories. I have not succeeded, but I hope my failure is a tolerable one. A special thank you to “Sari”: poet, smuggler, khubzist, humanist and all around a great friend. If you had not decided to help a lost stranger, this thesis would have looked very different. Thank you to all those that made life in Tunis so exciting. Especially Radhoune Addala for showing me every bar in town worth knowing; Elizia Volkmann, friend and journalist extraordinaire; and Lana Salman for all the wonderful conversations. At the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University, I owe a special thank you to my supervisors Michele Micheletti and Hans Agné. I am immensely grateful for your support, your equal measure skepticism and enthusiasm and your often challenging but always helpful advice. I am sure it cannot have been easy, disappearing off as I did to Tunisia for months on end with no plan and little in the way of research strategy. I am also indebted to the discussants of my mid-term and final seminars: Ulf Mörkenstam, Helena Hede Skagerlind, Ragnhild Nilsson, and as well as the thesis committee Kjell Engelbrekt and Ludvig Beckman. You made the path to a finished thesis endlessly less difficult. I am especially grateful to Ma- ria Jansson, your comments and guidance proved vital. Thank you to the Feminist-Politics group: Maria Wendt, Cecilia Åse, Maud Eduards, Diane Salsbury, Eleonora Stolt, Emil Edenborg and Mette Marie Stæhr Harder: for great feedback and, perhaps more importantly, an open and supporting atmosphere. Thank you, Aysem Mert for the often brief but always stimulating conversations in the corridor. Thank you, Henrik Berglund

v for letting me be a part of your great course. Many thanks to the Forum for Asian Studies for giving me a two-month scholarship to visit Taiwan. What a lovely country; it restored me to sanity at the exact right moment. These last Covid-19 infested months have reinforced the importance of colleagues and that playfulness is always needed among all the lonely and “serious” business of research. Thank you everyone at plan 5, past and present, for making Ph.D life a little less serious. Particularly Tyra Hertz, Tua Sand- man, Helena Hede Skagerlind, Karin Sundström, Jasmina Nedevaska and Livia Johannesson, for all the camaraderie and inspiration over the years. Thank you, Marcus Furendal, sharing an office with you all these years and observing you at such close quarters without finding any faults is surely a tes- tament to your saintliness. Thank you to the rest of the first-year group, a little less saintly perhaps but no less wonderful: Hedvig Ördén, Tarek Oraby, Ragnhild Nilsson, and Magnus Christiansson. Thank you Pernilla Nordahl and Anneli Lindén for making Ph.D life so much easier in the face of all the overwhelming administrative challenges. The devil is in the details: thank you Judith Crawford for your editing, and keeping the devil at bay. Outside of the department I wish to especially thank Inga Brandell, for your invaluable advice and attentive engagement with my work; Cilja Harders for your encouragement at a crucial moment; Jocelyne Dakhlia, for inviting me to present my work in Paris and for providing wise comments (and ice- cream); Don Mitchell, for a great Summer School in Oslo on public space (and Marxism); Sepideh Westerberg Nekomanesh for our many post (post) colonial excursions; Jason Pack for your feedback on the thesis, but much more than that for being the best best-man a guy could ask for. I also wish to thank the APSA MENA team, for great workshops, great people and gener- ously sponsoring many of my Tunisia trips. Every passion eventually becomes a burden, and the burden of writing a thesis is not so much that it can often be very boring, but that one becomes boring. I am all the more thankful therefore for the friends and family that have reminded me of the less dreary versions of myself. Thank you all, for not letting me sink too far into my own epistemological crises. A special thank you to Ranjdar, out of sight but not out of mind; Jaideep, for boundless flights of fantasy and representing my tribe when it mattered; Raoof, for Kashmir, Bollywood and huzn; Toni & Åsa, for awakening dreams of tomorrow; Mirja, for Hyderabad, Hampi and so much more; Karin, Carl & Johan, for keeping

vi the spirit of sunkbarer alive. Thank you, Rosa, Marcel, Connie, Moni & Ka- veh, Tim & Alice and all the other friends who have helped me in small or large ways, and to the friends lost along the way. Finally, I wish to express my love and gratitude to my family, who have had to bear the brunt of my bouts of academic ennui. I apologize for my often boorish behavior over these last few years. To my mother, for being my role- model and having the infinite patience to deal with two sons doing their PhDs. My father, for a bottomless supply of stories and drinks, and for never giving me cause to rebel. My sister, for showing that blood is thicker than water. My brother, for doing what I do, but doing it better. And above all for my wife, what could I have possible done in a previous life to deserve such a blessing? You are the bravest person I know, taking one giant leap after another into the unknown, and doing it with such grit and grace. I may be a little bit more cautious and slower but I promise to always take the leap with you.

Shughl, hurriyya, karama wataniyya

1. Introduction

Dictatorship is the opposite of discussion – Carl Schmitt

The chances are that democracy is the ideal place to find the origin of tyranny – the harshest and most complete slavery arising, I suppose, from the most extreme freedom – Plato

To be free one must have the capacity to plan and preserve in a difficult under- taking, and be accustomed to act on one’s own; to live in freedom, one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change and danger; to keep alert the whole time with a restless eye on everything around: that is the price of freedom – Tocqueville

SETTING THE STAGE Tunisia is no longer governed by an authoritarian regime, yet the past lingers in a myriad of ways that inform the experience and expectations of democratization. I became cognizant of this fact on my very first visit to Tunisia. I arrived in Tunisia in early 2015 for an exploratory field trip, still very much influenced by the prevailing narrative of Tunisia as the sole success story of the so-called Arab Spring. While there had been setbacks since the overthrow of President Ben Ali in January 2011, Tunisia had managed to hold three major free and fair elections, had seen peaceful transfers of power, and recently finished a new constitution that was widely hailed as a great accomplishment both in its content and the inclusive process that led up to it.1 In a few months the Nobel Peace Prize would be awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue

1 The first election was held in 2011 for the Constitutional Assembly, and then Parliamentary and Presidential Elections in 2014.

1 2 | Chapter One

Quartet for "its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.”2 In other words, there appeared to be much for Tunisians to be proud and even hopeful about. After spending a day in Tunis, I set out to travel to the interior and southern regions that had seen the first protests in late 2010. In Tunis, and as I travelled inwards across villages and towns, I was struck by the ubiquity of young men sitting in cafés or by the wayside in some shaded spot. My first stop was Sidi Bouzid, birthplace of the revolution. I struck up conversation with two young men, Aziz and Yousef, who were sitting drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. As it turned out, the two had been involved in the protests that toppled Ben Ali. In what would become a recurring theme, once I mentioned the revolution, I quickly got the response: “It was not a real revolution.”3 I responded, “What do you mean?” Aziz answered, “We cut off the head but more grew in its place.” Yousef filled in “The state has failed us. We risked our lives, but for what? Nothing has changed, in fact things have only gotten worse. Corruption and chaos are everywhere.” “But what about the new democratic freedoms?” I interjected. Aziz, shook his head and told me, “Those are just words. We wanted jobs and dignity. Instead, day by day we waste away here.” Noting my Syrian dialect Yousef declared: “You should understand. After all Tunisia is just like Syria.” Surprised and a little upset I protested, “Tunisia is nothing like Syria, you are safe, you don’t have to fear for your lives, you don't have to fear your own government.” He shrugged, “You will see, we are just the same.” It would not be the last time I would hear young men in the interior of Tunisia make the comparison between their situation and Syria. I found the comparisons, and the general anger and disappointment they expressed, disconcerting. I could neither dismiss them nor fit them neatly into the larger narrative of a successful transition. Out of the shattered pieces of my presump- tions, then, grew this thesis. As the only country to emerge out of the so-called Arab Spring with genu- inely representative democratic institutions, the need to understand the context in which this relative success was made possible and how it may continue

2 https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2015/press.html 3 Considerable scholarly effort has been put into answering the question of whether the events that led to the overthrow of Ben Ali should be considered a “revolution” or not (see Achcar 2013; Bayat 2017; Dabashi 2011). I use the term revolution throughout this thesis, yet I make no claim that it was a “true” revolution. In this I merely follow the many Tunisians who have told me, “It may not have been a revolution, but we call it a revolution”

Introduction | 3 and improve in its path, is of paramount importance to scholars and policy- makers alike. As Tunisian scholar Khadija Arfaoui put it, “Since the revolution, Tunisia has become a laboratory for democracy. If democracy succeeds in Tunisia, then it is bound to have a positive impact on the rest of the Arab world; if it fails, it is likely that it will succeed nowhere else” (2016:226). This success, however, is clearly ambiguous, its benefits are divided unevenly across space and experienced differently by different actors. The interior regions of Tunisia, places like Sidi Bouzid, Gafsa and Kasserine, despite their central role in the revolution, remain marginalized and have played an ambivalent part in the transition period; seeing continual protests and anger directed at the new democratic dispensation. That there should exist deep-seated frustration and anger during transitions is not in itself surprising, even in relatively successful cases. Democrati- zation scholars have argued that transitions face a host of difficulties. Thomas Carothers writes:

Citizens bring to the new democratic process very high expectations that often are quite generalized. They expect that life is going to get a lot better quickly. They expect that the government is finally going to be responsible and take care of the people, and the injustices and inequalities that were so characteristic of the dictatorship are going to be replaced by a fairer system. (2018:1)

However, few studies have attempted to explore how and why such expectations arise and what such expectations mean for the democratization process. Nor have they investigated what democratization and democracy more broadly mean as experience. The central question in the existing democratization literature tends to be framed as an investigation of the causes of democratic consolidation, or the lack thereof. Attempts to explain such success, or the lack of it, are generally from a top-down perspective: focusing on elites, political institutions, and elections. In these conceptions, society is understood as an aggregate and the nation is conceived as a single unit. The top-down focus of the bulk of the democratization scholarship has meant that studies on Tunisia have come to overemphasize the success of the transition processes, by looking primarily at consensus, compromises and bargaining among elites. In such mainstream literature, non-elites are included in the analysis only to the extent that they are protesting and visibly impacting the prospects of peaceful elite-transitions. At best, top-down approaches miss important political and social dimensions by ignoring the understanding and

4 | Chapter One experiences of local actors themselves. At worst, they come to misconstrue the transition process by blinding us to its contradictions with serious consequences for democratization. Minimally, such approaches risk reproducing the state’s own narratives, and silencing marginal voices. The driving assumption in this thesis is that the mainstream approaches to the study of democratization are inadequate in properly understanding the developing dynamics between the state and its citizens in Tunisia’s interior and beyond. This study looks beyond elites and institutions. Following Lisa Wedeen, it attempts to show “how social science scholarship can benefit theoretically and empirically from attending to democratic phenomena that exist outside of electoral and other formal organizational confines” (2009:3). It is by taking an ethnographic perspective that we can shift our focus away from dominant, often ideological, narratives of success or failure. To capture the everyday and lived experience helps us to understand the way that democracy and democratization are enmeshed with state-citizen dynamics and larger social and economic processes. Since the Tunisian revolution there has been an increased focus on the role of youth in the country. In both national discourse and in academic research youth are often presented as either revolutionaries or/and as a societal problem connected to unemployment, loitering, drugs and alcohol, as well as Jihadist recruitment. This thesis, instead, treats young men from the periphery as a category beyond revolutionary subjects and problem-makers. It approaches them as an optic with which to understand social and political change and continuity of democratic transitions. Rather than treat the habits of youth as incidental or problematic, this study views their practices as forming and in- forming important public spaces. In particular, it examines their waiting as a revealing mode of being in the world. The thesis situates young men’s public waiting in a socio-economic context in which the state is unable or unwilling to provide youths with, or create the conditions in which they can create for themselves, respectable livelihoods. This pre-existing failure fueled the revolution, but its persistence clearly reflects its limits.

RESEARCH AIM & QUESTION The overarching aim of this study is to understand the experiences of democratization, and by extension democracy. The overall research question is: how is democratization experienced?

Introduction | 5

The purpose of the question is two-fold. First, to advance new ways of studying democratization. The aim is to approach democratization and democracy beyond formal and procedural definitions. To investigate the degree to which democracy and democratization also contain dimensions of everyday life, of ways of being in the world. Based on assumptions, spelled out in greater detail below, the study posits that understanding democratization involves considering the importance of public space, as well as expectations and desires directed at the state. By investigating how democratic transitions are understood locally, or rather, how they are lived, the study seeks to understand how quotidian experiences reflect the continuity and change in the relationship between the state and its citizens. Second, the thesis seeks to “apply” this framework to the contexts of the Tunisian transition.4 More specifically, the study looks at young men in Kas- serine and Gafsa and their experiences of democratization. By examining marginalized groups and spaces, the study seeks to emphasize the importance of context and place in understanding the experience of democratization, but also to tie such contextual factors to larger dynamics of democratic change under conditions of marginality. This study is not an evaluation of Tunisian democratization, nor is it testing a hypothesis, as much as attempting to forward a new framework for capturing democratization as experiences. There are other connected research questions that this thesis raises, which will be addressed in the individual chapters. In attempting to answer the above query, the study will explore, if not fully answer, a subset of meta questions: What is the relationship between democracy and democratization? Where should experiences of democratization be studied? How can the experience of democratization be distinguished from other experiences, such as experiences of socio-economic marginality? In what ways do these experiences come to amplify each other?

A Political Ethnographic Approach to Democratization By attempting to investigate the experience of democratization, this thesis makes a number of conceptual moves and brings together a host of approaches. Theoretically, the study takes its point of departure from the work of the French political thinker Claude Lefort, and his understanding of symbolic power and the importance of public space for democracy. It also builds

4 I place the term “apply” in inverted commas, because in truth the framework is the product of the study, rather than the other way around.

6 | Chapter One on research on the state and citizenship. Empirically, experiences are approached interpretively and ethnographically, by investigating meaning-making narratives and everyday practices. According to Lefort, democracy is marked by the “empty space of power” (1988:19) that entails a breakdown of the symbolic. In a democracy, symbolic power is diffuse and uncertain. This study suggests that democratization, on the level of the symbolic, is an extreme form of democracy. Democratic transitions bring about great uncertainty concerning the foundations of society, and where power lies. This uncertainty arises out of the concrete, non-symbolic, opening of public space. Public space is understood both as the sphere of free communication and as physical spaces. They are spaces where new groups are allowed to express themselves and new narratives arise, and no one can claim sole representation of the People. The narratives that arise out of the public space are conditioned by the past political imaginaries. The political imaginaries are shared symbolic articulations of the relationship between the state and its citizens. They encompass a broad range of dynamics tied to citizens’ expectations, desires and disappointments, which the study seeks to capture. The study holds that democratization in this sense of destabilized symbolic power affects, and is in turn affected by, the political imaginaries of state- citizen dynamics. The expectations of the state are formed over decades and define what it means to be a citizen. The study posits that this undoing of the symbolic order is particularly stark, and therefore visible, among marginalized groups, and it is among such groups that the experience of democratization is suitably captured. In the case of the young men in Tunisia’s interior, the expectations of citizenship primarily concern “bread and dignity.” While ambiguous, this is taken to mean secure, state employment, and being “valued” by the state and society, as providers and as men. The previous decades of neoliberal retreat of the state has, however, led to a crisis of masculinity. More and more young men have been forced into the informal sector, or are merely waiting, and are therefore unable to marry and form families. This gap between expectations and reality fueled the revolution, but now also comes to color the democratic transition. During the democratization process, the political imaginaries come to be expressed in the new public space. This “speaking out” amplifies frustrations and uncertainties, by making them more visible, and they come to create their

Introduction | 7 own realities of the present. Together with the unmet expectation of citizenship, this has led to an epistemological crisis. This entails a crisis of interpretation, and uncertainty over authority and power, as well as of the self. The transition has given rise to fears of violence and corruption, not only from “above”, but as embedded within society. Under such conditions, a nostalgia for a strong leader that can provide “dignity” and stability becomes prevalent. The democratic transition also opens up the potential for new ways of understanding society and the self, less burdened by past myths. These are the central points of the thesis and will be developed in greater detail in the theory and empirical chapters.

PREVIOUS RESEARCH This study seeks to develop an ethnographic and interpretive framework for studying democratization. It contributes to ethnographically grounded discussions on democracy, democratization, state and citizenship, as well as to our understanding of youth, margins and public space. At the most empirical level, it will advance our knowledge of the experience of youth in the interior regions of Tunisia during democratization. In this section, I briefly place the study in relation to democratization literature and the state in the Arab World and beyond. Given the vastness of these subfields, these sections are by necessity very short overviews. The contributions to these and other fields are spelled out more clearly in individual chapters and the concluding discussion.

Democratization Studies Democracy is, in Wendy Brown’s words, a “promiscuous term” (2015:19). Despite the plethora of democratic definitions, democratization literature tends overwhelmingly to define democracy in rather narrow terms, in terms of institutional and/or procedural arrangements (Grugel & Bishop 2013; Qa- dir et al. 1993). Such definitions, often build on Joseph Schumpeter’s realist/elitist notion of democracy that sees elections as the constitutive element of democracy (1950). Thus, democratization scholar Adam Przeworski writes, “Democracy is a political regime in which rulers are selected through free and contested elections” (2004:302). Even scholars that make use of broader understandings of democracy, for example those building on Robert Dahl, tend to emphasize the central aspects of democracy as tied to the procedures of

8 | Chapter One electing political representatives (Collier & Levitsky 1997).5 Such formalist definitions of democracy, while valuable, are as Lisa Wedeen writes “incapable[…]of capturing the substantive activities that define people’s everyday political experiences” (2004:280).6 Understanding democracy in formalist terms, scholars have conceptualized democratization as involving three steps: the end of an authoritarian regime, the introduction of democracy, and the consolidation of the democracy. In so-called transition literature, the focus is heavily on the transition phases, the point in which the old order/regime breaks down and the process towards a democratic one begins. In this early phase importance is placed on formal institutions and political elites (Rustow 1970). Consolidation literature, which grew in the 1990s to become the dominant democratization approach, is a direct continuation of transition literature focusing on the later stages in the process of democratization. The consolidation phase is reached when democracy is no longer under threat and “is the only game in town” (Linz 1996). Like transitologists, consolidation scholars hold that, in the words of Larry Diamond, “elites have a profound—and I would even concede, preeminent— impact in determining whether new democracies become stable, effective and consolidated” (1999:219). Formalist definitions have meant that democratization studies often focused narrowly on the elections, voting procedures and the institutions surrounding them. At the same time, consolidation is understood to be reached when there is widespread acceptance of democracy among the general population. Consolidation scholars Juan Linz & Alfred Stepan write that a democracy is consolidated when the majority of the population, “holds the belief that democratic procedures and institutions are the most appropriate way to govern collective life” (1996:16). This has raised difficult theoretical and methodological issues regarding how to understand and measure support for democratization among the wider population, as well as debates around what aspects leads to increased democratic legitimacy. Standard works have often emphasized the importance of civil society as a key factor, as well as the effectiveness and responsiveness of the state (Burnell et al. 2014).

5 David Nuget calls these definitions “normative democracy” (2008) to signal their ideological dominance. 6 I am aware of the considerable differences between procedural, institutional, minimalist etc., understandings of democracy (see for example Saffon & Urubati 2013). By calling them formalist I merely signal their distinction from substantive definitions that puts greater emphasis on outcomes, and vernacular definitions, as well as the Lefortian view on democracy that this thesis makes use of.

Introduction | 9

Critics of mainstream approaches have claimed that issues of outcomes cannot be divorced from our understanding of democracy. They argue that without a more substantive definition of democracy beyond contested elections, citizen’s influence and wider forms of political participation are not captured, and many forms of exclusions are ignored (Grugel & Bishop 2014:36; Young 2000:173). As scholars have shown, “Many countries have adopted the formal institutions of democracy without having become more democratic in substance” (Schaffer 1997:40). Without attempting to directly answer what the “substance” of democracy would mean; this study holds that the experience of democratization needs to be contextualized, by incorporating local-historical state-citizen and socio-economic factors. The connection between economic development and democracy is an old one and remains a much-studied phenomenon in the literature.7 Studies have shown correlations between development and democracy.8 The general consensus is that while authoritarian countries with higher GDP are not necessarily more likely to become democratic, they are more likely to be able to sustain and complete a transitional process, once begun.9 Studies have also suggested that economic difficulties are a leading cause of failed transitions. Milan Svolik writes that:

Economic recessions are one of the most robust predictors of the breakdown of democracy. Between 1848 and 2008, a democracy was more than twice as likely to revert to dictatorship during an economic decline than during a period of economic growth. This association is especially relevant for young and poor democracies: when democracies break down, nine in ten do so before they are 20 years old or when their annual GDP per capita is less than $4,900. (2013:685)

Thus, while questions of economic development are understood to be conceptually distinct from democracy, there is a general assumption that it is important in order to consolidate and maintain democracy.

7 The debate finds its modern origins as an academic subfield in Lipset’s influential article ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy’ (1959). Lispet argued that modernization and industrialization have a number of consequences necessary for democracy: wealth, a middle class, education, urbanization, and mass media, concluding that “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy” (Lipset 1959:75). 8 See for example Przeworski (2000) 9 There is a wider discussion about necessary conditions of democracy, beyond economic factors, such as political culture (Almond & Verba 1963) and political institutions (Lijphardt 1968). Nonetheless, the economic aspects remain the dominant ones studied within this “pre- conditions approach” to democratization.

10 | Chapter One

However, studies that have looked at contemporary forms of “neoliberalism” has led to arguments that current notions of economic development undermine, rather than strengthen, democracy by increasing precarity, corruption, inequality and vulnerability among many groups (Brown 2005, Akçali 2016).10 This study attempts to render what is understood as a larger neoliberal project into concrete experiences, and to tie it to marginal young men and their concordant crises of masculinity. It becomes particularly important to attempt to distinguish, analytically if not empirically, between experiences of uncertainty associated with neoliberalism and those associated with democratization and democracy. Rather than claim that there is any direct or simple connection between economic development and democracy, this study looks at the experience of crisis often tied to neoliberalism and its interaction with the trials of democratization. It is not enough to make general claims that economic decline or neoliberalism undermines democratization, but we need to look at how socio-economic aspects affect specific groups in specific ways and how they come to interact with the democratization process. Despite criticism that definitions of democracy in the democratization literature are often excessively Western-centric, there have been few studies that investigate what democracy means locally in non-Western contexts. The ethnographic studies that have done so are often interested in determining varieties of meaning of the term democracy in different context. They postulate that “democracy might mean different things in different languages and to different peoples” (Khanani 2014:5).11 Political scientist Frederic Schaffer, for example, has investigated local meanings of democracy in Senegal and Philip- pines (2000, 2006). He is skeptical about the degree to which the “Western” term democracy captures the lived experience in other contexts, and prefers instead to use transliterations of local terms for democracy in his studies, to signal the divergence of meanings associated with it.12 While largely sympa- thetic to such attempts to vernacularize democracy (Michelutti 2007), and their emphasis on the importance of understanding democracy as locally em-

10 The term neoliberalism is discussed in greater detail in chapter 2. 11 These studies attempt to, in Michelutti’s words, vernacularize democracy, understood as “the process through which ideas and practices of democracy become embedded in particular cultural and social practices and in turn become entrenched in the consciousness of ordinary people” (2007:654). 12 The fact that the terms ‘demokratiya’ and ‘demokrasi’ that Schaffer uses, are Western loan- words may undermine this project somewhat. As Austin said “a word never—well, hardly ever—shakes off its etymology” (1961:149).

Introduction | 11 bedded, this thesis is less interested in tracing the differences and particularities of my interlocutors’ understandings of democracy, and more in situating these local understandings within larger contexts of socio-economic crisis and democratic transformations. The study seeks to find a balance between taking context and local experiences seriously, and engaging in theoretical discussions, inspired by Lefort, on democracy. Following what Samuel Huntington called the “third wave of democratization” (1991) a host of countries came to maintain the formal trappings of democracy and elections while being severely lacking in other dimensions. Scholars began to look both beyond elections, formal rules and political elites. Instead effort has been put into categorizing and explaining the varieties of deficient democracies in, “the ‘grey zone’ between open autocracy and liberal democracy” (Croissant & Merkel 2004:3), without assuming that this is a temporary stage. As Carnegie writes, “As it stands today, democratization is more a case of ambiguous transformation than predictable outcome” (2010:3). These approaches are sometimes referred to as “hybrid-regime studies” and aim to understand the different logics that may be at work in different democratizing processes without assuming that they are moving towards “consolidation” i.e.; a Western liberal democratic model.13 This study draws on the insights from this literature, particularly their emphasis on continuities between dictatorships and democratization, and the ways that democratization can come to amplify some of the worse aspects of state processes.14 Fol- lowing, hybrid-regime studies, this thesis is critical of the teleological elements of much of mainstream democratization literature.15 Yet, building on Claude Lefort’s understanding of democracy, this study ultimately stresses the discontinuity, or rupture, between dictatorship and democracy, even as both are tied together in a near dialectic fashion.16 Both consolidation and hybrid regime studies have highlighted how fears of increased corruption often follow in the wake of transitions. This is often

13 Collier & Levitsky refers to these approaches, somewhat pejoratively, as “democracy with adjectives” (1997). 14 Some hybrid studies, particularly on Latin America, have looked at the more ambiguous effects of democratization. Pearce, for example, looks at how democracy in Latin America has led to an increase in violence, which she terms “perverse democratization” (2010). 15 The literature on hybrid regimes has received criticism concerning conceptual confusion and stretching in the face of “an abundance of diminished subtypes of democracy and authoritarianism, a lack of common ground in terms of definitions and empirical measurement, and the absence of an overarching framework that clarifies the relationship between the various (sub)types” (Bogaards 2009:40). 16 Throughout this thesis I use the terms dictatorship and authoritarian regime or authoritarianism as synonyms.

12 | Chapter One put in the context of increased opportunities for patronage, as well as popular demands for transparency (Carothers 2018; Johnston 2014; Morris 2009). By contrast, from a Lefort-inspired perspective, narratives on corruption form part of the opening of public space and reflect the symbolic uncertainty of democracy. This study also understands narratives on corruption as expressions of wider political imaginaries. Democracy grows out of the strains of authoritarian myths of certainty and progress, and yet its crisis of uncertainty creates its own movement towards authoritarianism.

A Lefortian Move While not dismissing the importance of formal and procedural aspects of democracy, and political institutions and elites for the maintenance of democracy, this study suggests that democracy and democratization need to be understood in broader terms. Democracy is constituted by the emergence of a public space and its concordant shift in symbolic power. Following Claude Lefort, and as I lay out in greater detail in the next chapter, this study argues that in order to understand what democracy and democratization means, one must look at the political imaginaries, termed by Lefort as the “overall schema” in which society becomes intelligible to itself. This pre-theoretical unity of a regime is exactly what modern political scientists – in their positivist framework and scientific division of labor—miss, according Lefort. In their eager- ness to separate a sphere of politics, distinct from other aspects of the symbolic order, they lose sight of the essential coherence of society, and the fact that the political is already inherent in the social, in the way that society understands itself (Lefort 1988:219-223).17 Despite Lefort’s influence as a thinker of democracy, there has been little effort to translate his ideas into empirical research, particularly when looking at democratic transitions.18 One of the goals of this study is to render some of his assumptions into an ethnographic framework for studying democratization. Part of my task is to attempt to recover what Lefort refers to as the

17 Or as democratization scholar Harald Wydra writes, “The social foundations of politics are crucial because it is the meaning of our experience, and not the ontological structure of the objects such as institutions, states, or systems, that constitutes reality” (2007:6). 18 Lefort has, of course, been highly influential in theoretical discussions on democracy. In contemporary theory via his student Rosanvallon, as well as through thinkers such as Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek. A partial exception to the lack of empirical research is Tomas Blom Han- sen’s study of democracy in India through a Lefort-inspired approach (1999). Hansen’s study does not foreground the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, however.

Introduction | 13

“enigma of democracy” (1988:209).19 Not to resolve it, but merely to render it stranger, less obvious, and more contradictory. By emphasizing the disruptive character of democracy, we can better understand the tensions and dangers of democratization.

The State and its Political Imaginaries Democratization entails fundamental changes to the state and its institutions. Curiously, however, the relationship between the state and democratization has been rather undertheorized, particularly outside of formal institutions (Grugel & Bishop 2014:35).20 Understanding democratization as experience, this study argues, means understanding it in relation to larger political imaginaries and thus capturing citizens’ expectations of the state. There is a long, if rather marginal, tradition of studying the state ethnographically and interpretively; what Christopher Krupa & David Nugent refer to as “non-realist approaches to the state” (2015). Mainstream/realist approaches, they argue, treat the state as a material object and as an autonomous actor. By contrast, non-realist approaches are interpretive and ethnographically informed and are more interested in tracing how “the state” becomes understood as this autonomous and material entity. As Bourdieu writes, “in fact, most of the writings devoted to the state ‘partake of the construction of the state,’ i.e. of its very existence” (1994:3).21 Scholars working from a non- realist paradigm attempt to avoid this reproduction of the state. Philip Abrams, in a seminal article (1988), begins by asking, “what is the state?” Abrams suggests that the understanding of the state as a coherent system, as a material entity, is part of the very the function of state power. Instead, he suggests that, “we should abandon the state as a material object of study whether concrete or abstract while continuing to take the idea of the state extremely seriously” (1988:75). This line of investigating began a focus on understanding the state in its meaning-making dimension, and was part of a larger “cultural” turn in social sciences (Steinmetz 1999).

19 As I understand it, by talking of the enigma of democracy, Lefort is signaling that in the democratic condition we can never quite grasp our own essence. But an enigma, appears for Lefort, also as an invitation towards interpretation. Enigmas attract us, make us go further and deeper. See, for example, the introduction to his Machiavelli in the Making (2012) 20 As Qadir et al., write “Democratisation represents the crisis of the state” (1993:417). 21 Bourdieu goes further and says, “Social science, while independent of economic interests are rarely independent of the state” (1994:3). This attack on the concept of the state has parallels with Marx’s critique of the Hegelian notion of the state as merely reproducing the state’s own narrative of itself, and thus hiding power relations.

14 | Chapter One

Non-realist approaches regard states as “not simply functional bureaucratic apparatuses, but powerful sites of symbolic and cultural production that are themselves always culturally represented and understood in particular ways” (Ferguson & Gupta 2002:982). In many ways, these approaches are about blurring the line between ways of understanding the state as distinct from the nation. Part of the agenda of non-realist approaches has been to demystify the state, by unearthing assumptions that had been taken for granted. This means that one does not:

Presume that the state has an objective existence, and then seek to trace "its" in- trusions and dissipations into social fields beyond the state. Instead, they take as a central problem to be solved the very production of realness and the aura of ob- jectivity that may surround the state. (Krupa & Nugent 2015:10)

Part of the project also entails taking the mystifications of the state seriously. The object of a non-realist state analysis is to “move beyond the state’s own prose, categories, and perspective and study how the state appears in everyday and localized forms” (Hansen & Stepputat 2001:5). Seeing the state as an emerging category to be explained is central in order to both avoid normaliz- ing and reproducing the state’s own categories, and instead make them more visible. Crucially, understanding what the term the state means in a particular context is part of the aim of the investigation itself.22 By studying the meaning- making aspects of the state, the focus shifts towards more quotidian dimensions of statehood, which include a broad range of expectations and desires towards the state and citizenships beyond legal rights and formal institutions. If realist approaches often treat the state as an exogenous factor, independent of society, a fundamental distinction between state and society is misleading for many non-realist approaches. They seek to untangle “the illusion that the state is an institutional structure that is independent of economy and society” (Krupa & Nugent 2015:13).23 Timothy Mitchell terms this illusion state effect; “the ways that make the state appear as an inert ‘structure’ that somehow stands apart from individuals, precedes them, and contains and

22 As French ethnographer Didier Fassin writes, “our theory of the state is therefore constructed empirically. We do not presume that it is a unified entity, but explore the diversity of its ra- tionalities[…]By inverting traditional perspectives, whether they be normative or deductive, ethnography thus offers a unique way of approaching the state” (2015:ix). 23 This assumption of state-society distinction, many argue, is particularly problematic when looking at non-Western states, where the line between the state and society is a “blurred boundary” (Gupta 1995), especially at a local level where formal and informal dynamics are often indistinguishable in practice.

Introduction | 15 gives a framework to their lives” (Mitchell 1999:89). Hansen & Stepputat refer to this as “the language of stateness” (2001). In his influential State-in-Society approach (2001), sociologist Migdal attempts to build an approach that, while it puts the state in focus, does not privilege the state as the sole source of authority and change. As Migdal writes, the assumption that “the state is the embodiment of the nation or the people, and its rules – The Law –hold a special sanctity” (2001:13), is itself part of state power or its state effect. Migdal suggests that this image of unity of the state is often undermined by its own practices. Non-realist approaches like Migdal’s are particularly conducive to an ethnographically driven study of the state. It is in the local and quotidian that the fissures between the image and practices become particularly visible and acute. This thesis does not reject “realist” assumptions of the state, but in order to understand citizens and their expectations, it takes its point of departure from the non-realist views of the state as a partly symbolic entity and engages with this scholarship throughout the study. Yet it takes the image or representation of the state to be an open question and investigates the multiplicity of images as well as practices. It understands political imaginaries as being informed by expectations and desires of citizens towards the state. Furthermore, while non-realist scholars emphasize “the view from below” they tend to understand state effects as to some extent being imposed from “above.” This thesis has been more open with regard to how power projects out, often haphaz- ardly, from the center to the periphery, and various ways in which marginalized groups construct their relationship, their citizenship, to the state. It is interested in how the view of the state, its political imaginaries, is generated “from below” and how marginal actors may use the “language of stateness” to push against the state as well as constitute themselves as citizens. Critically, non-realist studies have often ignored issues of democracy, instead emphasizing the continuities of state-power across cases and time. One reason for this may be the above-mentioned focus on states as a mechanism of control, discipline and violence; where differences between democratic and undemocratic forms of government become blurred.24 By contrast, this thesis, by drawing on Lefort, and looking at ways in which citizenship is enacted

24 Another reason is likely to be found in the fact that these two academic subfields, democratization studies and political ethnography, rarely speak to one another.

16 | Chapter One

“from below”, emphasizes the differences as well as the and continuities between authoritarian and democratic states, both as forms of political imaginaries and as experiences.25

The State of the State in the Arab World In order to understand the historic state-citizen dynamics that have been cultivated under the authoritarian regimes of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, this study seeks to build on previous literature, particularly of the non-realist variety, on the Arab states in general and the Tunisian state in particular. There has been a long-standing issue that the study of the state in the Arab region has been isolated from the mainstream literature of comparative politics.26 Excepting a short-lived trend of democratization studies in the 1990s, this state of affairs remained unchanged until the advent of the Arab Spring when mainstream political science once again turned its gaze on the Arab World. In the study of the Arab state, what may be broadly referred to as neo- Weberian and neo-Marxist approaches of various kinds have been the historically dominant paradigms, both of which could, with some qualifications, be termed realist in the above-mentioned sense.27 While diverging in a host of ways such works tend to emphasize the degree to which social forces, including class, are products of the state itself. These studies often focus on the “exceptionalism” of Arab states and investigate their seeming immunity towards the general global trend of democratization. Particularly since the 1970s, finding little evidence of democratic impulses in the Middle East, scholars increasingly sought to explain the persistence of authoritarianism.28 ⁠ The dominant

25 Further discussion on citizenship is found in the theory section. 26 Michael Hudson writes that, “some Middle East political scientists feel ghettoized--their region and their work are ignored” (2001:801). The reason for this is, arguably, that the emphasis has been on the particularities of state formation in the Arab World, rather than a wholesale appropriation of “mainstream” (i.e Western) models of the state. Curiously, it seems that just at the time when the state was “brought back” into mainstream political science in the late 1980s there was a diminishing focus on Arab states and state formation in MENA studies. 27 Neo-Weberian refers to an emphasis on institutional/historic and coercive aspects of state power as well as looking at the Arab state as a development of Weber’s sultanism. Neo-Marxist refers to an emphasis on political economy dimensions of the state and class dynamics, or a lack thereof. 28 Another popular macro-approach that brings in a socio-economic perspective while combining elements of both authoritarian resilience and clientelism has been the so-called rentier state theory (Karl 1997). This theory holds that Arab states’ reliance on above all oil production, but other kinds of ‘rents’ as well (external funding in the case of Egypt and Syria), allowed for

Introduction | 17 approaches to studying state-society dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have been through a top-down authoritarian regime model, examining how elites adapt and “update” authoritarian policies (Hey- demann 2007).29⁠ In the context of Tunisia, Eva Bellin (2002) has examined how the state was able to subsume and dominate both labor and capital. Sim- ilarly, Emma Murphy (1999) has shown how the state co-opted all social forces under its corporatist regime. Another strand of Weber-inspired scholarship has emphasized political culture and has studied Arab states as suffused with clientelist network. In this neo-patrimonial understanding of Arab states, informal rules and personal connections dominate states that have become little more than extensions of personal power (Salamé 1994; Sharabi 1988). Nazih Ayub’s book Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East, from 1995, remains an influential work in the field. Somewhat paradoxically Ayubi refers to Arab states, like Tunisia, as “fierce but weak states” (1995:3).30 Ayubi shares many of the Weberian and neo-Marxist assumptions of a state-centered approach to Arab states, but argues that behind its apparent strength the Arab state is fragile. Arab states, he argues, are defined by their coercive dimensions; overdeveloped security and military apparatuses but an underdeveloped infrastructural capacity to impose objectives through non-coercive means. Inspired by Gramsci, Ayubi argues that Arab states have been unable to create a hegemonic project of legitimacy. Ayubi suggests that while Arab governments have the violent means to remain in power, they have little power to influence real change, whether of social, economic or political character. Citizenship studies have been relatively rare in the MENA region outside of studies focusing on minorities, Palestine, or gender.31 Following the Arab Spring, the burgeoning field of citizenship studies has attempted to put more emphasis on agency, resistance and bottom up action as well as on groups that are usually silenced or marginalized (Meijer & Butenschøn 2017). Some, like Meijer (2014), do this by bringing citizenship studies together with social distributive policies without taxation and thus representation. The fact that many Middle East- ern countries become more stable and authoritarian after the mid-1970s as oil prices rose appeared to confirm this theory 29 Other popular explanations include: the lack of civil society, the strength of its secret police, American foreign policy and its support for authoritarian regimes in the region. 30 I say paradoxically because Ayubi himself lays particular emphasis on the autonomous and unopposed nature of the Arab state and their leaders to impose themselves on society, in the absence of strong social classes. 31 Noted citizenship scholar Bryan Turner did write on citizenship in the Muslim world (2000). See also Inga Brandell (1997) for an early study of North Africa and citizenship.

18 | Chapter One movement theory; others, like Butenschøn (2000) and Hinnebusch & Rifai (2017), by putting it in a context of state-formation; scholars like Isin (2017) do it by broadening what can be considered acts of citizenship. Citizenship scholars argue that they avoid some of the pitfalls of democratization and transition studies on the MENA region by looking beyond formal institutions, while still contributing to our understanding of democracy (Mei- jer & Butenschøn 2017:17). Nonetheless, despite such claims, citizenship approaches tend to follow more traditional top-down models, using established categories such as authoritarian bargaining and rentier state, albeit through a slightly different lens. It is also noteworthy that the term social contract is so often used in this scholarship of the Arab World together with notions of “citizenship from above” to connote a contract imposed in top-down fashion by a paternalistic state. By contrast, Hisham Sharabi (1988) in his well-known Neo-Patriarchy is skeptical that a narrative of rights and citizenship is relevant in the context of Arab authoritarian states:

Clearly, in the context of patronage based on impotence and submission, the concept of social contract is inconceivable. Society in actuality is only subject to the will of the rich and powerful, a will delimited only by material capacity and institutionalized ethical injunction. (1988:47)

Like Sharabi, this study questions the understanding of state-citizen dynamics in authoritarian contexts in terms of social contracts. Yet, neither does it consider such dynamics as purely produced from the top. Rather, this study understands it as a mutually constituting process, between state and citizen, between the center and periphery. This thesis is interested in investigating how this back and forth movement transforms during democratic transitions. It focuses particularly, on the experiences of state and construction of citizenship. It is the everyday understanding and experiences of state and citizenship from the perspective of margins that are the focus of the analysis rather than a study of the state itself. A number of political scientists have investigated Arab states from a non- realist perspective. While these kinds of approaches remain in a minority, they have significantly broadened our understanding of the complex state-citizen dynamics in the Arab World. Timothy Mitchell’s book Colonizing Egypt (1991) builds on Abram’s call to deconstruct the state. Lisa Wedeen has conducted an ethnographical study of state formation in both Syria (2006) and Yemen (2009). Bouziane, Harders & Hoffmann in their book Local Politics and

Introduction | 19

Contemporary Transformations in the Arab World: Governance Beyond the Cen- tre (2013) set out to articulate a theoretical and methodological framework for studying the state in what they term places “beyond the center” through a “state analysis from below.” They write, “Rather than focusing on formal institutions and organizations, national arenas, and political elites, this approach looks at dynamic and contradictory state–society relations” (2013:149). Sim- ilarly, Asef Bayat in his influential work Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (2010) has examined everyday forms of resistance in the Middle East; in his terms “social non-movements.” It should be said that realist and non-realist approaches are not necessarily competing perspectives, and that in practice the distinction is rarely clear- cut.32 Both realist and non-realist approaches have argued that Arab states have in the last few decades moved from an authoritarian corporatist model, where state-society dynamics were defined by acquiescence in exchange for basic social provisions, to a neoliberal one, where the state has withdrawn from many social services, but has remained authoritarian (Bush & Ayeb 2012; Guazzone 2009; King 2009; Murphy 1999). This thesis takes as its starting point previous research on the state in the Arab world, both realist and non-realist and follows an understanding of state- citizen dynamics that is grounded in a shift from a corporatist authoritarian model to a neo-liberal, authoritarian one. While building on Ayubi’s assumption of the Tunisian state as “fierce but weak”, I nonetheless argue that despite its ideological weakness, the Tunisian state remains central in activating desires and broader political imaginaries and important in understanding the democratization process. In the context of Tunisia, important non-realist works include Beatrice Hibou’s magisterial The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (2008), where she brings together a Weberian and Foucauldian approach to the Tunisian state. Hibou highlights the repressive dimensions of the Tunisian state, while also emphasizing the aspect of inclusion, as the state provides security, the means for consumption and a modern life-style. Hamza Meddeb in his thesis Run or Die: Race to el khobza and Everyday Domination in Ben Ali’s Tunisia (2012)33 in many ways highlights the other side of this “inclusion”; those in the margins of the state. Both these works were written

32 Ismail (2006), for example, explores the shift in state-society dynamics from corporatists to neoliberal, through encounters with the everyday state in Bulaq al-Dakrur, a poor neighbourod of Cairo, making use of an ethnographic approach and spatial view inspired by De Certeau. 33 Original French title: Courir ou mourir: Course à el khobza et domination au quotidien dans la Tunisie de Ben Ali.

20 | Chapter One at the height of Ben Ali’s neoliberal authoritarianism, and both works assume that, “the analysis of daily economic practices makes it possible to understand the concrete exercise of power and the relations of domination” (Meddeb 2012:14). In many respects, I take their works as my point of departure. By studying everyday forms of practices and narratives, I investigate the way that forms of dependence linger and are transformed during transitions. Finally, this study seeks to build on, and contribute to, the growing literature on young men in Tunisia and their relationship to the state; in particular, works that explore the connection between public space and democratization. Rodney Collins (2009) in his dissertation From Coffee to Manhood, takes a historical and ethnographic approach to the connection between cafés and masculinity in Ben Ali’s Tunisia. He argues that cafés are important spaces of social interactions for young men but limited in their political potential. Fol- lowing the revolution, there has been an increased interest in public spaces as arenas of politics. Scholars like Ola Lamloum (2016) and Stefano Meroni (2015) have studied how state neglect towards precarious young men has led to public spaces becoming places for religious radicalization. Many studies have also showed that widespread frustration towards the transition among Tunisian young men has also led to increased protests and creative new forms of public resistance (Carothers 2018; Feltrin 2018; Santini 2018) By studying young men and cafés in the light of political imaginaries, I argue that certain gendered aspects of how the state and citizenship are articulated become particularly clear. Here young men and their waiting are understood as the central manifestation of an inability to realize established social norms and expectations, including masculinity, with wide repercussions for social and political life.

STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS Chapter two details the framework for studying the experience of democratization. It lays out the basic theoretical assumptions of the thesis, tied to symbolic power and the relationship between democracy and authoritarianism. It articulates the central dimension of the political imaginaries as state-citizen dynamics, accessed via public space. It further develops its assumptions on the importance of place, and where experiences of democratization are studied, by expounding on young men and their neoliberal crisis of masculinity, waiting and marginality as optics.

Introduction | 21

Chapter three discusses methodological questions related to the research, particularly what an interpretive ethnographic approach entails, as well as issues of case selection, interpretation of data and issues of generalizability. It also raises questions relating to reflexivity and the ethics, or lack thereof, of fieldwork. Chapter four functions as a background chapter and investigates state-citizen dynamics in Tunisia during the years of authoritarian rule. It also gives a brief discussion on the developments in the country following the revolution; where youth in the margins have continued to experience various forms of exclusions. The empirical chapters are broadly organized into two parts. The first three chapters examine public space in its physical dimensions and individuals; further, political imaginaries through various dimensions of waiting and their implications are investigated. The last three chapters capture experiences of democratization through narratives expressed in these public spaces. Chapter five and six investigate the connection between place and democratization, by considering the role of cafés as important public spaces in post- revolutionary Tunisia and emphasizing waiting as a form of practice tied to expectations and desires of state and citizenship. Chapter five analyzes popular, male-only cafés, and how waiting is an expression of masculinity in crisis and is simultaneously a challenge to the state and the democratic transition, as well as a reinforcement of gendered, male-centric, notions of citizenship. The ubiquitous presence of young working age men in cafés, it is argued, is a visible reminder of the failure of the democratization process and state-citizen dynamics more broadly. Chapter six analyzes gender-mixed counter-public cafés, as places of both inclusion and exclusion. It views these cafés as contesting and free spaces that seek to instantiate new forms of sociality and politics, even as they are reinforcing older dynamics. Chapter seven takes a biographical approach to the experience of democratization, by following the lives of five young men, and seeks to capture the everyday life of youth in the margins. This brings out some of the tensions of the concept of waiting, as both passive and active, and the “tragedy” of neoliberalism. Chapter eight captures the young men’s experience of democratization by looking at narratives about the transition and the young men’s multiple expectations and understandings of democracy. It focuses on their experiences of chaos and uncertainty as democratization opens up for old and new social

22 | Chapter One narratives. It is argued that together with socio-economic precarity, the opening of public transcripts has led to an experience of epistemological crisis. Chapter nine and ten examine the connection between narratives, political imaginaries and the experience of democratization. Chapter nine analyzes narratives of corruption and the way in which they reflect expectations and disappointments. It develops an account of state corruption as a key dimension in the everyday construction of the state and citizenship in the margins. Chapter ten reflects upon other narratives tied to nation-state myths, including khubzist and schizophrenia, as well as investigating the way the state is articulated in masculine and paternalistic terms. By looking at everyday experiences of the state through various forms of cultural intimacies, both chapters argue that one aspect of the Tunisian democratic transition and the opening of the public sphere has been a widespread deconstruction of the state. Another aspect is the increased opportunity for viewing the failures of society and of the self. Both dimensions are tied up with the waiting of the young men, waiting for the state and the promise they understand as inherent in democracy. The final chapter seeks to summarize the main themes and findings of the study, as well as its contributions and implications.

2. Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments

The road is long With many a winding turn That leads us to who knows where – The Hollies

There are no maps for these territories – William Gibson

INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses the overall theoretical framework and central categories for studying the experience of democratization. I believe research that attempts to capture experiences requires the rejection of presumptive theorizing, and necessitates selecting a variety of complementary approaches. What unites the approaches is an emphasis on interpretation, meaning and everyday experiences as well as attempts to grapple with questions of symbolic power, or political imaginaries, and the intricate ways they are negotiated. The study is informed by a number of different academic fields: the political philosophy of Claude Lefort, non-realist studies of the state, citizenship studies, public space and public sphere literatures. While the overall framework is laid out below, each empirical chapter in this thesis takes a different focus and speaks to different scholarly subfields, sometimes simultaneously. This avoids academic compartmentalization but at the cost of focus. For reasons of space, I cannot discuss every theoretical concept that has inspired the research here in the theory chapter. Rather, peripheral concepts that are used to organize individual chapters are not discussed here, but in the chapters in question. This chapter lays out the main assumptions and analytical tools of the study, attempting to show why they

23 24 | Chapter Two are important and how they connect to each other. An ethnographic approach works abductively, meaning it works towards and through theories and definitions rather than from them. The central concepts of the thesis have arisen out of the fieldwork and in conversation with academic scholarship. Presented in the opposite order to how the research was conducted, the thesis proceeds backwards, in a way; by starting with theoretical constructions, themselves conclusions of sorts, and then unveiling how they came into existence.

THEORETICAL ENTRY-POINTS The theoretical assumptions of this thesis are that power is, partly, symbolic, and that democratization entails a destabilization of symbolic power that comes into effect through, and is affected by, the relationship between state and citizens. This chapter attempts to develop these assumptions into an analytical framework for studying the experience of democratization. The first section lays out the general implications for studying democratization, and the second discusses the central categories for doing so.

Symbolic Power and Political Imaginaries Rather than starting with definitions of democracy and democratization, the study starts on the level of lived experience. Paradoxically perhaps, in order to do so it draws inspiration from political philosopher Claude Lefort. There are a number of reasons I believe Lefort is particularly suitable for this endeavor. Lefort, in his interpretive work on democracy, is sensitive to the importance of the symbolic and imagination as a way of understanding political phenomena. Furthermore, while ambiguous, Lefort stressed the importance of experience.34 While his work has focused on the shifts between pre-modern regimes, democracy and totalitarianism, it is, I believe, useful in understanding democratic transitions.35

34 Lefort was himself very engaged with works of political anthropology, he even used the term to describe much of his own work (see Moyn 2013:55). He was also inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville’s investigation of democracy as a both philosophical and deeply psychological phenomena. This is perhaps why Lefort’s work never spirals into abstractions but remains grounded in what his mentor, phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty refers to as “the flesh of the world.” 35 There are reasons to be slightly cautious in translating his work into an ethnographic account of the Tunisian transition; Lefort traces a specific historical and Western experience, where

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 25

Because Lefort’s thinking has not previously been used in any systematic way to understand democratization and its dangers empirically, the sections below are rather long. I have attempted to sift out the central assumptions of his thinking in order to turn them into guiding signposts to approach democratization as experience.

Power Power, Lefort maintains, is partly symbolic. What Lefort means by the “symbolic” is not always clear. 36 The symbolic includes the constitutional myths that give “unity to the social division; it is the internal articulation of society” (Flynn 2005:112). Without this “internal articulation of society”, which is part of a relation to the transcendental, the profane and empirical world cannot be understood.37 This internal order, according to Lefort, always points towards something else outside it, without which it cannot understand itself. The symbolic, for Lefort, is not mere representation of reality nor is it opposed to reality but is that which gives reality its coherence. A representation or a myth is not symbolic unless it does more than represent, unless it gives shape to society and state. For Lefort, the symbolic is above all effective; if it is no longer effective, it is no longer symbolic. Significantly, this study argues that one central arena, which the symbolic comes to be articulated through, and is constituted of, is the expectations and desires of citizens towards the state and society more broadly.38 This is what,

both the experience of the French revolution and the totalitarian movement are central. The degree to which this framework can be used for a very different context and time remains open to question. To be clear: this thesis is not a work of political philosophy in any Lefortian sense. I draw inspiration from Lefort’s work in a similar way that he himself uses the works of the classics, so that it “opens its reader to a road toward that which it thinks” (1972:28). 36 The symbolic is a central, if ambiguous, term for Lefort, and key in understanding his thinking. He writes, “When we speak of symbolic organization, symbolic constitution, we seek to disclose beyond practices, beyond relations, beyond institutions which arise from factual givens, either natural or historical, an ensemble of articulations which are not deducible from nature or history, but which order the apprehension of that which presents itself as real” (2005:24) This symbolic is not that which obfuscates the real, but makes the real possible to imagine. 37 Leforts understanding of the transcendental appears to have similarities to Lacan’s lack: as that which cannot be symbolized, that which alludes representation, but which nonetheless comes, in part, to constitute the subject. 38 Lefort rarely discusses the state. His uses the term “regime”, which combines Aristotelian and phenomenological assumptions. Lefort writes that “what distinguishes one society from another is its regime or, to be more accurate and to avoid an over-worked term – its shaping [mise en forme] of human coexistence has, in one form or another, always been present, and it lies, so to speak behind the theoretical constructs and behind advances in philosophical thought which are tested against the transformation of the world” (1988:217, italics on original). I understand

26 | Chapter Two following Hibou, I term political imaginaries. Political imaginaries are not necessarily an exact equivalent of Lefort’s symbolic, but captures central aspects of it, I believe. Political imaginaries are expressions, in a sense of, “the rules of the game,” concerning not only what is thinkable but also doable, and what ought to be done.39 This is what Lonsdale defines as “political language”:

By that I mean a commonly understood set of symbols which sum up, by allegory, myth and metaphor, the core values which ought to (but seldom do) govern the always disputable relationships between individuals and any society in their pro- vision for the future, which is implicit in the way they reproduce the present out of the past. A political language unites people over what to argue about. (Lonsdale 1989:127-8) 40

This should not be understood as analogous to ideology or hegemony, for it cannot be neatly reduced to a tool for persuasion by one group or class.41 Furthermore, while states make use of political imaginaries for their mes- saging, they are shared and contested by citizens and they do not reside in one place, group or individual. That they are shared does not mean that they are free floating, removed from economic or political considerations. Historic and contemporary politico-economic dynamics, as well as where and what groups one looks at, matter in order to grasp the political imaginaries. Certainly, power is not only symbolic, but material as well; where economic marginalization and a lack of social mobility constitute fundamental facts about everyday life for many young people in Tunisia. Yet, the symbolic and material are always intertwined in complex and nonlinear ways. Material deprivation cannot be divorced from expectations and desires, from the promise of a good life.

his notion of regime to roughly correspond to political imaginaries. By looking at these via expectations and desires of citizens towards the state, I am not claiming to uncover the full scale of the pre-theoretical symbolic order that organizes political thinking as such, but only certain central dimensions. Dimensions that come to form part of the experience of democratization. 39 While political imaginaries are certainly connected to what is usually discussed as legitimacy, political imaginaries are, I believe, also less tied down by the inherently normative connotations of the term legitimacy. 40 I prefer the term political imaginaries to political language because I believe these symbolic aspects are not only expressed in language but also in practices, particularly of waiting. 41 This will be particularly crucial in a context like Tunisia where class is relatively underdeveloped, as I discuss in chapter four.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 27

Interpreting Imaginaries My approach is interpretive in that I seek to understand the meanings that participants give to their experiences. It is driven by the understanding that, as Wedeen writes, “Politics is not merely about material interests but also about contests over the symbolic world, over the management and appropriation of meanings” (1999:30).42 This study also holds that since political imaginaries are not only found at the top but are “shared and contested”, an ethnographic approach is particularly appropriate in order to seek to trace these contestations. What an ethnographic approach allows is to capture forms of political language used in the everyday, by marginal groups that may be otherwise silenced.43 It also enables expanding the boundaries of what is considered political in relation to the state and citizenship. As Das & Poole write:

[E]thnography is a mode of knowing that privileges experience— often going into realms of the social that are not easily discernible within the more formal protocols used by many other disciplines. As such, ethnography offers a unique perspective on the sorts of practices that seem to undo the state at its territorial and conceptual margins. (2004:4)

By studying the margins ethnographically, the aim is not simply to “undo the state” but to apprehend what the state “is” and how it is understood in relation to citizenship. This view of the political demands an interpretive approach, “precisely because ‘the state’ itself is not a fixed object” (Asad 2004:279). Cit- izenship, margins and the state are tied to expectations and political imaginaries. The point is that while political imaginaries about state and citizenship are shared, they can engender different kinds of responses and are understood in a variety of ways. In a Lefortian sense, the political imaginations may be trans- forming; and to capture that change and fluidity is important. As Hibou reminds us, “Power is not only imposed from above but also plays on desires, on those positive elements that lead individuals to act” (2017:95). Imaginaries

42 Hibou similarly writes “‘To govern is to make people believe,’ said Richelieu, while Salazar claimed the reign of formal appearances when he said ‘o que parece é’ (what seems, is). Fiction is everywhere constitutive of the social sphere and the exercise of power” (2017:82). 43 As Stepputat writes “the project of radically questioning the state resonates well with the ethnographic approach of studying taken-for-granted institutions by denaturalizing them and seeing how they are constructed in ritual, discourse, and everyday life” (2013:27).

28 | Chapter Two become powerful to the extent that they respond to, as well as generate, desires and expectations.44 These can best be recovered through an ethnographic approach that “shifts analysis away from institutions, functions, and roles to the beliefs, actions and practices of interdependent actors” (Rhodes 2016:173). As Schatz holds “ethnography is critical for identifying the sources of impend- ing change” (2009:34). This change often comes from the peripheries and the everyday life that may often be overlooked in mainstream research. If the margins are places of exception and subversion, an ethnographical approach also seeks to go beyond clear-cut dichotomies of power and powerlessness. As Achille Mbembe writes regarding understanding power-dynamics in the post-colonial state:

Such research must go beyond institutions, beyond formal positions of power and the written rules, and examine the way the implicit and explicit are interwoven, and how the practices of those who command and of those who are assumed to obey are so entangled. (1992:29)

Lefort himself does not assume that political imaginaries are always an articulation of the powerful; it appears as a much more fundamental and constitutive form of collective imagination.

The Democratic Imaginaries If power is, partly, symbolic and diffused, it does not mean that symbolic power operates in the same way in democratic and authoritarian regimes. De- mocracy is, according to Lefort, institutionally and symbolically, fundamentally different from other forms of political organizations. In the sections below, I draw out the implications of Lefort’s notion of the symbolic in relation to authoritarianism and democratization. Much of Lefort’s work treats the relationship between totalitarianism and democracy. He argues that one cannot be understood without the other. Ac- cording to Lefort, in the pre-modern West, the symbolic was articulated through the “dual body of the King.” The king, sanctified by God, was he who defined, and was defined, by his relationship over the social body. It was only through the King, at once corporal and immaterial, that society could

44 There is, as Žižek (1989) by way of Lacan, reminds us, always an element of enjoyment in ideology. It functions not only through fear and coercion, but also through jouissance. Similarly, political imaginaries capture and articulate aspects of popular desires.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 29 place itself in relation to the transcendental and thus come to define itself. By contrast, in modernity, and following the French Revolution, there remains an empty place where the King once was, and therefore society is fundamentally unstable in its relationship to itself.45 This is the democratic condition, and yet the uncertainty of democracy also gives rise to the search for a “body”, for unity, that opens for the flight to totalitarianism. Modernity, for Lefort, is an experience understood as a “dissolution of markers of certainty” (1988:19). Democracy is an articulation of that dissolution as a political and symbolic system. Totalitarianism is the attempt to close that experience of uncertainty. Below, I will describe in greater detail the differences between democratic and non-democratic forms of government. Schematically, we can say that pre- modern regimes, like pre-revolutionary France, were symbolically “simple.” Society understood the symbolic order, and itself, in paternalistic terms. Re- lationships between subjects were always mediated via the paternal authority of the King. By contrast, democracy is symbolically “complex” and unstable. Symbolic power is placed in the People. Yet, the People have no body and they cannot speak. The voice of the People needs to be mediated. Every such me- diation, whether through elections, political representation, protests or presi- dents, is ambiguous and can, potentially, be contested. If the People speak in one voice, if they find their perfect mediator, then the system is no longer a democracy, and “the empty space of power” is closed. The symbolic complexity of democracy entails a host of tensions. I will attempt to show how these tensions become particularly acute in the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic system. In order to do so, I will first attempt to define what I mean by an authoritarian regime, and how it differs from Lefort’s understanding of pre-modern monarchies and modern totalitarian states. Lefort does not discuss authoritarian states. He treats totalitarianism, like democracy, as a particular form of symbolic regime, rooted in a particular historical moment. Can one have a Lefortian understanding of authoritarianism? There are, I believe, “family resemblances” between authoritarianism and Lefort’s totalitarianism.

The Symbolic Authoritarianism Without working with a strict definition of authoritarianism – which is often treated as a residual category – one can still lay out certain generic features.

45 This is true, even for societies that still have a monarch as the head of state. Modern monarchs no longer simultaneously embody and transcend the people in the same way as the pre-modern kings.

30 | Chapter Two

Lefort treats democracy and totalitarianism as two types of regime that both grow out of the modern dissolution of the unity of the symbolic. Totalitari- anism is the attempt to close “the empty place of power”, to give it a “body”, in the form of a party or the state itself. Totalitarianism attempts “to incarnate the identity of society with itself thereby conceiving all signs of social division, of plurality, of any opposition whatsoever as originating from the outside and as such liable to unlimited repression” (Lefort 1988:178). Society, under totalitarianism, is understood in the singular, as-one, and any plurality is expelled into the realm of the other. In a totalitarian state, the conflicts of society cannot be expressed as something other than external to society itself. Similarly, in authoritarian regimes, like the Tunisia of Ben Ali, there is a disavowal of open and internal conflicts. There is an attempt at portraying the people as-one, and the party/leader as the only legitimate articulation of the people. The party/leader as embodying the law, is another common dynamic between the two forms of systems. Vaclav Havel writes on what he calls post- totalitarian communist societies of Eastern Europe that, “Without the legal code functioning as a ritually cohesive force, the post-totalitarian system could not exist” (1985:75). Simultaneously, there is always, on a practical level, great uncertainty on what is and is not allowed, on what the law says or means. Many authoritarian contexts function in the same way; where complex laws and a host of rights and obligations are laid out and are central to the legitimacy of the system. While the law retains its importance in authoritarian states, in practice, it is often flaunted, particularly by the leader himself. This is similar to what Mbembe terms the postcolonial construct:

Togo was until recently the perfect example of postcolonial construction. The official discourse made use of all necessary means to maintain the fiction of a society devoid of conflict. Postcoloniality could be seen here behind the facade of a policy in which the state considered itself simultaneously as indistinguishable from society and as the upholder of the law and the keeper of the truth. The state was embodied in a single person: the President. He alone controlled the law and could, on his own, grant or abolish liberties—since these are, after all, malleable. (1992:5)46

Authoritarianism, in the form it has taken in Tunisia, and many post-colonial places, does not, however, have the same ambition to control every aspect of

46 This is clear in the case of Tunisia; “In Ben Ali’s Tunisia[..], it was common for decisions to be made without any legal basis, like those announced in a presidential speech that came into force without ever giving rise to the publication of laws or decrees” (Hibou 2017:129).

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 31 life as totalitarianism has. For Lefort, in totalitarian regimes, “everything appears to be political[….]and public”(1988:48). There is no space in which the state cannot enter. Unlike totalitarian regimes, authoritarian states like Ben Ali’s, are perfectly compatible with a neoliberal emphasis on individual freedom of choice in the economic sphere. Authoritarian states are less driven towards ambitious transformations of the desires of its people, and more towards realizing them.47 Like totalitarian regimes, however, they lack a true public space. As I will discuss below, it is this lack of a free public space that distinguishes totalitarian and authoritarian states from democratic states. Furthermore, authoritarianism appears to follow a more personalistic and paternalistic logic than totalitarianism. In authoritarian regimes, ideological purity is secondary to obeisance to the leader.48 This authoritarian paternalism is not on the level of the pre-modern, where society comes to understand itself through the king and his relationship to the transcendental. Rather, the authoritarian leader as the state/father promises to provide the essential elements of normalcy and modernity. Even if authoritarian states attempt to harness some of the symbolic simplicity of pre-modern paternalistic states, the dictator is nonetheless no king.49 He cannot embody society, nor mediate its relationship to the transcendental. A dictatorship is thoroughly modern in that it looks to the future, and can justify itself primarily as a system that can realize the hopes and expectations of its people.

As if Politics The inability of most authoritarian states to provide what the people desire invariably gives rise to widespread public disbelief in the official state discourse. This is combined with state attacks on open signs of public dissent. This is what Lisa Wedeen terms as if politics, “the combination of cynical lack of belief and compliant behavior” (1999:154).50 Authoritarian regimes may

47 Whether authoritarian states are less intrusive due to ideological reasons, or because they simply lack the means, is an interesting, but not ultimately relevant question in this context. 48 Or perhaps as Jessica Benjamin holds, the paternal dimension is more obfuscated in “hyper- modern” contexts of socialism and Western democracy (1978) 49 It is doubtful whether the present monarchies of the Arab World embody the same symbolic place as pre-modern monarchies. Yet, the fact that even none-oil based monarchies like Mo- rocco and Jordan, proved more resilient during the Arab Spring, than republican states, may give us some indication that they are more symbolically stable. 50 Yet, as I will argue in subsequent chapters, calling it cynical hides the degree to which the state is able to mobilize and play on genuine desires. See also Mirosal Kusy’s discussion of “as if” socialism (1985)

32 | Chapter Two not be able, or willing, to change people’s beliefs, but they can enforce behavior, make them act as if they believe. According to Wedeen, the fact that most people do not believe, and that those in power know, or at least suspect, that they do not believe, is still an expression of the power of the regime.51 The ability to make people lie, and thus be complicit in the fictions of those in power is, in itself, an expression of power of the sort of as if politics (1999) that defines authoritarian states. She writes that, “From the regime's perspective, enforced dissimulation signals that citizens are willing to reproduce and are capable of reiterating an officially sanctioned vision of daily life” (1999:103).52 Authoritarian states are built on elaborate systems of public lies that demand that official truths are maintained. This creates the necessity for widespread dissimulations in the face of discrepancies between the official narrative and everyday life. As if politics means accepting and perpetuating public myths even when “no one” believes. The basis of such a dynamic is an understanding on both sides, the regime and its population, on what a show of support, however begrudging, means; of how things should be. As Beatrice Hibou writes:

Participants show that they know the system, they recognize its mechanisms; their behavior shows that they know how to behave (properly) in a ritualized context so as to reproduce or improve their social status without thereby accepting or rejecting the rules of the political game. (2017:70)

The continuing of these rituals, and the political symbols they uphold, is a complex interplay between society and the regime. Nevertheless, what is and is not allowed, is not simply dictated by the state, which is never completely in control. As Mbembe writes, “What defines the postcolonised subject is the ability to engage in baroque practices which are fundamentally ambiguous, fluid and modifiable even in instances where there are clear, written and pre-

51 The degree to which totalitarian states are more able or willing to invest in making its population “actually believe” is not straightforward. Both kinds of regimes invest heavily in maintaining the appearance of belief. Furthermore, as Wedeen explains, while a regime that can enforce belief may be said to be more powerful, a regime that can enforce behavior despite a lack of belief is also expressing a sort of power. What I would add is that even in totalitarian contexts, these beliefs are never wholly produced from the top. 52 Wedeen studied Syria under Hafiz, yet much of what she says appears valid in other authoritarian contexts, like Tunisia during Ben Ali

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 33 cise rules” (1992:25). It is a constant negotiation between people and the authorities, termed by Bayat as social non-movements (2010), which plays itself out in everyday life and is as uncertain as it is unpredictable. There is a constant tension between what is and is not allowed, and life under authoritarian rule is a back and forth between legality and illegality.53 Scholars like Hisham Sharabi emphasizes the “monological” nature of (Arab) authoritarianism:

Monological speech, in daily practice, rarely produces good listeners, for it aims not to enlighten but to dominate. The listener-recipient, the other of the monological relationship (the son, the student, the subject), is reduced to silence: one may outwardly acquiesce, but inwardly one turns away. (1988:88)

This “turning away” does not necessarily imply a rejection of the political imaginaries by its “silent subjects.” Crucially, the illusion of stability and unity is not merely the ideological tools of state power, but also manifestations of popular desires.54 Borrowing from Foucault’s view of power, one may say that the state, even in its authoritarian form, is relational, productive and generative.55 In Wedeen’s study of symbolic power in authoritarian Syria, she argues “that rhetoric and symbols reduce the need to rely on sheer repression as a mechanism of control” (1999:26). Yet, the political imaginaries of unity, of paternal protection, of modernity can also come to undermine the regime. There are always conflicts, even if they cannot be articulated, there are always expectations out of sync with state rhetoric, always desires that can neither be completely represented nor repressed. The paradox of such as if power is that, as Hannah Arendt discusses, the more energy is spent by the regime in “a proliferation and perfection of make-believe” (2006:254) the less energy is spent in changing reality itself. In such situations of divergence between the public truth and quotidian experience, the mere act of “speaking out” risks undermining the whole regime. As Havel says, “if the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else”

53 As Hibou writes “actors strategically use social rules; they play with them not to prevent forms of domination but to condition and modify them” (2017:60). 54 As I will explore later, while it is the father/state that to some extent produces the subject/citizens, there is also a popular desire to become the father/state, become a part of the state apparatus itself, particularly via the promise of state employment. 55 It is not, however, “everywhere.” Furthermore, as I show, it is the state’s absence as much as its presence that provokes resistance.

34 | Chapter Two

(1985:40). Arendt talks of a “stubbornness of facts”, a resilience that makes politics based on lies fragile:

Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such, unsupported by the distorting forces of power and interest, become a political factor of the first order. Where everybody lies about everything of importance, the truthteller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act; he, too, has engaged himself in political business, for, in the unlikely event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world. (2006:261)

I believe this “speaking out” is less about the truth in any strong sense of the term, and more about pointing out the inconsistencies of the public discourse.56 In its inability to completely close in on itself, authoritarianism could then represent both Lefort’s notion of the impossibility of totalitarianism, as well as the tendency towards it. 57 Dictatorship is always a democracy in the making, the fissures of uncertainty waiting beneath the apparent calm waters of a tight public script. At any moment, the emperor can be revealed to be without clothes, and the myth of a society without conflict can come crashing down. This, as I detail in chapter four, is what happened to Ben Ali’s Tunisia. The fall of a dictatorship brings with it all the practical and symbolic tensions of Lefort’s democratic uncertainty.

Indeterminacy of Democracy By contrast to authoritarianism, it is precisely the inability to represent power, society and the people in any unified way, in Lefort's term “as a body”, that marks democracy as a specific mode of politics. It is defined by a lack of symbolic representation. This is not to say that power and the people cannot be represented in democracies, but only that such representations are always open for contestation. There is never a complete correspondence between symbolic representation and “actual” representation.58 The invocation of key

56 What I mean by truth here is merely as participants themselves understand it. Although the kinds of “factual truths “that Arendt discusses are also important. As I discuss in chapter 4, the Tunisian state spent considerable effort in fudging official figures of unemployment and mis- reporting data on economic development. 57 Totalitarianism is for Lefort on one level impossible “Eventually this imposition becomes transparent, and the party that pretended to incarnate society ends up existing at its periphery” (Flynn 2005:225), but the uncertainty of democracy always opens up for the flight to certainty. 58 If democracy entails delegation of power and representation, it is always incomplete. The president is not the People. Neither is parliament. Neither, in fact, is the people, the People. The

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 35 categories such as the People, the law and rights, cannot be reduced to empirical facts, but always points beyond itself, towards the symbolic. To claim a right is not only to say that such a right exists, but to attempt to inscribe a right into the real:

It is impossible to detach the statement from the utterance as soon as nobody is able to occupy the place, at a distance from all others, from which he would have authority to grant or ratify rights. Thus, rights are not simply the object of a declaration, it is their essence to be declared. (Lefort 1986:257)

Similarly, invoking the People is part of constituting it. It is always both descriptive and performative. In a democracy, power is something residing within the People, which is evoked and symbolic, and at the same time it is something real. Real in the sense that it can be made manifest in plebiscites, it can be counted and decided through votes. The people can be counted, yet the People is external; located in an “empty place”, that can never be completely captured and has no clear boundaries. Lefort sees democracy as, at its core, defined by indeterminacy; indeterminacy over whom the people are, what society is and who has power. He writes, “Power becomes and remains democratic when it proves to belong to no one” (1988:27). It comes into being when it is evoked in the name of the People, but is also always open to contestation. Democracy is thus “a regime which cannot be apprehended in its political form” (1988:228). Since it has no symbolic mediator (king, party or ruler) with which to reflect itself through, it is fundamentally a society that “is constantly in search of its own foundations” (1988:229). The challenge of democracy lies in this indeterminacy, but also that it opens for antagonisms in society that can only be expressed in non-democratic regimes as external threats to the body politic itself. Democracy entails expressing oneself freely. Yet, public space is destabilizing precisely because speech no longer has a clear point of reference:

The people, the nation, equality, justice and truth in fact exist only by virtue of the speech which is assumed to emanate from within them and which at the same time names them. In that sense, power belongs to the individual or individuals

empirical can never quite be reduced to the symbolic. According to Lefort, despite the fact that democracy, in its representation of itself, does not invoke the place of the symbolic “other”, of another place, “the other” nonetheless remains central, even in its absence.

36 | Chapter Two

who can speak on their behalf or, to be more accurate, to the individual or individuals who appear to speak on their behalf, who speak in the name of the people and give them their name. (1988:109-110)

The paradox of democracy is that it is a unity experienced as a division, “Who we are, and who speaks in our name, is given in modernity not as a fact but as a question” (1988:18). The connection between uncertainty and democracy is not completely lacking in democratization studies. Przeworski, for example, has discussed democracy as a form of “institutionalized uncertainty” (1991:14). This is remi- niscent of Lefort, as he writes of democracy, “It represents the outcome of a controlled contest with permanent rules. This phenomenon implies an institutionalization of conflict" (1988:17). For Przeworski, however, the uncertainty of democracy is limited to uncertain outcomes in elections.59 Lefort’s approach goes further, to encompass an uncertainty that permeates every aspect of society. What constitutes democracy, or the democratic condition, is less a set of institutions or rules, but society’s radical questioning of its own form. For Lefort, democracy is a regime that “in its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy” (1988:16). What is central in Lefort’s understanding of democracy is that it introduces uncertainty not only at the level of politics, but at the level of political imaginaries.60 This opening up of the democratic comes into being, according to Lefort through the rise of a public space.

Democracy and the Public For Lefort, what distinguishes democracy from totalitarianism is the ability to speak in public, without fear of reprisal. What Lefort terms public space, although somewhat under-theorized, is of paramount importance to democracy.61 Lefort writes, “My primary concern is to promote recognition of a public space, which is always in gestation and whose existence blurs the conventional boundaries between the political and the non-political” (1988:35.) The right to speech, to be heard, is a necessary dimension of keeping the empty

59 He writes, “Uncertainty is not synonymous with unpredictability: The probability distribution of electoral chances is typically known. All that is necessary for outcomes to be uncertain is that it be possible for some incumbent party to lose” (Przeworski et al. 2000:16-17). 60 It is also this uncertain and continual questioning that makes the desire for certainty apparent. In this way the experience of democratization as uncertainty, as chaos on a social and political level, is both the movement from and towards authoritarianism. 61 According to Simmons “Lefort’s writings can be viewed as a phenomenology of the political space and how it is represented” (2004:413).

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 37 space of power from closing in on itself. For Lefort, like for Jürgen Habermas, it is speech which is central, it is through communication that the public arises:

As everyone acquires the right to address others and to listen to them, a symbolic space is established; it has no definite frontiers, and no authority can claim to control it or to decide what can and what cannot be thought, what can and cannot be said. Speech as such and thought as such prove to exist independently of any given individual, and belong to no one. (Lefort 1988:33)

Public space is public by virtue of the fact that it “belongs to no one.” It is the ability of anyone to evoke the people that define the public space in democracies, and by evoking it, to some extent bring it into being, but also contest it. Here, it is not the public sphere as the Habermasian arena in which rational communication may arise, where the threat comes from impediments to the right form of speech. Rather it is the very ability to speak in public, about the public, that makes it essential to democracy.62 Since articulating an opinion is part of constituting it, it is also a form of power, a power that is manifested in the speech itself, but is also nullified by the ability of anyone to object. For Lefort, conflict is central in democracy, and so the articulation of differences and the fracturing of consensus of unanimity is always a part of a truly public space, even if speech tends towards hiding its power.63 The act of speaking publicly is never innocent and contains inherent dangers. It is this very process of becoming, of making the people through speech that also opens up for the terror of revolutionary violence, the people pitted against itself, speech closing in on itself. There is, equally, always a possibility that the totalitarian search for a unity, for a body, for the people-as-one, takes form. Since the public lacks a “body”, and can only come into being as an unlimited search for itself, the flight from democracy can only be accomplished by a

62 Lefort writes that, “The people, the nation, equality, justice and truth in fact exist only by virtue of the speech which is assumed to emanate from within them and which at the same time names them. In that sense, power belongs to the individual or individuals who can speak on their behalf or, to be more accurate, to the individual or individuals who appear to speak on their behalf, who speak in the name of the people and give them their name” (1988:110). 63 Lefort writes: “no one can take the place of the supreme judge: 'no one' means no individual, not even an individual invested with supreme authority, and no group, not even the majority. The negative is effective It does away with the judge, but it also relates Justice to the existence of a public space – a space which is so constituted that everyone is encouraged to speak and to listen without being subject to the authority of another, that everyone is urged to will the power he has been given” (1988:41).

38 | Chapter Two silencing of speech. As long as individuals can speak in public without fear, the public exists. The opening of free communication is central then for Lefort, as it involves a fundamental shift from totalitarian/authoritarian modes of governing and gives rise to a public in the true sense; as a constant articulation and search for itself, open to counter-claims and a radical decentralization of symbolic power.

Opening of Public Transcripts The Lefortian view of democracy leads us, then, to focus less on the role of elections and constitutions, and more on the importance of public space.64 It is through public space that democracy comes to be constituted, but this is also where the risks become the most apparent. Lefort, however, says little of the concrete implications of what happens when public space arises for the first time. I argue that the movement from authoritarian “closed spaces” to more democratic “open spaces” can be experienced as disorienting and dangerous. One way to better understand the impact of public space, in contexts of democratic transitions, is as a movement from, what James C. Scott (1990) terms, public transcripts, towards the opening of previously hidden transcripts. For Scott, public transcripts are the state-sanctioned public script. Hidden transcripts, by contrast, are “a backstage discourse consisting of what cannot be spoken in the face of power” (1990:xii). It is the offstage script, in terms of both narratives and practices, of the dominated. In situations of enforced compliance, those in powerless positions risk sanctions, or violence, if they deviate from the script. Consequently, they tend overwhelmingly to reinforce the public transcripts. The ever-present tension between the two arises because, as Scott writes, “Short of actual rebellion, powerless groups have, I argue, a self-interest in conspiring to reinforce hegemonic appearances” (1990:xii). This dynamic is captured by Havel, in the context of socialist Czechoslovakia, with his example of the greengrocer who displays the sign of Workers of the World, Unite! in his vegetable stall:

64 Crucially, this does not entail that elections are not important, or do not compose essential elements of democracy. Elections are central in keeping the place of power “empty.” It is through elections that, as Lefort says, “Number replaces substance” (1988:18). Even if, the search for the “substance” democracy is never completely removed.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 39

The greengrocer declares his loyalty (and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the ﬁrst place. (1985:31)

Quotidian life in authoritarian contexts is filled with such “rituals of support” that, while not honestly meant, nonetheless shows the power of the regime to impose its vision of the world.65 In the words of Havel, they come to “form part of the panorama of everyday life” (1985:35), and thus individuals are themselves “players in the game.” The less the vision and rituals make sense, the more they matter to the regime.66 While various forms of critique are not always completely absent from the public, even in authoritarian states, to the degree they exist they are heavily circumscribed; always carrying the risk of reprisal. They are expressed, above all, in the intimate spheres, and even there they are not without risks. In her ethnographic work in a village in Laos, Holly Height mentions how hidden transcripts attain a particular kind of “force of fantasy” in authoritarian contexts:

Taussig observed that a “regime of terror” will push stories of state into intimate realms: after meals, by lamplight and in intimate places. Circumscribed from the public sphere, these stories are divorced also from factual verification and resolution. Repressed, such stories of state in Laos become all the more important, taking on an almost mythological feel. In them, fantasy and fact are difficult to distinguish. (2014:89)67

The narratives that are discussed in my empirical chapters, concerning topics like the state, corruption and democracy should be read as a move from the

65 The kinds of “truths” that are left unexpressed is primarily the everyday opinions of people, as well as what Arendt refers to as factual truths; “brutally elementary data of this kind, whose indestructibility has been taken for granted even by the most extreme and most sophisticated believers in historicism” (2006:239). 66 Yet the “acceptance” of the public transcripts by the populations should not be read as being based purely on fear. 67 Similarly, Wedeen writes “The realms of the forbidden, the taboo, and the clandestine expand as the official political realm contracts. Commonplace events become titillating bits of information or gossip to be guarded, cherished, and revealed among friends” (1999:45).

40 | Chapter Two realm of the intimate and private to the public, from hidden to public transcripts, from fantasy to facts. What was previously talked about at home, in hushed tones is now discussed openly. The previously suspected but secret stories, of corruption and violence of the state, now become open for all to share.68 The extent to which these narratives are continuations of hidden ones is by their nature hard to discern, and yet they come to inform the experience of democratization.

From Fantasy to Fact What happens when the elaborate system of control, and what Havel calls “ritualized lies”, falls apart? For Arendt, political lies are fundamentally corrosive and she claims that lies

[C]an always be explained and made plausible—this gives them their momentary advantage over factual truth—but they can never compete in stability with that which simply is because it happens to be thus and not otherwise. This is the reason that consistent lying, metaphorically speaking, pulls the ground from under our feet and provides no other ground on which to stand. (2005:310)

Following Arendt, Wedeen emphasizes that the authoritarian conditions of as if politics fragment the possibility of a public, and isolate individuals from each other. A “true” public personality demands an honest and open discourse (1999:45). It is only then that a new understanding of public space emerges, as well as new forms of subjects that interact as citizens outside “the closed bounded public spaces regulated by power” (Cohen 2013:128). Arendt and Lefort emphasize the importance of free speech in forming free individuals and an open polity. Wedeen, writing on Arendt’s notion that truth is central to the public says that, “Organized lying disorients those who are continually subjected to it and undermines their capacity for action” (1999:44 italics in original). This may certainly be true and, as I will discuss in subsequent chapters, there has indeed been an opening of publicness in Tunisia following the revolution. But a central claim in this thesis is that during a democratic process truth, or more specifically the possibility of honest public discourse, may also be disorienting. It disorients, because as I have discussed above, it signals the diffusion of symbolic power. Public space also allows for

68 Alianak writes “Tunisians gossiped and spread rumors in private about the kleptomania of Ben Ali’s extended family” (2014:29)

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 41 the previously repressed conflicts within society to be publicly expressed. Fur- thermore, public speech disorients because it can, potentially, reveal inconvenient and threatening “facts” about society. No longer in the realm of fantasy, many of the hidden transcripts are now taking the form of new public narratives, and some of these narratives are proving disturbing and disruptive. These disorientations come to be exacerbated by unmet expectations and unfulfilled hopes on the transition. The consequence of the move to a free public space is an openly expressed anger and cynicism towards the state, a sense of confusion as well as a high degree of self-criticism. I read the democratization and opening of hidden transcripts as a process of self-discovery, one that is born out of a destabilizing of meanings, and is itself destabilizing. The speaking out, and speaking truths as they are experienced, exposes the full scale of the deception behind the slogans of the authoritarian state. Yet, this can also be translated into anger at the democratic transition. Revealing the inconsistencies of the public transcripts in an authoritarian context shatters what Havel calls the dictatorship of the ritual, and exposes its empty slogans. It reveals that the world was not as the regime (and people themselves) may have wished it to be. But speaking out, in the context of democratization, creates its own set of problems.69 Public transcripts—regardless of their truth, or lack of truth—to some extent, express public desires. What I am suggesting is that silence may have a certainty of its own. In the narratives arising out of the newly opened public space, what was once suspected can easily be accepted as the truth; before, we thought the situation was bad, now we see that it is even worse than we suspected.

Beyond Formalism What sets Lefort’s understanding of democracy apart from purely formalist approaches, then, is that for Lefort, while elections and processes of governance are key features of democracy, they are merely one part of a much more profound change at the level of the symbolic, or political imaginaries. If formalist definitions of democracy appear to posit that democracy is nothing

69 Arendt in her article Truth and Politics claims that public lies arise out of what we wish the world to be, while facts and truths are often inconvenient. Again, the distinction between truths, opinions and facts is in this context rarely straightforward. What I primarily wish to emphasize is that the public sharing of the kinds of beliefs regarding society and the state that previously could not be expressed is transformative, both of the person telling them and of these beliefs themselves.

42 | Chapter Two more than the procedures that govern it, then according to Lefort, the processes of democracy and the opening of public space generate a fundamental shift in the way society comes to understand itself. Democracy has, according Lefort, historically furnished its own set of myths. For Lefort, the “empty space of power” that arose following the French revolution, was, in the West, filled with bourgeois myths. These myths attempted to cover up the fractures and conflicts in society, through a sort of sacralization of concepts like “Property”, “the State”, “Nation” and “Family” that came to anchor society (1986). The indeterminacy of democracy has, however, meant that these myths have always been open for contestation.70 The democratic inability to ground these myths in the transcendental has meant that they have always remained incomplete. Thus, any modern myths, within the context of democracy, remain highly unstable; the empty place of power lingers just beneath the surface. Lefort places the uncertainty of democracy within a particular time and context; modern France. The question then arises: in what ways does this uncertainty come to be expressed in a different time and context; that of contemporary Tunisia? I believe Lefort’s assumptions to be helpful in understanding the movement from dictatorship to democracy at the level of experience. With Lefort as a point of departure, I place the political imaginaries of authoritarianism and democracy in relation to the state and citizenship. I argue that the context in which this new publicness arises is central in understanding how the indeterminacy of democracy plays itself out in a given situation. Below, I seek to take the assumptions of symbolic power and democracy as arising out of the opening of public space, and to turn them into a framework for studying democratization.

TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR DEMOCRATIZATION AS EXPERIENCE Given the above assumptions of symbolic power and the difference between democracy and authoritarianism; this section seeks to lay out in greater detail the relationship between democracy and democratizing, what democratization means, and how it is tied to state-citizen dynamics and public space.

70 In his later work, Lefort argued that these bourgeois “Truths” have disintegrated and have been replaced with what he terms “invisible ideology.” I discuss this invisible ideology more in relation to neoliberalism below.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 43

From Democracy to Democratization Democratization is, in a Lefortian sense, an opening towards greater symbolic uncertainty and complexity. Lefort himself, however, did not write about democratization. For Lefort, democracy is more an either/or rather than a transition or spectrum. How then to conceptualize democratization if transitional processes are by definition the process of moving between A and B, between authoritarianism and democracy? The very concepts and terms surrounding democratization invoke the rites of passage, in van Gennep’s classical understanding. The language of stages is the language of removal and integration, termed by van Gennep as separation, liminality and re-integration (1960). The transition is “the liminal period”, between the new and the old, occupying neither. It is a period and space of uncertainty and ambiguity, as well as of renewal and change. It is not hard to imagine democratization as exactly such an ambiguous period, both at a political and individual level. The fact that the language of democratization is the language of liminality, and can be understood as large-scale rites of passage, should not prevent us from seeing the limitations of this perspective, and the problems inherent in the democratization paradigm. In this transitional way of imagining it, this crisis is temporary and will fade once “true” democracy is established.71 Yet a Lefortian perspective would suggest that democracy is a kind of permanent condition of uncertainty. Lefort expresses this tension in the democratic project itself clearly, when he says:

[T]hat modern society and the modern individual are constituted by the experience of the dissolution of the ultimate markers of certainty; that their dissolution inaugurates an adventure – and it is constantly threatened by the resistance it provokes – in which the foundations of power, the foundations of right and the foundations of knowledge are all called into question – a truly historical adventure in the sense that it can never end, in that the boundaries of the possible and the thinkable constantly recede. (1988:181)

Should we then consider democracy itself a liminal state? However, a permanent liminality, “that can never end” is by definition not liminal, even if it may contain many aspects of a liminal experience. Furthermore, on the level

71 The fact that narratives around a “crisis of democracy” is a constant fixture in much of the established democracies of the West seems to indicate that this is not the case.

44 | Chapter Two of both experience and political imaginary, the breakdown of the authoritarian order is uncertain. The point that Lefort makes regarding democracy its precisely that it never stabilizes, even as it creates the conditions for a flight to illusory stability. Even totalitarianism as a solution is only temporary. The certainty it purports to provide is a lie. For Lefort, both democracy and totalitarian regimes are temporary states, each pushing towards and against the other. They are thus both liminal states, or neither is.72 While I believe that many aspects of democratization contain dimensions of liminality, I argue that, on the level of experience, democratization does not in any way imply a certain direction towards a given goal. Instead, what defines it is the sense of uncertainty and chaos. It makes more sense to me to keep the term liminality in its “classical” formulation for the process of being in-between in the context of two known states, both spatially and temporally.73

Extreme Democracy A tension in Lefort’s work is the degree to which actors themselves are aware of the shifts and changes in symbolic power and thus in the changes from one form of regime to another. Lefort writes:

[T]he important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of social life […]without the actors being aware of it, a process of questioning is implicit in social practice, that no one has the answer to the questions that arise, and that the work of ideology, which is always dedicated to the task of restoring certainty, cannot put an end to this practice. (1988:20-1, italics in original)

He mentions in the above quote a profound change that happens “without the actors being aware of it.” By contrast, in my account of democratization

72 This may be something like what Thomasson argues, building on Szakolzai’s notion of modernity as permanent liminality (2000). Ultimately Thomasson expands the term liminality to refer to almost everything, “In liminality there is no certainty concerning the outcome[..]Lim- inality explains nothing. Liminality is. It happens” (2014:7). I find this expansion of the term problematic since he also defines liminality primarily as an “in-between position.” 73 I therefore reserve the term liminal for youth, as a stage between childhood and adulthood. However, I still draw on work on liminal experiences to capture what happens in the confused space of symbolic uncertainty of democratization.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 45 in Tunisia, it is a highly embodied experience. It is disorientating and confusing, opening up for a host of questions tied to who has authority and where power now lies.74 Unlike Lefort, I argue that this uncertainty is experienced, and to some extent understood, by young men, at least during its early phases and under certain conditions, that will be discussed below. Rather than treating democratization as a progression of steps, I start on the level of experience and I treat democratization as a precarious process of heightened awareness on both a social and individual level. Democratization can then, tentatively, be understood as an extreme form of democracy, where the Lefortian conflicts and crises are more apparent. Thus, we should say that democratization makes the uncertainty, or liminality, more visible. Even if it is, on the level of the symbolic, fundamentally no different from seemingly more stable democracies. Yet which new forms or re-articulation of old political imaginaries that will arise in the “empty space of power” is not given. In this conceptualization, Tunisia is not in an earlier stage, or an incomplete version, of the archetype presented by Western democracies. It is an illuminating case of interiority.75 I hold that on the level of experience, democratization is a form of democracy. Democracy may take many forms, but indeterminacy appears to be its signum, a key element in its makeup.

State and Citizenship If democratization can, at is most general level, be understood as a visibilization of uncertainty inherent in democracy, it remains to be stated how this study holds that the uncertainty of democratization is directly tied to the state- citizen dynamics. Whether discussing democratization, public space or citizenship, or even revolution, the state is at the center. Nevertheless, the relationship between democratization and the state, outside of institutions and formal processes is rarely spelled out in the scholarly literature. I argue that the political imaginaries, the desires and expectations of what it means to be citizens, inform the experience of democratization. These political imaginaries

74 As Flynn writes concerning Lefort, “Although he never addresses it directly, it is ‘lived experience’ which is of central importance in the work of Lefort” (2005:xix). 75 So, like the Tunisians who say “even if it was not a revolution, we call it a revolution” I may say that even if it is not a transition, I call it a transition. Where the line should be drawn within the “grey zones” of democracies I leave as an open question.

46 | Chapter Two may look different for different groups, but they are to some extent shared, and have been formed and contested, over past decades. Still, what does it mean to study the political imaginaries of state and citizenship? In this section, I set out an ethnographic and interpretive approach to studying the state and citizenship by looking at the state through what Krupa & Nugent call a non-realist approach (2015).76

States of Imagination In this study, I do not define the state in a specific way. Rather what I attempt is to capture the political imaginaries, which include citizens’ expectations of what the state is, does and above all ought to do. To do so, I draw on non- realist studies of the state. In “realist” approaches, states are often treated as political institutions that hold control over the legitimate use of violence, while nations are understood as “on the side of culture.”77 Yet, for non-realist approaches such clear-cut distinctions makes little sense. Similar to Benedict Anderson’s famous conceptualization of nations as “imagined communities” (1991), non-realist scholars understand the state as imagined. This does not mean that the state lacks materiality nor that it is only imagined or symbolic. It means that one cannot always claim a clear distinction between the material and institutional aspects of the state and its symbolic dimensions. States are treated as “constructed entities that are conceptualized and made socially effective through particular imaginative and symbolic devices that require study” (Ferguson & Gupta 2002:982). In such an approach, the importance of the state is maintained even as the common distinctions between state and society, state and nation, state and imagination are problematized. I take this to mean that regardless of which level the analysis is conducted at, one needs to consider the understanding of the actors themselves by looking at “how the state is lived, perceived, constructed, and contested by the people” (Bouziane et al. 2013:10). It involves considering the expectations, hopes and disappointments that people express and enact vis-à-vis the state.

76 Bouziane et al., (2013) calls this “state analysis from below.” Although I am inspired by their approach, I believe the term is somewhat misleading, since the distinction between the state as “above” or “below” is rarely clear. 77 Philip Rosen writes, “Nations are cultural, discursive fields. They are imaginary, ideal collective unities that, especially since the nineteenth century era of nationalism, aspire to define the state. The state is an institutional site constructed as an overt repository and manager of legiti- mated power. Nation is on the side of culture, ideological formations, civil society; state is on the side of political institutions, repressive apparatuses, political society” (2001:256)

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 47

State analysis here is interpretive. Another way to frame it, is to say that because the state is partly cultural and symbolic, its everyday expressions are not simply subjective, but reflect historical and local contextualization; i.e. political imaginaries.78 Surprisingly few non-realist studies of the state have focused on democracy or democratic transitions.79 This study seeks to fill this lacuna and takes a non- realist approach in order to investigate the degree to which certain symbolic aspects that constitute the state, and society itself, may have changed following democratization. It becomes important to trace the ways in which democratization enables both continuities and discontinuities of political experiences.

Citizenship Experiences of the state also imply an articulation of citizenship. As Bu- tenschøn writes “citizenship can be considered the organizing principle of state-society relations in modern states” (2000:11). In this study, citizenship is understood as the way that narratives, words and practices are used by individuals or groups, whether explicitly political or not, to articulate their place in society vis-á-vis the state. It is tied to political imaginaries and the way state- citizen dynamics are and ought to be. Citizenship is often understood as a legal relationship between individuals or groups and the state.80 The point of reference in citizenship studies remains T.H Marshall’s articulation of citizenship as legal rights. Specifically, Marshall distinguishes between three kinds of rights: 1) civil rights (freedom of speech, equality before the law); 2) political rights (right to vote, right to form a party and associate); and 3) social rights (education, health and general welfare). Ac- cording to Marshall’s original conceptualization, civil rights came first in the West, during the eighteenth century, followed by political rights in the nineteenth, and finally social rights in the twentieth.81 To Marshall’s original three categories a host of new rights has been added, like cultural, environmental,

78 While realist approaches to the state have also focused on everyday aspects, and local level dimensions of the state such as everyday bureaucrats (for example, Lipsky 1980), these are still within a framework that treats the state as an “object.” 79 An exception is Thomas Blom Hansen who has studied democracy in India with a non- realist framework. 80 Turner writes of citizenship “as a collection of rights and obligations which give individuals a formal legal identity; these legal rights and obligations have been put together historically as sets of social institutions” (1997:5). 81 This follows an idealized Western development where civil and political rights preceded the development of the Welfare state. However, in many countries in the Arab World and beyond, social rights preceded civil and certainly political rights.

48 | Chapter Two urban and sexual rights, as well as an increase in the importance of non-state institutions in constituting citizenship (Isin 2017). Yet, the field of citizenship studies has gone beyond legalist understandings to include a much wider set of ideas, claims and practices. Noted citizenship scholar Bryan Turner writes that it is “important to emphasize the idea of practices in order to avoid a state and juridical definition of citizenship as merely a collection of rights and obligations” (1993:2, italics in the original). Isin and Nyer, in their recent approach, define citizenship as an institution or process “mediating rights between the subjects of politics and the polity to which these subjects belong” (2014:1). Rights here include claims-making and a broader repertoire of practices that may or may not become enshrined in a legal framework.

Social Contracts Citizenship, in the scholarship on both the West and the Arab World, is often conceptualized through the lens of social contract theory. The contract is an understanding, whether formalized or not, between the state and citizens regarding rights and obligations. Butenschøn writes that:

What distinguishes the citizenship approach […] is its level of analysis, which can be deﬁned as the contractual relationship (in the broadest possible meaning of “contractual”) between the state and the inhabitants under its jurisdiction. (2015:116)82

The concept of the social contract, however, implies too narrow a focus on a set of pre-articulated rights, rather than more dynamic and relational desires and expectations. This applies whether this “contract” ought to be understood in explicit terms or not. It is questionable if the notion of a “contract” best captures the more contentious and defuse dynamics between the state and citizens. Furthermore, assumptions that these contracts are the result of purely “actor-oriented strategic reasoning” (Butenschøn 2015:116) can also be ques- tioned, as putting object-oriented issues above symbolic ones.83 This thesis

82 Meijer & Butenschøn also write “the terms and conditions of citizenship are defined by a “contract” between citizens and the state in which the citizens’ civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights, as well as their duties, are laid out” (2017:5). 83 As Butenschøn himself points out in the same paper, in relation to Nasser, the military leader of Egypt “At the height of his career, Nasser’s popularity reached almost superhuman dimensions, overshadowing any rational foundation of a contractual relationship between the ruler

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 49 argues that the term contract is misleading, and it makes more sense to talk of shared political imaginaries, that are at the same time continually contested and understood differently across space and groups.84 The symbolic and cultural images of the state and citizenship are never set, but rather “always in the making as tentative, incomplete projects” (Stepputat 2013:26). What contractual assumptions miss is the complex relationship between citizens and the state, between power and obedience, one where neither are ever in full control and where the stakes are constantly shifting. Furthermore, discussions on social contracts and legal rights tend to fall back on an understanding of authoritarian regimes as ones where social rights are bought at the expense of civil and political rights, and assume that the latter are active and the former passive.85 I hold that distinctions between civil, political and social rights are rarely straightforward, particularly if we move away from a legalistic perspective. People may, for example, demands social rights through performing civil rights, by protesting, by joining civil society, by joining or starting political parties. As Lefort reminds us, the concepts of citizenship and rights means little if they are not expressed, if they are not spoken or practiced. Unwritten contracts are simply other ways of denoting non-democratic dynamics. One could say that without the right to dissent, social rights are null—that they are not rights, but simply imposed from above. One could also say that even without those enshrined rights, or regardless of their legal existence, the political never fully disappears. Thus, I do not claim that authoritarian states are defined by their lack of citizenship rights, but rather that the complex dynamics of expectations and desires between state and citizens is ever-present, if often barely visible. Even if insipient rights exist in authoritarian contexts, they often have to be inferred; as they tend to be hidden behind the public transcripts. In a democratic context such struggles tend to be more visible.86 and the ruled” (2015:120). The emotional and imaginative aspects of state-citizen dynamics should then not be ignored. 84 This is not to say that authoritarian states, and actors within it, may not use the language of a social contract. 85 Marshall himself appears to have been skeptical of such an understanding. Instead he “points to the unified nature of citizenship and the need to consider civil, political and social rights in relation to, not isolation from, each other” (Lister 2005:473). According to Lister, Marshall understood both that the different rights need each other to be fully realized, and that they tend to “spill over” into different context and spheres (2005:474). 86 Even in a democratic context, however, a certain notion of obedience may be inherent in the concept of citizenship itself. As Etienne Balibar writes, “the idea of the rights of the citizen, at the very moment of his emergence, thus institutes an historical figure that is no longer the

50 | Chapter Two

In the context of this study, citizenship is more than a set of formal rights or normative categories, nor is it simply an outcome of a social contract but rather a host of expectations and practices. As Zayani writes, “citizenship de- scribes certain dispositions, practices, and activities through which individuals attempt to renegotiate—even if unwittingly at times —their relationship with the state” (2015:18-19). These are never completely captured, nor controlled, by the state but form part of the larger political imaginaries. This study understands the state-citizen dynamics as comprising central parts of the political imaginary of dictatorship and democracy, constituting both explicit and implicit articulations of the way things ought to be. These need not be explicitly articulated in political terms but are also embedded in more quotidian expressions.

State-Citizenship Dynamics as a Cluster of Promises Political imaginaries of citizens are articulated in a multitude of ways, often tied to diffuse expectations and desires. The assumption here is that, as Gupta writes, “Without understanding the emotional ties between citizens and the state, we cannot understand how people respond to state initiatives and actions”(1996:275).87 This is what Krupa & Nugent term state affect: the hopes, expectations, desires and disappointments that underlie an understanding of what the state is and does, or should do in relation to its citizens (2015:14). In focusing on desires, I am following Lauren Berlant, who holds that, “When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us” (2011:24). Desires articulate hopes and expectations that are directed towards “someone or something.”88 In terms of citizenship, those expectations are primarily directed towards – and against – the state. This can be understood as analogous to Althusser’s interpellation process (2006). By responding to the subjectus, and not yet the subjectum” (2016:19)86 We are always both citizen and subject, or citizen-subject. As Isin makes clear, “Each claim that a citizen articulates against an authority puts her under demands of that authority” (2017:517, italics in original). Citizenship is the ways in which claims, expectations and desires are articulated both against and under the state. 87 Similarly, Wydra writes that “People are not only citizens of a state or members of a party but also emotional beings, whose lives are affected by existential crises, which in turn, shape their memories, desires, and beliefs” (2007:198). 88 I do not attempt to uncover hidden or unconscious desires. I use desire, not in a Lacanian sense, as a lack beyond representation or symbolization (Fink 1997), but in a “straightforward” way; as another word for stated and expressed wants. I do not make any assumptions as to whether desires can be “truly” realized. Furthermore, whether desire can be, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) claim, a generative and revolutionary force, depends completely on context.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 51 modernizing promise of the state, and articulating their desires and expectations towards the state, citizens come at the same time to confirm its authority.89 This approach is less about a set of clearly articulate rights and more about understanding expectation of a “dignified life”; what it means can, and does, vary. Expectations on the state include many things; the provider of modernity; protection provided by the state from society itself; the bringer of everyday, symbolic, and epistemological order that fills the “empty space of power.” The focus on expectations and desires should not obscure the fact that citizenship is also fundamentally about resources, whether material or not. As Turner writes “citizenship is inevitably and necessarily bound up with the problem of the unequal distribution of resources in society” (1996:39). Here I move further away from Lefort, who neglects dimensions of non-political dynamics. I suggest that the economic context and material expectations play a role in the way people come to understand themselves as citizens; it can add to the frustration and sense of uncertainty, with direct effects on the democratization process. As I explain in greater detail below, these dynamics may play themselves out differently among different groups. Furthermore, citizenship in Tunisia, like in so many other countries, remains in many ways wedded to a gendered notion of citizenship premised on the promise of a certain “modernity”, encompassing education and a stable, preferably state-employment, for men (Ferguson & Li 2018:1). I will explore this gendered nature of citizenship and how expectations towards the state are understood in masculine terms. This view of state-citizenship dynamics entails an understanding of the context; where and how symbolic dimensions of power are articulated, and by whom. This study approaches these desires and expectations through narratives, practices – such as waiting – and what political anthropologist Michael Herzfeld refers to as cultural intimacies, “the self-stereotypes that insiders express ostensibly at their own collective expense” (2016:7). Cultural intimacies are quotidian articulations in response to nation-state myths, expressed via stories, or often-repeated phrases and tropes of post-transition Tunisia that form parts of political imaginaries. What this means is that just as the narratives and actions of the young men that I follow connect to the state, they also point to a “cluster of promises”,

89 As I suggest in chapter four, it may be less the ideological content of this interpellation that is significant but the process itself. One where the state calls upon the individual.

52 | Chapter Two to expectations of what citizenship does and should mean. It is these expectations and everyday constructions of citizenship that this thesis will explore. This approach also emphasizes the importance of public space, both as abstract sites where citizenship is articulated, and as concrete spaces where citizenship is performed through waiting.

Public Space One way in which this thesis attempts to tie together discussions on democracy and state-citizenship through the lives of young men, is by looking at public space.90 The study holds that investigating the concept of the public is central in understanding democratization at the level of experience as well as the relationships between state and citizens. As I have explained, public space is where the “empty place” of democracy comes to be realized, but its lived physical dimensions are important too. If there is a consensus over the claim that public space is important to democratization, and democracy more broadly, there is little agreement over how, and what, public space is, or does. Discussions on public space and the public sphere are spread out across a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines and are amorphous and difficult to pin down. Most of the discussions are focused on the West, and most of them take as their point of reference Ha- bermas’s classic The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, if only to critique it. The work is both descriptive and normative, at once a historical elaboration of the origins of publicness, a critique of its actual distortions and a roadmap towards its realization. In the decades following the book’s publication, the concept of the public sphere has lost none of its popularity, and discussions surrounding it show no sign of abating.91 One of the central contributions of the concept was to shift the focus on democracy from merely formal dimensions such as elections and institutions, to more informal aspects that include spaces of communicative engagements. Following Lefort, I understand public space as the necessary condition for democracy. Public space, here, is the ability to speak without fear of state repression. This “right to speak” is never an absolute right, it is not the legal

90 Like Arendt and Lefort, I make no distinction between public space and public sphere; arguing that the public is both abstract and concrete. 91Although Habermas himself revised aspects of his arguments, this book remains a central starting point for much discussion on these topics. As Kellner writes “Few books have been so systematically discussed, criticized, and debated, or inspired so much theoretical and historical analysis” (2000:5).

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 53 aspects of public space that is central in my discussions, but rather “what it does.” Public space becomes important in post-revolutionary Tunisia because, according to Habermas and Lefort, it is where dialogue and communication happens, but also according to Arendt, because it is an arena for visibility and action. It is where norms, ideals and expectations are expressed and articulated. As a sphere outside of direct state-control, it is essential for democracy and it comes to articulate political imaginaries. The thesis also understands public space, or spaces; for they are plural, as important in their concrete, physical everydayness. Treating cafés as important forms of public space, I seek to investigate what happens in these spaces and how that reflects both continuities and discontinuities of state- citizen dynamics in a post-authoritarian context. Furthermore, following Nancy Fraser, I understand some cafés in Kasserine and Gafsa as “counter- public arenas of dissent”; places in which the voiceless can be heard and by extension develop identities. These are places for formulating agendas and goals, even when these are not always in the name of the public good or conceived to be based on pure reason (1996). Public spaces are also highly gendered, in which exclusion happens; being visible does not always mean having a voice.

Being Seen The lack of discussion on space in the work of, and on, Habermas has led to a common distinction between the public sphere as an abstract space, and public space as the physical manifestation of that abstraction. Cultural geographer Don Mitchell writes:

The public sphere in Habermas’ sense is a universal, abstract realm in which democracy occurs. The materiality of this sphere is, so to speak, immaterial to its functioning. Public space, meanwhile, is material. It constitutes an actual site, a place, a ground within and from which political activity flows. (1995:117)92

Despite what has developed into two separate fields—public sphere studies and public spaces studies—scholars have attempted to bridge the gap between the two. In trying to bring together discussions on space and sphere many have taken inspiration from Arendt, whose work Habermas is indebted to.

92 This distinction is only partially accurate, since the public sphere that Habermas talks about clearly has material dimensions even if they do not take center stage. This is true particularly of the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Even if the work does not emphasize the physical dimension of the public sphere, neither is it a purely abstract realm.

54 | Chapter Two

Arendt speaks of the public space rather than the public sphere. For Haber- mas, the development of the bourgeois public sphere signaled a new and important step, away from the embodied nature of the aristocratic public, and towards one in which rational debate rules. Thus, the speaker became less central than what was spoken. By contrast, it is precisely the embodied nature of the public that Arendt praised in its old Greek form. It is specifically the loss of this physicality that Arendt bemoans, by claiming that the modern public space has been swallowed up by the social. In place of performance, presence and action, contemporary public space treats citizens as disembodied and abstract entities, or as creatures most at home in the intimate private sphere.93 For Arendt, the agora, the public, is central in its physicality: to see and be seen. For Habermas, it was discourse and not action that defined the public sphere. Yet, as many have argued, this misses something important:

Inattention to the action dimension of judgment means the citizen is inevitably a spectator. In contrast, the full range of practical action highlights the largely pragmatic, problem-solving motives that often move people in the public sphere, in both formal and informal contexts. (Boyte 1992:346)

While, for Habermas, the shift from collective action to collective discourse forms the central difference between ancient and modern publics, for Arendt performance remains the key to an emancipatory public. It is only physical presence and public visibility that guarantees one’s place in the public, “without publicity one cannot be fully human” (Kilian 1998:119). To be present, to be seen, is in Arendt’s famous phrase, to have “the right to have rights” (Arendt 1958). For Arendt, to be excluded from the public is to be effaced from the polity and in such a context citizenship is null and void.94 What a focus on public space emphasizes, is issues of practice, as well as of concrete access and visibility. Following Arendt, I hold that what kinds of public spaces exist, who is seen and who has access to them, is important, and this study will attempt to untangle some of the implications of presence. Pub- lic spaces are thus both what I study as well as where I study.

93 For both thinkers, the potential of the public has been greatly reduced by the forces of modernity. 94 While debates still rage over the degree to which Arendt’s vision is compatible with modern forms of democracy, with its emphasis on the private realm, Arendt’s formulations of the public continue to inspire scholarship on the subject.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 55

Bracketing and Contestation Besides visibility, two connected aspects that are understood as central to both public space and the public sphere are, what sociologist Carl Cassegård refers to as, “bracketing and contestation.” Cassegård writes of bracketing:

[P]ublicness arises when egalitarian arenas of interaction are created by a systematic bracketing of inequality. Publics, in other words, arise when participants systematically disregard real differences and relations of dependency in order to create a semblance of equality between participants. (2014:692, italic in original)

Bracketing of differences is a precondition for both the rational communication imagined by Habermas and Arendt’s space for action. For Arendt and Habermas, the ability of public space to “bracket” inequality is of central importance. Similarly, Lefort’s idea of public space assumes that power belongs to “no one.” But the ability of public space to bracket difference raises the question: who is included in this space of as if equality? Scholars, like Nancy Fraser, have criticized Habermas’s account for being too focused on the concept of a single “bourgeois masculinist” public space. Such a space is often excluding, as Fraser writes; “A discourse of publicity touting accessibility, rationality, and the suspension of status hierarchies is itself deployed as a strategy of distinction” (1990:60). Fraser, instead, argues that there existed and exists marginalized spaces where groups are able to articulate their counter- claims and demand greater inclusion. Cassegård terms this “contestation”; which entails “openly challenging exclusion and inequality” (2014:692). I draw on Fraser’s notion of subaltern counter-publics, in order to emphasize the excluding dimensions of public spaces as well as the importance of alternative spaces of contestation.

OPTICS OF DEMOCRATIZATION In the version of democratization that I have laid out, the very process of opening up the public discourse and the forming of a public space gives rise to a growing sense of uncertainty. In this Lefortian reading, conflict and disagreement is inherent in democracy. Democracy is a constant movement towards definition, one that entails a movement away from the closed public space and empty rituals, even as it also leads to great uncertainty over the political symbols and rituals of everyday life. People may now see and express more clearly what they believe is wrong, but in doing so they also come to

56 | Chapter Two undermine the organizing myths that kept the symbolic order in place. De- mocratization in this rendering is an experience of profound uncertainty over matters previously taken for granted, and fundamental aspects of life, which can be studied ethnographically. Part of the aim of the study is to clarify how this crisis operates, is expressed and experienced. I suggest that there are many dimensions tied to the experience of uncertainty, not all of which are connected to public speech in this Lefortian sense. I claim that the democratic crisis needs to be put in the context of an experience of a wider socio-economic crisis, and a crisis in the relationship between state and citizens. I argue that contemporary and historic dynamics of state- citizen relations are central in understanding the particularities of that experience. A standard narrative of democratization may hold that any uncertainty that flows out of the opening of public speech would over time, and given the right conditions, recede, stabilize and consolidate into democratic certainty (or in more standard vocabulary; democratic legitimacy). A Lefortian perspective would suggest, instead, that this uncertainty remains, even if hidden. My analytical perspective is agnostic over whether this is the case, and yet suggests that at least for some groups, and under certain conditions, this uncertainty may be exacerbated and thus remaining visible. It appears reasonable to assume that the uncertainty of democratization will play itself out differently, perhaps radically differently, among different groups, individuals and contexts. Thus, where and among what groups one chooses to study this experience is of paramount importance. This is not only a methodological issue, but a conceptual one as well. In order to approach the experience of democratization via political imaginaries and public space, this thesis takes an ethnographically informed perspective and studies young men in the margins. The thesis argues that experience of democratization needs to incorporate where these experiences happen and understands young men in the margins as optics from which to understand social and political change and continuity. By studying young men in Kasserine and Gafsa, it takes a view from the margins and seeks to approach democratization through the eyes of some of its most vulnerable and volatile subjects. Waiting, it is argued, is a main mode of existence for marginalized young men. Whether by choice or compulsion their very presence is disruptive and their waiting signals a profound shift of social norms and values in that it reflects a condition where the path towards adulthood is out of reach. When I say that young men in the margins constitute the optic with which to explore wider social dynamics, what is meant is that certain aspects of post-

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 57 revolutionary dynamics of state-citizen relations in Tunisia become particularly clear, particularly stark, through this prism. Young men in Kasserine and Gafsa represent a double marginalization: of both space and time. They are both outsiders, the losers of the status quo, and insiders that shake the system. The choice of an interpretive approach to young men in the margins is driven by the assumption that it is among this group that crisis of democratization becomes especially visible. It also among this groups that the challenges citizenship are the most evident as highly gendered and affected by a crisis of masculinity, induced by neoliberal policies. The following section will lay out why I believe that young men from the margins are particularly valuable optics with which to view democratization and its connection to wider socio-economic dynamics. The reasons for this are both general and particular to the context of this study.

Young Men Young men in the margins are the prime subjects of waiting, which I argue, should be understood in relation to and as articulations of citizen-state dynamics. Young men in the margins are situated where the crisis of state-citizenship is readily apparent, and visible, often articulated as a crisis of masculinity and tied to neoliberal governance. Similarly, young men in the margins, as the group that instigated the revolution, are also where the expectations and disappointments of democratization are particularly clear. Young men from the interior region, the thesis argues, inhabit a particularly marginal and yet hardly powerless position in transitional Tunisia. In the national, and state narratives, they are treated as both revolutionary subjects, heroes against dictatorship, and as threats to the transition process. By going beyond narratives of youth as threats or heroes, this thesis instead focuses on their waiting as an inability to realize established norms and expectations, particularly of masculinity.95

Waiting and Liminality Youth is a slippery category. While biological age is a dimension of youth, it cannot be reduced to it, but also needs to be understood contextually as well

95 As I write in the methods section; the focus on young men, is also partly an issue of access.

58 | Chapter Two as socially.96 Youth is connected to situations, to fertility and reproduction as well as ways of being. 97 As Bayat writes:

“youthfulness” signifies particular habitus or behavioral and cognitive dispositions that are associated with the fact of being “young”— that is, a distinct social loca- tion between childhood and adulthood, where the youngster in a relative autonomy is neither totally dependent (on adults) nor independent, and is free from being responsible for others. (2010:16) 98

Youth is particular in its in-between state. At the same time, the transition from youth to adulthood that characterizes modern narratives of adolescence, has become more and more difficult to realize. The consequence has been that long-term waiting has become a more defining part of young people’s lived experiences, particularly in the developing world (Bayat 2010; Weiss 2009). Many youths across the global South have acquired education; even so, they remain stuck in insecure jobs in the informal sector, underemployed or unemployed (Jeffery 2010; della Porta 2015). Many are unable to marry, form families, and complete the transition to adulthood (Jeffery 2010; Stepputat 2013).99 If the lives of many youths across the globe, including those I study, are defined by waiting and a sense that “nothing is happening”, there is, I

96 Sarnecki in her work on youth in a favela in Rio de Janeiro explicates the complicated relationship between youth and age: “To some extent, to be young in Nova Cidade is related to situations rather than actual age. At the same time, to be defined as young in Nova Cidade, depends on whether a person has children or not/and is married or not [..]Youth is related to looks, tastes, style and ways of behaving, moving and speaking more generally” (2016:29). 97 The concept of youth is itself rather recent and modern. Much research on youth builds on Mannheim’s classic article from 1923 The Problem of Generations. Mannheim looks at youth as a generational group connected through the lens of shared experiences, inter-generational dynamics and their propensity for change. Mannheim singles out youths as particular in that “youth are endowed with particular capacities to perceive social change and destabilize the social order, and thus the potential aside in these processes[..]As such, youth are potential agents of social rejuvenation” (Rennick 2015:31). The degree to which the youth of a particular context will experience a shared collective consciousness and act as a coherent force, depends on the particular structural and historical contexts and is not a forgone conclusion. 98 Similarly, Cole argues that youth, “are less embedded than adults in older networks of patronage and exchange,” and thus less constrained by old patterns of behavior (2004: 575-76). 99 This is sometimes tied to the “youth bulge” as a consequence of increased birth-rates across Africa and the Middle East (Szymon & Van der Heijden 2011). More broadly this phenomenon is often connected to the increase in educational opportunities in the developing world in combination with “neoliberal” reforms that reduce opportunities for secure, in particular, public sector employment.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 59 argue, something profoundly disruptive in this waiting, even in its most boring moments.100 Youth, in being not-yet-adult, puts them in a precarious position, yet also a potentially powerful one: as agents of change and renewal. In the previously discussed “rites of passage” described by anthropologist Van Gennep (1960), and developed by Victor Turner (1969), liminality is a central concept. Lim- inality refers to situations of being “betwixt and between” and traditionally serves as the process by which the young become adults through their temporary removal, socially if not spatially, from the standard norms of society only to be returned as newly forged members of the community.101 Yet, under current conditions this removal without reintegration has become the norm for many young and long-term waiting instead becomes a defining feature of many youth. They are stuck, so to speak, in liminality. A key part of the liminal experience is a sense of disorientation, where old patterns and habits are broken down, something that I argue becomes exacerbated through the uncertainty that defines the democratic transition.102

Power over Time Waiting is awareness of time, it is “having time without wanting it” (Schweizer 2005:777) As such, waiting can be construed as a form of powerlessness, and to make someone wait a form of domination. As the sociologist Michael Flaherty writes, “No one volunteers for waiting and boredom […]unrewarded and endless waiting signals subordination and powerlessness” (2014:181). Similarly, sociologist Javier Auyero argues, “Domination works, we contend, through yielding to the power of others; and it is experienced as

100 This tension between youth as a future-oriented state and being stuck, is increasingly generalized and is not confined to only the developing world. As Donatella della Porta writes about youth in Portugal “this generation, which deﬁnes itself as ‘without a future’, is characterized by high levels of unemployment and under-employment in underpaid and unprotected positions” (2015:460). Or as Silva writes about the United States, “traditional markers of adulthood— leaving home, completing school, achieving financial independence, getting married, and having children—have become increasingly delayed, disorderly, reversible, and even forgone in the latter half of the twentieth century” (2012:505). Youth is increasingly associated with precariousness, and a condition that Schielke terms “living in the future tense” (2015). 101 Liminal periods are often short and disruptive, but important. Thomassen writes “liminal spaces and moments are key to personal and social development, anywhere in the world. It is via the liminal that persons and groups are taken apart, recomposed and regenerated” (2014:38). 102 Liminality is a useful concept, but also risky in that everything can appear as liminal. I use liminality as an in-between situation between two known states. In other words, I disagree with Thomassen, and do not consider “modernity” a liminal space.

60 | Chapter Two a waiting time: waiting hopefully and then frustrated for others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others” (2012:4). Who is made to wait, and how, reveals important clues to larger power-dynamics. Yet waiting is rarely straightforward. Fundamentally, waiting implies waiting for something, or someone, it conveys expectations, desires and hopes. Time is most keenly felt when the present is no longer in sync with the future, when it is felt at all, it is felt as a disruption.103 A sense of waiting then, an awareness of time, is also when our expectations of time come to light, it is a refusal of the present and as such highly political. It is in the waiting of young men that some of the expectations of the state, of citizenship, of democracy, become the most visible. It is also where gendered aspects come to the forefront, for the question is not simply what is waited for, but equally who is allowed to wait. I treat waiting not simply as absence, or as defined by passivity, but understand it rather as an active process. It entails engaging in what Flaherty terms time work, defined as, “The intrapersonal and interpersonal effort directed toward provoking or preventing various temporal experiences […]This concept implicates the agentic micromanagement of one’s own involvement with self and situation” (2011:11). While constrained by social structures, Flaherty stresses the agency of individuals to manage their experience of time. I explore the ways that young men attempt to alleviate their waiting in various ways, even as they may come to reinforce their marginal position. The ubiquity of cafés is an expression of this waiting. So are the protests and demonstrations that break out with regular frequency, and attempts to migrate, both to richer coastal cities as well as to Europe. Furthermore, as I write in chapter five, liminality means opportunities for new and creative forms of what Turner calls communitas. Youth, of course, is not the only category of people for which waiting is a dominant theme. Many researchers on the everyday note how modern life has become almost unbearably dull.104 Yet, as Frederiksen & Dalsgård explain:

103 Bourdieu writes “Time (or at least what we call time) is really experienced when the quasi- automatic coincidence between expectations and chances, illiso and lusiones, expectations of the world which is there to fulfill them is broken” (2000:208). 104 Gardiner writes: “Everyday life often takes on the form of an ‘organized passivity’; it has become alienated and degraded to such an extent that we dream of escaping it in myriad day- dreams, fantasies of metaphysical transcendence, and religious chimeras of every kind” (2002:14).

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 61

Although young people are not the only ones to experience time as a problem, the category of youth offers a particularly sharp lens through which to explore how matters of time affect daily life. “Youth” as a category is often temporally defined as a transitory period between childhood and adulthood, and hence young people are often forced to reckon with the future in relation to their present and to their social positions. (2014:3)

Youth then is a particularly interesting group to investigate in order to understand change and the lack of it. While marginalized youths are hardly alone in experiencing intense periods of boredom and disappointment, for few other groups does it play such a central part of their existence.

Unbidden Revolutionaries According to Hashemi (2015), there have been two main approaches to studying disadvantaged youth in the Middle East and North Africa. The first is affective and holds that “socioeconomically disadvantaged Middle Eastern youth are more prone to radicalization and thereby constitute a threat to national and international security” (2015:1), the assumption being that they are acting irrationally. The second follows a rational-choice approach that sees youth as engaging in “deliberate calculation of means and ends in order to attain the power and wealth necessary for upward mobility” (2015:1). Hash- emi herself, while rejecting notions of disaffected youth engaging in irrational behavior, pushes for a bounded-rationality approach that considers the importance of context and culture, and holds that marginalized youth “make rational choices and engage in rational acts, but within certain cultural bounds” (2015:3). While I believe it to be important to view actors as imbedded in social contexts and cultural norms, what an overemphasis on norms misses is the degree to which youth are participating in the creation of new norms, new activities and new goals. At the same time, I have attempted to seriously consider the constraints and limits experienced by youth. I believe that the focus on rational calculations and norms misses the temporal dimension, the dimension of waiting. As Johnson-Hanks writes:

Waiting can be more positive[..]or more negative[..]but either way it stands in dramatic contrast to the view of means-ends rationality that has been taken for granted since Max Weber. Whereas means-ends rationality posits action in which the actor selects a specific desired end and then uses the available means as effi- ciently as possible to achieve it, this judicious opportunism is a mode of action in

62 | Chapter Two

which no specific ends can be formulated, only, perhaps, vague notions of what constitutes a good life or what would be a promising chance, and in which the primary activity is apparent inaction. Time loses a sense of before and after because intentional projects are impossible. (2014:30)

Hanks’ focus on waiting brings an important dimension to the otherwise sim- plified distinction between means-end rationality and cultural norms. Unlike Hanks, however, I do not see inaction, apparent or otherwise, as the primary dimension of waiting, nor that intentional projects are impossible. Marginal- ized youth I argue can neither be reduced to rational purposeful actors, nor simply seen as reproducing prevalent cultural norms. Due to their particular position, waiting is their main mode of existence and they are in a perpetual liminal time. This means that their inability to reproduce social norms needs to be considered. They are what I term unbidden revolutionaries. Their very presence is disruptive and their waiting, purposeful or not, has profound effects on politics as well as established social norms.

Neoliberalism In the context of marginalized youth, their waiting is often said to have grown out of, what I somewhat hesitantly refer to as, neoliberalism.105 Neoliberalism can mean specific policies, associated most infamously with the so-called Structural Adjustment Programs, pursued with vigor by the IMF and the World Bank during the 1980s and 90s. It can connote a more general shift away from welfare-state focused forms of capitalism to a more market driven and austerity fixated logic articulated by Frederick Hayek and then put into practice by Milton Friedman and his disciples progressively from the late 1970s. According to Wendy Brown it is an even more diffuse process, a “governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic” (2005:10). 106 In relation to the state, it means a change in the role

105 The term neoliberalism has become so ubiquitous and, perhaps, overused that it is hard to find any clear and coherent definitions. In fact, the assertion of the nebulous nature of the term has now become a part of its vocabulary. It can often appear as Auerbauch writes that “neoliberalism is just another dirty word, capable of representing any number of injustices in the world loosely attributed to globalization” (2006:48). There may be some truth to this claim. My main aim in using the term is to highlight dimensions of young men’s experience with the state and citizenship, that are not inherently part of the tension of democratization itself, but nonetheless come to amplify some of its most troubling aspects. 106 It can also be understood as a larger process of both ideology and practice “to intensify the abstractions inherent in capitalism itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 63 of the state and the relationship between the citizens and the state; away from a more redistributive role to one where the people are left to their own devices.107 Particularly in the developing world, scholars claim this has meant that “states are increasingly unable to perform their redistributive role: the resources they are able to extract and distribute are becoming smaller” (Sharma & Gupta 2009:22). It also means states no longer attempt to do so. Studies on these neoliberal processes have often shown how vulnerable sections of society have been particularly hard struck, as access to basic public goods becomes a matter of financial resources or, just as often, connections. The privatization of the state accentuates inequalities and embeds corruption into the system in increasingly perverse ways (Harvey 2007; Ismail 2006). The state, in the way it comes to be understood and practiced, is increasingly about “tutoring people to build their capacities and become self-dependent, responsible citizens who can take care of their own welfare and govern themselves” (Sharma & Gupta 2006:21). Neoliberalism is at once a state logic and a reconfiguring of human relations. This mode of state-citizen relations, is understood to be aimed at creating a new kind of subjectivity: “In neoliberal discourse, subjectivities are shaped by an economic rationality of entrepreneurship and competition, in and through which individuals govern themselves” (Akçalı 2016:6). This means that the disciplining and governing of the self becomes the primary citizen virtue. The state becomes less a vehicle of redistribution and more an enabler of entrepreneurial capacities.108 Lefort, while not using the term neoliberalism, talked of a new “invisible ideology” that replaced the earlier bourgeoisie ideology. This new ideology is based on the “myth of communication”, where “everything is in principle sayable, visible, intelligible, for such is indeed the effect of the occultation of division: the image of an unlimited discourse in which everything would become transparent” (Lefort 1986:229). While operating within a “democratic”

replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:305). 107 The welfare state is “replaced” by a complex web of governance, where the state and state actors are present but not always the most influential, among various policy experts (Miller and Rose 2008). 108 One becomes a consumer rather than a citizen; a consumer prudently choosing among a host of options rather than demand equal treatment or access. Relations between people, and with the self, become fully mediated via economic logics and competition, and people begin to act as if every sphere of life is a market. As Ong writes, there is “a regulatory aspect to neoliberalism whereby economics is extended to cover all aspects of human behavior pertaining to citizenship” (1996:739).

64 | Chapter Two open space, power itself becomes invisible. As such it appears to have dimensions of authoritarian power in that it makes conflicts impossible to express. Neoliberalism, crucially, does not entail that the state has disappeared or withered away. As will be explored in the empirical chapters, the neoliberal shift and its concordant crisis is not straightforward or unambiguous. While neoliberalism entails a rearticulating of state-citizenship, expectations and resistance remains. If one can talk of a crisis produced by neoliberalism, the crisis is one of divergence between expectations and experiences. The state continues to demand obeisance and yet access to its resources becomes increasingly obfuscated behind layers of connections and crony capitalism. As I expound on below, to the degree we can think of experiences of neoliberalism, it is primarily expressed as increased corruption, the perceived threat of becoming “left behind” and in terms of a breakdown of the breadwinner model. Without taking that experience into consideration, understanding young men and their relationship to the state becomes difficult.109 Even without claiming the Tunisian state to be close to any form of pure neoliberal state, this study is interested in how neoliberal governance comes to interact with democratization at the level of experience. This means that neoliberalism needs to be contextualized in order to be understood, both in terms of where one looks, but also at what groups.110

Crisis of Masculinity The connection between youth, time and waiting is one reason why youth are so often presented as a social and political problem, today more than ever: “youth are at times described as the new proletariat of the 21st century[..]believed by many to be a dangerous recipe that leads to political instability and civil wars, especially in the global South” (Bayat & Herrera 2010:4).111 If the term youth is used broadly, to categorize dangerous elements, imagined or

109 I am aware that this rendering of neoliberalism is analytically imprecise. As I discuss below, the primary purpose of using the term is to distinguish between experiences of crisis tied to democratization and experiences of crises tied to this larger ‘neoliberal’ process of precaritiza- tion. 110 Wendy Brown herself cautions: “neoliberalism takes diverse shapes and spawns diverse content and normative details, even different idioms. It is globally ubiquitous, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself in space and over time” (2005:21). 111 This image of dangerous youth is found across the globe, “They are the focus of moral panics and appear regularly in the media in the guise of " folk devils" (S. Cohen 1972): the gun-toting high-schooler, the Palestinian rock-thrower, the devious computer hacker, the fast-talking rapper, the ultra-fashionable Japanese teenager teetering on platform heels. Youth in these incar- nations personify a given society's deepest anxieties and hopes about its own transformation. (Maira Soep 2005:xv)

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 65 otherwise, the language of youth is highly gendered. When academics and authorities talk of the connection between youth and social ills, such as civil wars, crime, religious extremism, sexual harassment and loitering, it is almost always male youths that are the target of these social and political anxieties. In the scholarly literature this “crisis of masculinity” is often tied to the shift towards neoliberal governance discussed above and is understood to have hit young, particularly working-class or marginalized men especially hard (Walker & Roberts 2018). The clearest expression of this crisis is a struggle for secure and stable employment and the concordant uncertainty over the future. In many parts of the world, wage labor of various arrangements has come to form an important aspect of modern masculinity, particularly via the notion of the male breadwinner (Ferguson 2013:228). And yet the shift from industrial labor and secure, state employment towards flexible and insecure jobs, has meant a radical reduction in the ability to realize such goals. As Andersson & Beckman writes:

[L]abor market has thus undergone a radical process of ﬂexibilization—sometimes also referred to as a process of feminization (Standing 1999). Working conditions resemble those that women, historically speaking, were, and often still are, subjected to: low wages, irregular and insecure jobs, and a lack of strong unions. (2018:103)

This has also meant, for men, an increased difficulty in acquiring the necessary economic and social capital for marriage and respectability. The crisis of masculinity, while material, is tied then to the inability of attaining social recognition as an adult (male):

Historically, entry into paid work served as a ‘rite of passage’ for young men—a key waypoint in the transition into adulthood. Through carrying out particular types of work, men have ‘performed’ and articulated different constructions of masculinity, and through working and earning money they have carried out their historically constructed role as fathers and providers. (Nixon 2018:54)

In the West, the focus is often on young men from working class backgrounds, or immigrants, that are unable to take advantage of the opportunities of a post-industrial economy. In the South, however, studies have shown that educated, unemployed men are also often categorized as “problems”, and that increasingly a university degree is no guarantee to secure employment (Bayat & Herrera 2010). As will be discussed in chapter four, the political economy

66 | Chapter Two of Tunisia has seen a large increase in the number of unemployed young men with university educations. In marginal regions, like Kasserine and Gafsa, the path towards adulthood has been historically associated by a state that can provide secure state employment and thus enable biological and social reproduction. Because of the decline of this state-led developmentalism, the habits of waiting are understood as a highly gendered crisis of masculinity. Instead of the breadwinner model, where the women “wait” and men were understood as “active”, the men now are stuck in their own forms of waiting.112 This male waiting often takes place in public. Waiting is both an expression of a highly gendered social economy, where women often work at home or in low- paying and back-breaking jobs, as well as reinforcing the logic of public space as the place of men. It is this waiting for (male) adulthood that is manifested, and that this study will investigate in connection to democratization.

Masculine Experience Paul Amar (2011), notes how “masculinity in crisis” narratives are being increasingly used by analysts and governments to explain the various problems connected to young men in the Middle East and beyond. According to Amar these discourses on masculinity hide and misrepresent more than they reveal. Without reducing young men only to problems, this thesis wishes to explore these tensions within masculinity, particularly in the way it connects to man- ners that young men attempt to position themselves in relation to the state and themselves as citizens. Masculinity in this study is understood, in line with R. W. Connell, as “configurations of practice structured by gender relations. They are inherently historical; and their making and remaking is a political process affecting the balance of interests in society and the direction of social change” (2005:44). According to Connell, masculinities are always multiple, dependent on context yet organized hierarchically, and they articulate a patriarchal logic of gender dominance:

[M]asculinity is not a static archetype but rather that masculinities are social constructs iteratively produced by the actors seeking to embody them, as well as by the discourses, spaces, and ﬂows of power within which they operate. (Gahman 2018:244)

112 The fact that this breadwinner model was never particularly widespread in practice, does not necessarily diminish its power as a normatively desired model.

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Much of the masculinity studies that take Connell as their starting point, are interested in mapping various forms of so-called “hegemonic masculinities” that occupy “the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable” (Connell 2005:76). This study is agnostic over the existence of such “hegemonic masculinities”, but takes Connell’s notion of multiple and unstable masculinities as its starting point and looks at the way masculinities are tied to democratization and neoliberalism. Considerably more scholarly work has been devoted to capturing the experience of living under neoliberalism and its crisis of masculinity, than experiences of democratization or democracy. For working-class or precarious men, the decline in industrial labor and the rise of networks of crony capitalists, has meant that, on the level of experience, the road to a secure life has become less transparent (Nixon 2018; Silva 2012; Walker & Roberts 2018). Samueli Schielke, who studied marginalized young men in contemporary Egypt, argues that the path towards economic success is experienced as less an effect of individual discipline and more opaque networks of corruption, connections and fate (2015:123). The paradox is that even as neoliberal narratives come to emphasize the importance of “technologies of the self”, the connection between education, labor and success has become less clear. While for many young men in the margins employment has become more out of reach, a neoliberal logic, it is argued, entails an internalization of responsibility towards the self; “Neoliberal imperatives, then, ensure that inequality is legitimized by making clear that the poor and the socially immobile are to blame for their plight, having failed to work hard enough to achieve the desired material gains” (Walker & Roberts 2018:1). Thus, while the expectations of breadwinner roles for young men remain in place and the ability to realize them is greatly reduced, the responsibility for failure to achieve respectability is laid on the individual. The inability to find stable employment becomes translated into a failure of “becoming a man”:

This forces men both to assume sole responsibility for breadwinning and to link any failure to do so with an overall deﬁciency in masculinity. No allowance is made for the inherent structural bias of neoliberal capitalism that severely limits the earning capacity of the most deprived. Rather, individuals are blamed for their personal shortcomings as if everyone started out on a level playing ﬁeld, placing the majority of men in a particularly invidious situation. (Harris 2018:36)

Schematically, we could say that the neoliberal crisis is one of unemployment, the inability to secure a “good life” and of being stuck in liminality. In the

68 | Chapter Two case of the young men this is expressed as a crisis of masculinity. A neoliberal subjectivity is one where the responsibility for this liminality and failed (male) adulthood is internalized. The challenge of this thesis is to, on the level of experience, capture this sense of crisis and to distinguish it from democratic uncertainty. How is this liminality different from the liminality of democratization? We are speaking then of two kinds of crisis, both tied to power and state-citizenship; one of a larger democratic uncertainty, and one a neoliberal crisis of masculinity. How these two interact and how to distinguish them, as experiences, are part of the aim of the study.

Margins Waiting is fundamentally a relationship to time. Yet there are important dimensions of spatiality to waiting. If waiting and boredom is an increased aspect of modern life across the globe, it is certainly distributed unequally, across generations, social groups and regions. Waiting has its own geography of space. Some places are experienced, by both its inhabitants and outsiders, as spaces in which “nothing happens.” The places that I investigate, Kasserine and Gafsa, have particular historical dynamics in the wider context of Tunisia; as historically marginalized regions, they are places in which class is mediated by space. In Tunisia, like in many other places, the youth in margins and semi-margins have experienced an equalization of expectations even as their ability to realize them has diminished. The waiting of young men from the interior then expresses a double marginality, both of place and time.

Marginally Subversive This study understands marginality as both places and people. Marginal groups in marginal regions are studied. The term marginality is often used as a synonym for exclusion, as a space, process, or social positionality that is removed and excluded from the center, from power, from the mainstream. Ac- cording to Bayat, “the notion of ‘marginality’—whether as a social group, class, region, nation or a group of nations and regions—refers primarily to a state of poverty, deprivation and subordination” (2012:19). Bayat seeks to distinguish the term from simply exclusion and powerlessness, and instead asks, “Can marginality be a site of liberation, a locus of alternative power?” (2012:20). Bayat suggests that it can, “a marginal position may not be simply a state of powerlessness; it can prove a space for alternative norms and lives, a place of respite and counter-power, for the very excluded and self-excluded”

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(2012:14). Similarly, other scholars have considered margins and marginality as sites to study subversion of power. Hoffman et al., call these “spaces beyond the center” and argue that they can “have a high subversive potential and are capable of decisively shaping and seriously challenging centrally institutionalized forms of authoritarian governance” (2013:7). Marginality then is the position of powerlessness but also suggests potential for change. Both the concepts of marginality and youth as analytical categories have been attacked as replacing and hiding class (Mahdi 2012:133). There is undoubtedly some truth in this assertion. As I discuss in chapter four, the issue of class is not absent in Tunisia. There may, however, be reasons for talking of marginality in place of class in a context like that of Tunisia. Political economy scholars have long made the point that in post-colonial countries, class is under-developed as a lived reality, and that the relation to the state has taken the main role not only as a vehicle for redistribution but as the main creator of class (Heydemann 2007; Hinnebusch 2006). Furthermore, those at the bottom, are not working class or urban proletariat as understood in industrialized nations. Rather, as Ayubi writes, “the pseudo-proletariat, the sub-proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat” (2009:180). At the same time the “dominant” group, in terms of size and to some extent the normativity of its “desired” status, is what Ayubi (2009) and Ahmed (1985) refer to as the intermediate strata. This is less a class and more a residual category defined by its relationship to the state; the higher levels of the state apparatus are included, such as administrators, lawyers, managers, those that form part of the “bureau-technocratic bourgeoisie” (Ayubi 2009:176). Many of these formerly belonged to the “petite bourgeoisie” (Sharabi 1988). But also, the lower rungs of state employed, teachers, police or those in other ways dependent on state patronage. In the absence of a working class or independent bourgeoisie, “the intermediate strata come to achieve an inordinate importance as a social base of state power and to occupy a strategic field in the economy and politics of their countries” (Ayubi 2009:177). In the Arab World, this category rose radically in size from the period following independence to the 1970s, and still make up the largest category of those formally employed. As I discuss in chapter four, state employment is still understood as the surest way to social mobility, or today increasingly social stability, and the realization of adulthood. The marginalized are those that aspire to intermediate status but are instead “stuck” in precarity. They are the worst hit by the above discussed neoliberal shift and crisis of masculinity. Of that group, in the context of

70 | Chapter Two

Tunisia, youth from interior regions are overrepresented. Furthermore, as explained in chapter four, the political economy of Tunisia has meant that university graduates have seen a sharp reduction of employment options. In such contexts, neither class, nor distinctions between educated or uneducated are straightforwardly tied to privilege or powerlessness.113 As Ayubi writes:

Marginality is an important concept here because it deals with the lack (or limited nature) of participation not only in the political but also in the socio-economic sphere. It implies a limited (and distorted) degree of insertion into the productive system (e.g. unemployment, underemployment), as well as a limited (and distorted) degree of insertion into the consumption system and into the cultural system. (2009:181)

In a context in which unemployment is overwhelmingly an issue of youth and youth from interior regions, where unemployment rates are often double those in the coast, then at the very least it is clear that class in Tunisia is both temporalized and spatialized. While the category young men, even less than class, does not represent a coherent entity, young men nonetheless share many expectations and in many cases an inability to reach them. Thus, I maintain that space and time, meaning marginality of space and youth as a liminal category, mediate class without subsuming it, and constitute important fields of study in their own right. While a sense of grievance is shared among young men in interior regions, I also explore in chapter eight the ways in which education and other social factors condition responses to the crisis of masculinity.

Marginalizing and Marginalized A spatialized focus entails sensitivity, not just to how democratization is experienced, but also to how it is understood in relation to the local and national, between center and periphery. These peripheral places, such as Kasserine and Gafsa are defined as “spatially materialized inequality of power relations and access to material and symbolic goods that constructs and perpetuates the centers over areas that are marginalized” (Fischer-Tahir & Naumann 2013:18). The margins are both places and groups, or a position, tied to symbolic and material dimensions. As Fassin writes:

113 As I discuss in chapter 10, the dominant imaginary of the struggling Tunisian man is a khubzist, a kind of lumpenproletariat, who whether educated or not, is forced to hustle to get by.

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[I]t is in its margins, comprised at once in terms of populations, territories, and policies, that the contemporary state can best be captured—in the way that it deals with its poor and its delinquents, its immigrants and its detainees, in the manner that it administers sensitive urban neighborhoods and waiting zones at the border, correctional facilities and detention centers, in its use of practices at once opaque and spectacular, deviant, or illegal.(2015:3)

As places and people outside the normative “center”, the margins are interesting windows into the “exceptional” aspects of state-citizen dynamics. As Ramirez writes about the margins, they “are characterized in terms of absence- as zones of (national) exception that are lacking in the key institutions and orientations that are said to characterize the state as a whole” (2015:35). They are also places where certain dynamics become clearer, where the logic of state power is particularly evident, in its violence, exception, and absence, and where the potential for subversion is high. Furthermore, the young men that this thesis is concerned with in Kasserine and Gafsa do not understand themselves as simply outside of the “center”, they understand themselves as marginalized: their position is the result of an active process by which state and other actors increase this lack of access to resources and power. Marginalization is not in other words treated as merely accidents of history and geography, but a product of state policies—something that is “actively done” to the subjects of this study. This thesis studies young men’s negotiation of marginality, meaning that it looks at the ways the youth understand and seek to change this marginality in relation to the state and citizenship. Both the terms negotiation and marginality signal ambiguity. Constricted as the young men are, there is no guarantee; many strategies aimed at change may instead come to reinforce marginalization. The difficulty is to look at agency without implying that “success” is simply a product of “hard work”, divorced from the larger structural constraints. The revolution and its aftermath are both an example of the power of marginality, as well as an indication of the limits. In this thesis, I argue that this subversion of the margins is fundamentally ambiguous, and can take a host of forms, not always obviously democratic and can also come to reinforce other forms of dependence and inequalities. Furthermore, by studying young men, it becomes clear that marginality it always partial. While marginalized in a wider context of national and global inequities, the young men are also in other ways in positions of relative power, and their reactions and resistance can come to buttress prevailing gender dynamics.

72 | Chapter Two

From the South By making use of an in-depth, context-sensitive ethnographic approach, this thesis seeks to “search in the shadow” as Lisa Anderson terms it; “in the arenas of political life less well illuminated by conventional political science” (2006:210). By considering experiences of democratization in interior Tunisia and Gafsa and Kasserine, this thesis is driven by an attempt to “think from the South.” “The South” here represents positions of marginality; where Tu- nisia, interior regions, and young men all signal various forms of marginality as well as power asymmetries, both as sites of knowledge and through forms of dependence. Crucially, from my perspective “thinking from the South” does not involve rejecting mainstream or Western concepts, nor to merely emphasize differences or particularities of non-Western contexts. It is not a project of undermining “Western ontologies” or knowledge-claims. All the conceptual tools used in this study are formed within standard “Western” academic debates. Yet the study is also based on the assumption that the margins are powerful sites for interpreting and reinterpreting central social science concepts and tools. Chakrabarty, in Provincializing Europe, suggests that Europe, or the West, remains the implicit model and reference point for all theoretical constructs. As Khanani says; “knowledge from the peripheries simultaneously highlights Europe’s intellectual boundaries and cultural particularities, while breathing fresh life into the intellectual apparatus that is now a global inheritance from the Enlightenment” (2014:11). In the context of this study, what “thinking from the South” means is that by starting with an ethnographically informed perspective that focuses on everyday life rather than starting from theoretical concepts themselves, the thesis seeks to “learn” from the peripheries of Tuni- sia, and expand on, rather than replace, our understanding of established categories.114 This is done not to simply compare specific cases to Western experiences and look for inadequacies, or assume that the Tunisian experience is getting closer or further away from the Western standard. When it comes

114 I am of course aware of the large body of work that claims that we need to “decolonize” Western categories and ontologies and build or rebuild “native” or “indigenous” forms of knowledge (Smith 2013). I do not, however, claim to place myself, or this thesis, outside of established “Western” categories. If nothing else, many of these critics of “Western ontology” often continue to draw influence from “Western thinkers.” Rather than rejection, I argue that we need to incorporate the Other into our mainstream categories. See Sharabi 1988 and Dirlik 1994 for discussions on the contradictions of “anti-Enlightenment” thinkers in the Third World.

Conceptual Framework and Schematic Arguments | 73 to such central concepts as the state, democracy and citizenship, while acknowledging their Western inheritance and recognizing the power asymmetry in the way these concepts are conceptualized and realized, marginal spaces can simultaneously be treated as theoretically and practically meaningful, as centers of their own. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that there might be a contradiction in speaking of margins. The terms “margins” and “beyond the center”, poses the question; margins in relation to what? Margins assume a center, and in a Lefortian approach there may be no center and thus no margins. Democ- racy is defined by “the empty space”; power is diffused and is continually contested and it “belongs to no one.” In the context of groups in Tunisia, the continued relevance of a concept of the margins lies partly in the tension that the opening of the democratic space comes to amplify the demands of those in the margins. This process gives them a voice and simultaneously make their marginalization more visible and perhaps even more “real.” In the broader context of Tunisia’s place in the Global South, there can be little doubt that both theoretically and practically, democracy as a form of government is both blessed and burdened by its historical connection to the West. Part of democracy’s wider appeal for people, in countries like Tunisia, may lie in their mimetic relationship to the West, and all the attendant tensions that come with it. As I discuss in subsequent chapters, to be democratic is partly understood as “becoming modern.” This imitative process is not, however, perfect. Something is always lost in translation. Furthermore, it produces its own sets of complex reactions and counter-reactions. These “imperfections” produce realities that may come to challenge “our” established concepts.

SUMMARY The central aspects of the framework of the thesis are as follows. Building on Lefort, the transition from authoritarianism to democracy is understood primarily as the opening of public space, which entails destabilization on the level of political imaginaries. In an authoritarian regime, the state/father, attempts to portray itself as the sole representatives of the People. Democracy, however, means continued contestation and uncertainty, at least on the level of the symbolic, over who represents the People, and where power resides. The study posits that this unravelling of the symbolic order, this uncertainty, may

74 | Chapter Two be particularly visible and salient in the earlier stages of democracy and among marginal groups. It is in such periods and among such groups that the democratic disruptions may be most clearly captured as experience. Furthermore, the framework assumes that the form that this destabilization takes depends on previous state-citizen dynamics and is best studied via an interpretive ethnographic approach. This thesis explores young men in the interior of Tuni- sia, a category that has experienced disruptions of neoliberalism and its concordant crisis of masculinity. It becomes crucial then to investigate how the neoliberal crisis comes to interact with the democratic destabilizing of symbolic order and the ways the young men articulate and negotiate these uncertainties. Given this framework, the next chapter will provide a discussion on how experiences of young men may be captured. It also expands on some of the methodological choices and challenges of attempting to do so.

3. Methods and their Interpretations

There is something mercenary about ethnography – Allaine Cerwonka

Attention without feeling … is only a report – Mary Oliver

I leave methods to the botanists and the mathematicians. There is a point at which methods devour themselves – Franz Fanon

INTRODUCTION This study is, broadly speaking, a case study of young men in interior Tunisia. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kasserine and Gafsa. Methodologi- cally, this thesis is dedicated to an interpretive sensibility that seeks to capture experiences, understood as narratives, practices, sense and meaning making in relation to democratization and state-citizenship. If, for many forms of qualitative work “the case should stand for the population” (Gerring 2007:147) then interpretive and ethnographically driven work is more interested in context. An ethnographic approach allows for a rich and detailed exploration of the ways that words and concepts are used, understood and rooted in everyday life. The aim is contextualization, understanding and theorizing, rather than theory testing and reducing the field to variables and causal relations. Ethno- graphic work can also in the words of Burawoy “extend out” (1998:5), from micro to the macro, from the particular to the general. This thesis seeks to understand the young men’s experience of democratization, state and citizenship in relation to the literature both on the Tunisian state as well as larger theoretical discussions. This is not a straightforward process; it entails a host of philosophical, methodological and not least ethical

75 76 | Chapter Three questions. In this chapter I discuss the various aspects understood as central in evaluating interpretive ethnography.115

METHOD OF INTERPRETIVE ETHNOGRAPHY Quantitative and interpretive works have long been a mainstay of mainstream political science. Ethnographically driven research, however, remains marginal.116 What then is involved in ethnography? While debates may still rage over how to understand ethnography, like the political scientist that have begun to make use of ethnographic methods, this study understands ethnography as being near the analyzed subjects in space and time. At its most essential, ethnography means the immersion into the lives of others (Schatz 2008; Yanow 2012; Wedeen 2000). For political scientist Ed Schatz, the core aspect of ethnography is participant observation, involving “immersion in a community, a cohort, or a cluster of related subject positions” (2009:5). Political scientists Kapiszewski, MacLean & Read emphasize “gathering evidence in context – within the settings where the political decisions, events, and dynamics of interest took place or are recorded” (2015:9). Participant observation and ethnographic methods more generally have come to be criticized by anthropologists themselves in recent decades. Alt- hough I believe this “reflexive turn” provides some important correctives to earlier assumptions, this study regards ethnography as a useful tool for engaging in interpretation of social phenomena.117

115 Political scientist Peregrine Schwartz-Shea speaks of “first-order terms” in interpretive ethnography as forms of evaluative criteria. These being “Thick Description, Trustworthiness, Reflexivity, and Triangulation” (2011:101). Thick description is necessary in order to assess the soundness of the analysis, as well as to enable others to evaluate the viability to transpose the study to other contexts. Trustworthiness refers to “the many steps that researchers take throughout the research process to ensure that their efforts are self-consciously deliberate, transparent, and ethical” (2011:102). Reflexivity is the reflection on the role of the research in the research project. Triangulation can refer to a number of things including having more than one source of information in terms of people, places or time, as well as multiple ways of accessing the field and assessing the data or manifold theoretical approaches to a problem (2011:113). While not always using the same terms, I am largely inspired by Schwarts-Shea’s understanding of what is considered important in order to evaluate interpretive ethnography. 116 If ethnographic approaches are marginal in political science, they are hardly new. For example, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America could be considered a work of political ethnography. 117 As Wedeen explains it, political scientists that have come to use ethnographic methods rarely go to the “extremes” of some strands of contemporary anthropology in questioning social scientists’ ability to make generalizations or interpretations of social reality (2010:258).

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Interpretive approaches can be understood in a variety of ways, commonly there is an emphasis on language, symbols and meaning. Interpretive ethnography is “a way of recovering meaning; that is, beliefs and practices” (Rhodes 2016:173). The central aim is to capture how concepts, perspectives and practices are understood in the field (Schwarts-Shea & Yanow 2012:18). The underlying assumption is that meaning and symbols are embedded in all aspects of human relations. While these meanings are not necessarily “true” in any strong sense, they need to be taken seriously and understood, given what is usually referred to as the Thomas theorem “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”118 While not all political ethnographic approaches are interpretive, most are nonetheless informed by an interpretive sensibility (Schatz 2009). I believe there are good reasons for political scientists to find a place for interpretive ethnographic methods in their toolkit. Ethnography is, as De Volo & Schatz write, suitable “in cases where government statistics are suspect, media outlets are controlled by political interest, and poverty, lack of infrastructure, illiteracy, or political violence impede survey research” (2004:269). Ethnography is not, however, simply a poor substitute in the absence of proper surveys. Schatz in his edited volume Political Ethnography – a rare anthology on ethnography by political scientists – suggests that it can produce “evidence of the sort that can flesh out, or call into question, generalizations produced or meanings assigned by other research traditions” (2009:10). Similarly, according to Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, interpretive and ethnographic research often grows out of “a dissatisfaction with existing approaches” (2006:xxiv). It is often aimed at calling into question assumptions that are taken for granted, and it opens up for new ways of thinking about politics.119 There are also drawbacks to ethnographic approaches. As a political scientist, I had no training in the rigors of fieldwork prior to my emersion into the field, and much of it was a trial by fire. While ethnographers and anthropologists often like to claim that “you can’t teach ﬁeldwork, you have to do it” (Rhodes 2016:174), the lack of institutional or collegial reference-points for

118 Much is often made of the gulf that separates interpretive/hermeneutic approaches from positivist/naturalist/quantitative research. I wish neither to bridge nor cement that gulf, only to suggest that – while the language and terminology are often radically different – there are plenty of reasons to assume a fruitful coexistence. 119 It is about asking different kinds of questions, as Rhodes puts it ethnography is about “raising new questions and ‘shaking the bag’ [..]to ﬁnd ‘new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking about’ everyday life” (2016:174).

78 | Chapter Three a political scientist doing fieldwork adds to the sense of bewilderment. Draw- ing on scholarship from a range of non-political science sources, I often felt at a loss as to how to present the research process in a way that is acceptable to political scientists. Furthermore, ethnographic manuals in methods, such as they are, rather than referring to operationalization, data-selection, validity and generalizability, discuss issues of access and gaining trust, of power-dynamics in the field, of leaving the field and sorting through field-notes. Below is an attempt at discussing my research process and challenges in terms that may be at least partially familiar to mainstream political scientists; yet like all hybrids it may prove unsatisfactory to everyone involved.120

CASES

Tunisia Despite its small size, few natural resources and marginal geopolitical significance, as the only country to emerge out of the so-called Arab Spring with a relatively stable transitional process Tunisia it is often hailed as a model for the rest of the region. It is therefore crucial in understanding the conditions for this relative success. If Tunisia is important, then, it is to be born in mind that the overemphasis on its uniqueness and its success, implies falling into an old trap that has venerated the Tunisian model. Prior to the revolution, the notion of a progressive model authoritarian state was one carefully cultivated by the Ben Ali regime and was advanced by institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.121 By looking “beyond the center”, at marginalized spaces and groups, this thesis seeks to contextualize this image of model Tunisia and what this “success” means on an everyday level. The case of Tunisia, this study argues, offers a good vantage point from which to explore the ways that democratization engenders frustrations and disappointments, and thus the expectations inherent in the process may be uncovered.

120 As Cerwonka writes, “Scholars who engage in research that relies upon hybrid approaches [...] often find themselves having to defend their research efforts more vigorously than do their more orthodox colleagues. Not surprisingly, it is hard for the interdisciplinary scholar to avoid feeling like a dilettante, rather than a ‘real’ scholar who has confined herself to the scholarly literature and methodology of a single discipline (and, thereby, gone ‘deeper’)” (2007:8). 121 I discuss this in greater detail in the next chapter.

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Gafsa and Kasserine Gafsa, a town in the southwest, with a population of about 100,000, is the capital of the Gafsa Governorate (wilayat). It is an old city, with Berber and Roman roots, but it was mainly settled following the discovery of large phosphate reserves during the end of the nineteenth century. Kasserine, two hours northeast of Gafsa, is somewhat smaller with 75,000 inhabitants. It is the capital of the Kasserine Governorate that straddles the Algerian border, divided by the Cha’ambi mountains. The city developed as a market town, between a French garrison and the local tribes. Both towns are placed in the interior parts of Tunisia that have historically been considered a “tribal belt” of semi- nomadic Bedouins.122 Political scientists studying the local level have often aimed at “verification of general observations recorded on a national level” (Briquet & Sawicki 1989:64). By contrast a fundamental assumption in an ethnographically informed perspective is that “it is on the local scale that power relations become tangible and abstract concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘politics’ observable” (Hoff- man et al. 2013:3). In this thesis Kasserine and Gafsa could be termed “diag- nostic sites” (Björkdahl & Kappler 2017), sites where on-going struggles or conflicts over resources or meaning make them particularly interesting to look at in order to understand the tensions in the experiences of democracy in a post-authoritarian context. Similar to the focus on young men, the choice of these places could be understood as analogous to extreme cases in more positivist case selection language. As John Gavanta writes on his choice of cases in his study on power and powerlessness:

[T]he quiescence of the Central Appalachian Valley is not unique in America. Rather, the starkness of its inequalities and the exaggerated character of the power relationships may make more visible patterns of behaviour and belief which are found amongst non-elites elsewhere. (1980:viii)

The choice of looking at Kasserine and Gafsa in interior Tunisia, al dakhel, as places “beyond the center”, is driven by this assumption that places in the margins are places where certain power-dynamics become particularly visible. Marginalized, and often construed as an “internal other”, they are places

122 While Kasserine is clearly understood as belonging to the interior regions, al dakhel, Gafsa is sometimes understood to be part of “the south.” These political imaginaries of geography are inexact, but both “the south” and “the interior” signal historic and contemporary marginalization.

80 | Chapter Three where questions of inclusion and exclusion become particularly salient (Ferme 2004). The assumption is not that these places are “representative” of Tunisia or the interior regions but that they make certain logic, here the crises of masculinity and democratization, more glaring and therefore more visible. The time-intense nature of fieldwork means that single-site studies are the norm. The two ethnographic sites, Gafsa and Kasserine, are chosen in order to “examine the circulation of meanings, objects and identities” (Björkdahl & Kappler. 2017:7) in more than one site. These are nonetheless close in space and thus viable within the time and resource constraints of this study.

MATERIAL GATHERING I have spent a total of 14 months in fieldwork in Tunisia, spread out over eight different trips between 2015 and 2019. These trips have been between three weeks to three months. That fieldwork is often “long” is necessitated by a variety of factors, including being an outsider that needs to become famil- iarized with the new context (and language), to develop contacts, build trust and not least to articulate and re-articulate a research agenda, as well as reaching a point of saturation.123 Most of the fieldwork has been spent in Kasserine and Gafsa, engaging in what Rhodes calls “deep hanging out”(2016:174) with young men, or writing and organizing my field-notes in Tunis. During my fieldwork I have engaged with and talked to a large number of individuals, but the core set of interlocutors in Gafsa and Kasserine are the young men that I have followed since my first field trip.124 The young men I followed most closely, defined as those that I have met in each subsequent return to the field, are fifteen in number, nine from Kasserine and the rest from Gafsa. All of them are unmarried, and throughout the period of study most of them have been in various states of unemployment or underemployment. Eight of them have at least a high school diploma, and half have or are currently studying in university. Eleven of them have at some point been involved in some sort of political or cultural activities, broadly defined.125

123 The duration of every particular trip was usually decided by external factors; particularly teaching obligations. 124 I sketch a more detailed description of five of these young men in chapter seven. 125 Throughout the thesis, I use the term activist in a broad and general sense as anyone that at least on a semi-regular basis participates in formal or informal politics. However, as I discuss further in chapter six, the distinction between activist and non-activist is rarely clear.

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The larger circle of friends around these young men, that I have followed but not necessarily met as often and regularly as the individuals above, I number around 50 individuals. 30 or so of these young men can be divided into two loosely connected friends-groups.126 One is composed of what may be termed artists and cultural activists in Kasserine, engaging in activities such as hip-hop, poetry and theatre and they are often centered around the café Andes that is described in chapter six. Another is a group of friends from Gafsa, active in leftist politics as well as the civil society, often spending their time in the café Metropolis discussed in chapters five and six.127 By also focusing on youth that have not necessarily been involved in overt political activities, I have sought to bring out the political implications of “everyday life” and young men more broadly. Furthermore, while most youths I have engaged with in the interior regions define themselves as unemployed, it is important to keep in mind, as Feltrin writes, that “‘unemployment’ is often a cultural construct signifying that somebody is not engaged in the kind of work to which she feels entitled by prevailing social norms resulting from previous struggles” (2018:47). The term unemployment signals, more than anything, unrealized expectations. Similar to Craig Jeffery’s study of lower middle class young men in Meerut, a semi-peripheral town in India, many of the young men that I engage with in both Kasserine and Gafsa have, ”the financial backing to obtain education and engage in a prolonged job search, but lack the funds, social networking resources and cultural capital to succeed within fiercely competitive markets for government jobs and positions in the new economy” (2010:9). This lack of networking resources is partly a matter of class, but more than that, I argue it is an issue of place. My interactions with these core informants and their friends provide the bulk of the richer ethnographic material. The main mode of gathering information in these instances has been participant observation: following them in their daily lives, participating in their waiting and escapes from it. The extended fieldtrips and the return to the field is essential, since it allows for tracing developments across time. The choice of young men is driven by access as much as theoretical considerations. Being a male scholar in regions where men dominate public spaces

126 With considerable overlap and changes over time, making it unrealistic to give any definitive number. 127 It was not a conscious choice to focus on these two groups, but rather I believe it reflects the different traditions of these cities. Gafsa has a history of clandestine leftist politics and Kasserine in known for its politically charged cultural groups, particularly hip-hip.

82 | Chapter Three has meant that access to female dominated spaces was severely limited. The choice of these particular young men is intentional only to the extent that I seek to investigate young men that are waiting, i.e. are not gainfully employed in professions commensurate with their education or expectations. This is not to dismiss the importance of other sociological factors, but that youth, gender and marginality are treated as my main optics. As I have argued elsewhere, in places like Kasserine and Gafsa, class is mediated by place and space, although certainly in highly uneven ways, which I explore in chapter seven. Besides these central figures, I constantly engaged in conversations and semi-structured interviews with young men, and to a lesser extent woman, in Kasserine and Gafsa and beyond. The purpose of this was to if not verify then at least complement, compare and differentiate the discussions and narratives that I gathered. These often haphazard, sometimes strategic encounters number around 400 and have been somewhere between short-conversations and long in-depth interviews. A category of young men absent from this study are what may be termed conspicuously religious youth, often associated with the moderately Islamist party Ennahda. While this group is by no means a clearly delimited category, their absence is primarily due to their relatively marginal presence in the kinds of public spaces this thesis explores, mainly cafés. Since the study examines the ways in which everyday practices, public visibility and narratives interact, this exclusion may be justified. In the practices and cultural intimacies of interior Tunisia, everyday life is curiously devoid of visibly religious dimensions. I have also done what can be termed expert interviews, with twelve civil society organizations, five mayors, several political representatives and experts. The interviews can also be characterized as exploratory inaterviews. Their purpose has changed over time yet can be broadly understood as providing more detailed contextual background information for the thesis. I have also read newspapers, listened to political speeches, and followed the first local elections in May 2018. Both the interviews and this information-gathering can be understood as complimentary to the reading of scholarly literature on Tunisia, in order to capture what Hansen and Stepputat call “the language of stateness” (2001:9). This includes the narratives of the state that citizens encounter, which situates the visions of the democratization that emerge ethnographically.

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INTERPRETING “DATA” The main material I gathered in each field-trip was the observations, conversations and interviews that take the forms of recordings, transcriptions and field-notes. I recorded conversations when allowed and when possible or practical. Above all I have relied on taking field-notes, during conversations and observations and later writing together notes in the evenings. Recordings have been useful, particularly in going back to conversations when clarification was needed or my notes were unclear. It is important to stress that an interpretive approach does not entail searching for “data” to fit a pre-established framework, or to “test” a prede- fined hypothesis. Rather it involves continually building and rebuilding a framework in dialogue with the field. One reason for the loose framework of this thesis is, in a way, to continuously traverse the line between epistemological uncertainty and certainty, by searching for, and questioning, meaning- making. It is one of the fundamental facts of fieldwork that the researcher has limited control over what transpires in the field. Ethnographic research, therefore, requires flexibility in the way the research is designed and implemented. Many of the central concepts of this thesis emerged late in my work, as did the question of experience of democratization. This is not surprising, given that ethnography is a combination of a deductive and inductive approach, both theoretically and empirically driven; Yanow refers to this as abductive reasoning. Abductive research “begins with a puzzle, a surprise, or a tension, and then seeks to explicate it by identifying the conditions that would make that puzzle less perplexing and more of a “normal” or “natural” event” (Yanow 2011:27). I have already indicated in the introduction how my initial impres- sions of the dissonance between the prevailing success story of transition, and the everyday experience of failure, left an indelible mark that informed my subsequent explorations. This initial surprise at finding such disappointment among the young men I encountered, began to inform the questions that I asked and the answers that I sought. The aim has been to capture experiences and political imaginaries of everyday life. What is needed is sensitivity to the ways in which political language acts, and are embedded and articulated in everyday life.128 The strength of

128 This should not be confused with a discourse theory approach that looks exclusively at language. Instead, this study is fundamentally interested in the ways such symbols and images are

84 | Chapter Three interpretive ethnography is to put the interlocutors own understanding of concepts in the forefront of the investigation. Kapiszewski et al., write:

Political science concepts – “rule of law,” “democratic consolidation,” “power” – are often complex and highly abstract, complicating our ability to develop them. Field research is indispensable for helping scholars nail down what the key concepts in their work actually mean. It puts the researchers in vantage point from which to observer gaps between concepts and reality and nuances that facilitates that conceptual precision. (2015:19)

It allows for researchers to let interlocutors articulate their meaning-making in order to capture their experiences. Experience here connotes both the way that concepts are expressed, whether directly or indirectly, as well as ways of being, or practices, but also how they can be translated into social science terminology. In order to translate the world of everyday life into an “experience” of democratization, and to capture the political imaginaries that inform such experiences, I have, broadly speaking, employed three strategies. Firstly, I have looked at the past citizen-state dynamics of Tunisia (chapter four). Secondly, I have attempted to articulate the political importance of where the young men spend much of their time, by focusing on cafés (chapters five and six). Thirdly, I have examined narratives and themes that dominate the discussions of young men in the margins. These narratives and themes can be categorized into two types: 1) the directly political, such as discussions surrounding democracy and corruption (chapters eight and nine); 2) the indirectly political, which nonetheless reflect political assumptions (chapter ten). None of these strategies claim to capture the full breadths of the young men’s experiences. An impossible task. But, taken together, they nonetheless provide a sense of the political imaginaries of the young men, and the way these come to color the experience of democratization.

Narratives The most important aspect of interpretive ethnography is to capture the interlocutor’s own understandings. Rather than simply ask my interlocutors “what is democracy, revolution, corruption, state?” I have sought to understand how these terms are used and discussed in everyday life. The aim is not articulated and performed in everyday life and practice. As Mbembe writes of post-structuralist scholarship “On the pretext of avoiding single-factor explanations of domination, these disciplines have reduced the complex phenomena of the state and power to “discourses” and “representations,” forgetting that discourses and representations have materiality” (2001:5).

Methods and their Interpretations | 85 to reach a coherent understanding of a term, but the range of possible meanings in order to capture what Clifford Geertz famously referred to as “the native’s point of view.” This sometimes means asking pointed questions, asking for clarification or follow-up questions, or even to return to the person at a later date to continue the conversation. But it also means following themes and discussions as they arise in everyday settings. This thesis seeks to do more than to chart the range of possible meanings of terms like democracy and the state but also the expectations and desires associated with these terms by placing them within larger contexts and narratives. Narratives in the context of this study refer to the way people make sense themselves and of the world around them. When I consider terms like state and democracy, I do not only seek to understand what the words mean in a definitional sense, but also which narratives that are used to talk about them, and make sense of them. Narratives are significant for a number of reasons. Rhodes, who refers to narratives as stories or storytelling, writes “storytelling organizes dialogues, fosters meanings, beliefs, and identities among the relevant actors” (2016:173). Similarly, according to Michael Jackson (2002), stories are intersubjective processes that help us understand the world; they are shared attempts to make sense of one’s own and others’ beliefs and actions. Narratives provide meaning, but narratives also function as ways of organizing facts by making them understandable and intelligible, “narratives not only reveal the character of facts but they also create their character and guide our decisions about what counts as a fact” (Rhodes 2017:32). Building on Arendt, Jackson emphasizes the importance of stories as empowering, as a form of community building that bridges the gap between the individual and the social. They are at once ways of structuring personal stories and sharing larger narratives with others. Jackson discusses two aspects that make the study of narratives politically salient;

[T]he first involves a crossing between private and public spheres, the second involves relations between competing forms of discourse – the question of whose story will be told, and which story will be recognised as true and given legitimacy. (2002:131)

Narratives are important as emerging forms of public discourse; many take the form of previously held hidden transcripts (Scott 1990) that have now taken the shape of shared narratives that are in the process of becoming public transcripts. I argue that such shared narratives are ways of making sense of the

86 | Chapter Three transition from dictatorship to democracy as well as the role of the state and citizens. Besides narratives dealing directly with democracy and democratization, I have looked at narratives that express expectations and desires of the state and its citizens. These narratives take the form of what political anthropologist Michael Herzfeld refers to as cultural intimacies, “the self-stereotypes that insiders express ostensibly at their own collective expense” (2016:7). Cul- tural intimacies are everyday articulations in response to national and state myths, expressed via stories or often-repeated phrases and tropes of post-transition Tunisia, which form parts of political imaginaries. Narratives are also important in terms of the way that they connect to other narratives. They act as corrections or refusals of other stories. Mbembe reminds us that “the analyst must watch out for the myriad ways in which ordinary people guide, deceive and actually toy with power instead of confronting it directly” (1992:25). Narratives are both forms of shared understandings and potential conflicts. They reflect power-dynamics, but also ways of attempting to subvert power. As Hibou writes:

[T]he political game, including in authoritarian situations, requires a common political language to be shared, one which will provide strong images from which ideology can be formed, but can also be the object of appropriation, interpretation or even subversion. (2017:63)

Narratives are captured through conversations and observations that may be broadly referred to as a form of interviewing technique. The term interview may be misleading, however, as Yanow & Schwartz-Shea write:

“Interviewing” as used in interpretive methods means something other than ad- ministering a survey or otherwise following a list of questions that the researcher feels he must cover in their entirety lest the interview be deemed a failure. (2006:113)

They use the term “purposive conversation” when talking of interpretive fieldwork.129 The aim of such purposive conversation is to build an understanding

129 Schaffer calls this “ordinary language interviewing” and it “is a tool for uncovering the meaning of words in everyday talk” (2014:151). Building on Austin and Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy, the fundamental assumption is that the way words and concepts are used in the everyday embodies shared understandings. Further, that “the meaning of a word consists in how the word is used” (Schaffer 2014:152), and finally that words have many, overlapping and often contradictory uses; which Wittgenstein famously called family resemblances. Thus,

Methods and their Interpretations | 87 of concepts, which is in line with the people one is speaking with. This involves listening to conversations, but also intervening in strategic ways. As Schaffer writes, “While the interview is open-ended and conversational, it is nevertheless structured to the extent that it is designed to expose the meanings of words through deliberate questioning strategies” (2014:308). The researcher is not absent or unaware of his or her influence, but is part of the discussion, directing, reacting and responding.130 While there is clearly limits to this sort of method in terms of generalizability it also avoids some of the risk of large surveys that often face difficulty in pinning down what a term may mean. Even in more open-ended surveys where people are allowed to define democracy in their own terms, Schaffer argues the likelihood of misinterpretation is very high (2014:306).131 A potential challenge of ethnographic interpretation is the issue of translation, since almost all my conversation has been in Arabic. However, I would argue that this potential difficulty might be overstated. All interpretation involves translations; whether from one language to another, or the transformation from speech to script, or the movement from description towards

interviewing, it is relevant to attempt to reach an understanding of a term or concept that is rooted in its everyday usage. 130 Schaffer sets out five helpful strategies for clarifying what a term means to its users; “1. Elaboration prompts that invite the interviewee to flesh out or amplify what he or she is saying [..] 2. Example prompts that can help both you (the interviewer) and the interviewee think more concretely about the question at hand[..] 3. Internal logic questions that provide an opportunity for the interviewee to reflect more deeply about what he or she is saying [..] 4. Restatement questions that confirm that you understand what the interviewee is saying, and also demonstrate to the interviewee that you are listening, that you are taking him or her seriously[..] 5. Direct questions that ask explicitly what the interviewee understands the meaning of term “x” to be?” (2011:155) While I do not always have the space or opportunity to make use of all five strategies in every encounter, they are useful guiding principles and reflect the strength of extended participant observation. 131 Carnaghan discusses some of the difficulties of capturing meaning of concepts, “Even in stable societies where citizens have considerable experience with democracy, survey respondents may not completely understand the meaning of the questions that they are asked” (2011:682). In transitional contexts Carnaghan argues “Words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are less likely to have widely shared meaning; institutions may function very differently from the way they were designed; citizens may not be well schooled in the niceties of democratic theory” (2011:683). Here ethnographic methods may be better at capturing the range of meanings and associations of a term.

88 | Chapter Three social science categories. In every step there are risks of distortions and misin- terpretations. This is not to minimize the difficulties and complexities of translation, yet one of the strengths of ethnographic research is the ability to go back to interlocutors and ask for clarifications, or to discuss various meanings and associations of a term. Furthermore, potential inconsistencies are part of the investigation itself.132 This is also why placing terms within larger narratives, cultural intimacies and practices is particularly important. Interpretive ethnography is an iterative process of constant back and forth between the language of the everyday and the social science literature. Some terms, like neoliberalism and masculinity crisis, are what anthropologists refer to as etic or “experience-distant” terms and generally not used by interlocutors themselves. While others, like democracy, transition, corruption, citizenship are both etic and emic terms. They are social science terms that are also “experience-near”, meaning interlocutors themselves in everyday contexts use them, even if their meanings may diverge from their social science meanings. This means that somewhat different strategies are needed to capture different aspects of lived experiences. Narratives have been particularly important in capturing the political imaginaries of democratic transition, and practices for understanding neoliberalism.

Practices For accessing narratives and concepts, the emphasis is on listening to and engaging in conversations with my interlocutors. As Matthew Gutmann says, the stress in ethnography tends to be on words rather than practices:

Bluntly put, and for better or for worse, most of what ethnographers “do” is talk to people. We talk to people about what they think, what others think, and about what they and others say they and others do. We also “observe,” and these observations may be important, but I think on the whole many of us rely far more on words about deeds than on the deeds themselves. (2002:6)

And yet quotidian life is more than discussions.133 This study also looks at what the young men do. By following young men during their everyday life, I have come to emphasize one practice as particularly crucial; sitting in cafés. This practice I have categorized under the rubric of waiting and is treated as important in its own right; both in reinforcing and undermining social norms,

132 Thus, for example, the many different terms and associations of the word state form part of the analysis in chapter nine. 133 According to Paul Vayne “everydayness is a life stronger than thought” (1995:165).

Methods and their Interpretations | 89 as well as connected to forms of citizenship and experiences of neoliberal crisis. The forms of narratives cannot be divorced from where they are expressed. I argue that the concept of waiting is a kind of practice, a way of being in the world, and a useful one in understanding the hopes, expectations and desires of the young men. The relationship between beliefs and narratives on the one hand and practices on the other is a thorny one. As Rhodes writes “an interpretive approach holds that meanings or beliefs form webs that are constitutive of actions and practices” (2017:19).134 I seek to both articulate the way that narratives are embedded in everyday life as well as to suggest the ambiguity in what they do or mean.

Imaginary Approaches Crucially, I do not claim to know what people “truly” believe. As Rhodes writes, “Although political scientists do not have direct access to people’s beliefs, they can justify ascribing beliefs to people by saying that it best explains the evidence on which we agree” (2017:29). I investigate spaces of meaning- making; narratives, concepts and practices that are shared and familiar; that “make sense” in context. I use the term experience in order to emphasize that political phenomena are more than abstract concepts; that they are embedded in everyday life. These experiences are in the end interpretations, even as I seek to ground my interpretations in ways that make sense to my interlocutors. As I argued in the previous chapter, by studying young men’s waiting and what they are waiting for, we can understand how young men come to view themselves as citizens, and their relationship to the state. In chapter five and six I look at cafés as central places for such waiting. The kinds of cafés they wait in reflect broader expectations as well as limitation of the current order. In attempting to bring to light narratives and practices I have also, in chapter seven laid out the personal biographies of several of my closest interlocutors. This is done not only to exemplify, but also to follow shifts across time.

134 What is meant by practice is much disputed. One may certainly plausibly claim that narratives are forms of practices. This thesis understands practices in narrower terms as non-discursive, or non-linguistic, actions and performances, even if such a distinction is not straightforward and practices are never fully divorced from beliefs or meanings. As Mbembe writes: “the African subject is like any other human being: he or she engages in meaningful acts. (It is self-evident that these meaningful human expressions do not necessarily make sense for everyone in the same way.) The second observation is that the African subject does not exist apart from the acts that produce social reality, or apart from the process by which those practices are, so to speak, imbued with meaning” (2001:6, italics in original). It is this world of meaningful acts that interpretive ethnography attempts to capture.

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This is important in terms of understanding the practical challenges of the transition and wider neoliberal crisis and ways in which the young men come to respond to these challenges. Through participant observation of the daily lives of young men, through following certain themes that reflect larger state-society dynamics, this study seeks to understand their frustrations with the present and desires for the past. This is carried out through engaging with cultural intimacies and through understanding how the transitional process is discussed. Thus, in chapter nine, I pay attention to narratives concerning corruption, and in chapter ten I consider a broader register of everyday narratives used by young men, which connect to larger state-citizen dynamics.

Representative of What? This thesis is not a comparative study in the strict sense of the term, in that it does not treat Gafsa and Kasserine as distinct or representative cases that are compared and contrasted.135 Rather they are treated as different vantage points from which to investigate the same dynamics. The distinction is tied to representativeness. Case studies, particularly of the ethnographic variety, are not, and cannot, aim to be representative in the quantitative sense. It is not an objective to find the most representative village, city, or place. As Small writes, “The ‘representative’ single neighborhood does not exist” (2010:28). The aim is not to get a representative case through random sampling, but rather to intentionally map a particular process or dynamic:

That is, a well-executed single-case study can justifiably state that a particular process, phenomenon, mechanism, tendency, type, relationship, dynamic, or practice exists (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Lofland and Lofland, 1995). This, in fact, remains one of the advantages of ethnographic work, the possibility of truly emer- gent knowledge. (Small. 2010:24)

Generally, political ethnography does not dwell on issues of representativeness or generalizability, but rather is judged by the persuasiveness and strength of its enquiry: “extrapolation is in fact based on the validity of the analysis rather than the representativeness of the events” (Mitchell 1983:190). Thus, this study does not claim that Kasserine and Gafsa are representative, whether of

135 As Rhodes writes “Anthropologists would not refer to their fieldwork site as a ‘case study’ because it is not a ‘case’ of anything until they withdraw from the field to analyse and write up their field notes” (2016:174).

Methods and their Interpretations | 91 interior Tunisia, Tunisia as a whole, or beyond. Nor does it claim that the young men in this study are representative of youths as a whole in Kasserine or Gafsa or elsewhere. The choices of sites and informants are driven more by the question of where the processes that will be explored will be the most fruitful to observe. Issues of access trump issues of representativeness. This connects to another aspect of ethnographic fieldwork that separates it from quantitative political science approaches. Even in qualitative work, it is common to justify the choice of case in single or comparative case studies in terms of a “type” that defines its significance to the larger population of cases.136 This kind of selection assumes a clear understanding both of the theory one seeks to test or develop, as well as the kind of case one chooses and thus its relationship to the larger population of potential cases. By contrast, in ethnography these grow out of the research itself. As Schwartz-Shea and Yanow write:

[T]he language of ‘case selection’ is not appropriate to interpretive research design: it fails to recognize the significant ways in which access may be contingent on the identity of the researcher, as if any researcher, in any circumstance, possesses the ability to select any case at will. (2012:70)

Thus, for example the choice of focusing on only young men, has been driven as much by necessity, i.e. lack of access to the daily lives of young women, as by theoretical or methodological considerations. The ethnographic process is iterative and sequential. The key is flexibility in the face of uncertainty, “interpretive research designs must be flexible due to field realities, stemming from participants’ agency. The researcher lacks control over research participants as well as over unfolding events” (Yanow 2012:71). Fieldwork is an exercise in improvisation. While ethnography puts a premium on being close to the subjects of study and taking the perspectives of the studied persons seriously, it should not be reduced to only looking at the local, the everyday and the subjective. If the emphasis is on meaning and context, this does not mean avoiding to attempt to make broader claims.137 These claims are not statistical generalizations but rather as Rhodes writes, “We can derive plausible conjectures from intensive

136 Gerring provides nine examples of such types: “typical, diverse, extreme, deviant, influential, crucial, pathway, most similar, and most different” (2008:645). 137 As Wedeen points out, even Clifford Geertz, for all his emphasis on the interpretative turn in studying cultures “insisted[..] that the interpretivist enterprise was capable of producing general knowledge about the human condition” (2010:258).

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ﬁeldwork” (2016:178). Plausible conjectures require crafting of strong arguments from the material and seeking to place the local in connection to wider social processes and in dialogue with established theory, historical analysis and/or comparisons to other studies. In other words, ethnography involves theorizing.

Saturation Research as a feedback loop may be true for all kinds of investigations, but it is part and parcel of the ethnographic approach where the iterative method applies to interviews as much as theories and research questions. One way of viewing it is to, like Small, conceive of each separate interview, or field-observation, as a case, or unit, in itself. Each intervention into the field, each encounter and conversation informs each subsequent encounter: “The ﬁrst unit or case yields a set of ﬁndings and a set of questions that inform the next case” (Small 2009:25).138 This dialogue between theory and empirical material provides not just opportunities for theorizing but a continuous interrogation of the viability and analytical usefulness of the concepts and theories used. Thus, the connection between democratic transition and crisis, grew out of discussions, heard again and again. This led to a search for concepts to capture this sense of crisis and chaos, including epistemological crisis, liminality and Lefort’s understanding of democracy. Then, back again into the field, and back into the material, to find out if these new interpretations “fit.” Invariably new questions arise in the face of new information. Burawoy calls it a “kami- kaze approach to theory”:

Each day one enters the field, prepared to test the hypotheses generated from the previous day's "intervention." Fieldwork is a sequence of experiments that continue until one's theory is in sync with the world one studies. (1998:17-18)

This back and forth between theory and the field is key in any ethnographic endeavor. The idea is that one eventually reaches the point of saturation: “If the study is conducted properly, the very last case examined will provide very little new or surprising information” (Small 2009:25). At the same time, this study is fundamentally interpretive, meaning that one never reaches a point

138 Yanow and Schwartz-Shea critiquing the categorization of fieldwork as small-n studies write ”One might imagine counting, for example, the large number of hours of engaged observation, the number of conversations held, the number of interactions, and the ensuing number of segments of observation and/or conversation and/or interaction analyzed over the course of the research project—any one of which would yield a large ‘n,’ indeed” (2006:xvii).

Methods and their Interpretations | 93 of being “in sync” with the world one studies. Rather it is, like all forms of exegesis, a piecing together of clues, where the amalgamations of “facts” are always open to rearrangement and new interpretations.

Thinking With In many ways this thesis has shifted from pre-established theoretical categories and concepts towards a focus on making sense of everyday experiences and drawing out their political implications. It has become more interpretive and ethnographic in sensibility and has sought to incorporate more of the concerns of the interlocutors.139 Underlying this ethnographic study is the assumption that local actors have a deep understanding of, not just their everyday lives, but of democratization and the state. Not only do they encounter it again and again, but often their survival depends on it. As Allina-Pisano writes:

The study of the margins is important not only for communicating and interpreting the voices of less powerful people, but also because the knowledge produced in the margins may sometimes be, in the world of truth claims, more accurate than that generated in the center. People in the margins may have more than "another perspective" to contribute; as actors close to local processes of political change, they sometimes have more detailed information about certain types of phenomena than do political and social elites. (2009:56)

As will be demonstrated, many young in the margins do not view their everyday experiences of the state in isolation, but view the state as a symbolic and translocal entity. When a young smuggler from Gafsa calls the Tunisian state dawlat al fasad: a state of corruption, he is articulating an understanding of the Tunisian state as a larger governing logic. The everyday problems that he and others like him face are not simply those of corrupt practices, isolated from the governance structures, but are understood as the very logic of the state in Tunisia itself, something that piecemeal reform may fail to undo or change. Similarly, many young have clear ideas about which changes the democratization process has brought about in their everyday lives, as well as having a multifaceted understanding of what democracy means.140

139 As Adcock writes, “for an interpretivist, an account that presents actors as responding to a “general” problem will only be persuasive to the extent that its abstract formulation of that problem can also be unpacked as a redescription of some “particular” concrete problem(s) that those actors see themselves as responding to (2006:62). 140 This is not to say that statements of local actors can be taken at face value or that they should not be approached critically

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And yet everyone has blind spots, partial perspectives, and limitations. In- terpretation is also “moving outside” of participants’ own view. This is a constant balancing act. What an ethnographical and interpretive approach offers is the opportunity to think in terms both provided by, and in dialogue with, the subjects of the study, in tandem with academic concepts. Holly High suggests that the role of an ethnographer is not to “demystify”, unlike sociologists, but rather to be “caught” by the meanings inscribed by those we study (2014:107). I have tried to err on the side of the participants; to be “caught” by their stories is a central aim of this approach, without trying to in any way obfuscate my own role in this process. But from an interpretive perspective there is neither mystification nor demystification, only various forms of meaning-making, “The knower and the known are inseparable, interacting and inﬂuencing one another, leading to shared interpretations” (Rhodes 2016:173). We are all, researchers and interlocutors alike weaving and re- weaving webs of meaning. Conspiracy-theory scholars sometimes like to point out that there are more than a few commonalities between academic work and conspiracy theories. As Benjamin Koerber says, they both “proceed from a radical suspicion of the dark, occult forces that stand behind the illusion of surfaces” (2018:9); they tend towards reductionist views that have uncovered hidden meanings in the seemingly trivial.141 Like discoverers of conspiratorial plots, academics run the risk of “interpretive hubris” (Koerber 2018:12). Even in ethnographic research, despite the field “speaking back”, there remains the nagging fear that one’s interpretations are not only inadequate, but also nothing but reflections of one’s own epistemological crises and uncertainties, or perhaps even worse; one’s blind certainties. I will not claim that I have not aimed for persuasion, and yet, as Arendt reminds us, lies are often more persuasive than truth (2006). Thus, if the text is messy, if some voices do not always “fit” with the larger theoretical framework or interpretive thrusts, this is at least partly intentional.142 Although the creation of a coherent narrative and story is the sole obligation of the researcher, I also believe that a certain looseness of narrative is necessary. Part of this is for the benefit of the readers, as Flyvbjerg writes, thick descriptions, “allow the study to be different things to different people” (2006:238). But, I believe, part of it also serves another purpose. Research while dialogic is fundamentally more dictatorship than democracy. I hope, at

141 Karl Popper made the connection between conspiracy beliefs and the blue print model thinkers like Plato, Hegel and Marx in his classic Open Society and its Enemies (2013) 142 Certainly, most of the “messiness” is unintentional. All texts bleed.

Methods and their Interpretations | 95 least, to avoid the allure of totalitarianism and settle for a run of the mill authoritarianism by letting the contradictions and tensions shine through, leaving room for, if you so wish, resistance and refusals.

REFLEXIVITY Reflexive research necessitates awareness by the researcher of how biographical details play a role in how the researcher is received in the field and the kinds of information that can be accessed. Political scientists Schwartz-Shea and Yanow write that reflexivity “refers to a researcher’s active consideration of and engagement with the ways in which his own sense-making and the particular circumstances that might have affected it, throughout all phases of the research process” (2012:100).143 In ethnography the researcher’s own position and identity is not distinct from the research itself. As Pachirat puts it “political ethnography invites—even requires the ethnographer to account for the partiality of perspective that shapes her voice” (2009:144). Interrogating the way that the researcher comes to inform the research itself is central in ethnographic work, even if these dimensions are rarely discussed in the finished text itself. One reason for this absence is a degree of embarrassment. As Shehata writes on being open about how identity influences research:

This causes great anxiety for most social scientists, and I am certainly no exception. As a political scientist I feel especially uneasy, guilty, and unprofessional. After all, we are taught as researchers that the personal is trivial, uninteresting, and certainly not the serious business of science. (2006:246-7)144

At the risk of embarrassment, I will provide a few brief illustrations of how biographical dimensions determined key aspects of my research.145

143 Reflexive research entails more than awareness of the position of the researcher, it also im- pacts the way that the research is presented and written. As Yanow writes, “If knowledge is situated knowledge, produced by situated knowers, 'I' is the most normal and natural voice for the researcher to use. Such use is utterly in keeping with interpretive scientific writing” (2009:290). Reflexive work is less likely to treat the text as subject and silence the author. 144 Another reason for the silence may be a kind of tacit knowledge among those doing ethnography. A dimension that is taken for granted and need not be stated explicitly. 145 It should be made clear however, that reflexivity entails more than merely a section in the thesis, but is an approach to research and permeates the whole project.

96 | Chapter Three

Originally set to study the Tunisian decentralization process as seen from the peripheries, I spent my first months in the field attempting to gain access to municipalities and mayors in interior parts of the country. It was while waiting for these “real” research-sites that I came to spend much of my time with young unemployed men in cafés and other public spaces.146 Like me, they were waiting for “something else.”147 As my social network of young men expanded I began to shift the focus of my research away from decentralization and towards interrogating this “waiting”—now a central concept in my thesis. Had I not been of an approximate age with the youths—and male—it is unlikely I would have developed the same kinds of networks and research interests.

An Intimate Stranger Even something as seemingly trivial as speaking Arabic with a Syrian dialect has had a direct impact on the way I was received in the field. From my first field trip, any ideas I may have entertained of being perceived as an “impartial observer” were quickly squashed. Interlocutors often interrogated me on my Syrian background and particularly my stance on the Syrian conflict.148 ”For or against Bashar?” is often the first question I got upon starting conversations with young men.149 Despite my best attempts to steer conversations away from Syria by explaining the very personal and sensitive nature of the topic, this all too often proved frustratingly futile. It is all the harder to justify remaining silent to questioning when I myself am engaged in enquiring into both political and personal matters. When I finally capitulated, discussions often got heated. Many a times I lost my temper. While often difficult and frustrating episodes, they were hardly uninforma- tive. For one they provided insights into the degree to which many in Tunisia followed the Syrian conflict and larger events in the Middle East as well as the degree to which that conflict reflected current political issues in Tunisia.150

146 As I discuss in chapter five; most cafés and public spaces of “waiting” are male only. 147 By this I do not in any way imply that my experiences are equivalent to theirs. Only that certain shared aspects of space and time became a starting point towards thinking about their lived experiences. 148 I rarely got any questions about Sweden. 149 “Bashar” here refers to Bashar Al Assad, Syria’s president. Although not all on the left support Bashar, I quickly came to learn that there is a perception that those that are starkly against him tend to have an Islamist orientation. Thus, the question is at least partly about placing me along a political spectrum. Women never asked me this question. 150 It may seem obvious that Tunisians would be deeply invested in events that happen in Syria. But since, in my own experience, many Syrians know little about Tunisia (particularly prior to

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What many of these encounters hit home was that from the vantage point of Tunisia, the Middle East was not far away at all and the events of the Arab Spring had surely brought it even closer.151 It is true that for many Tunisians the Syrian conflict is nothing more than a prism through which to project local ideological positions. But this is not all. These discussions on Syria, and the larger Middle East, reflect an on-going engagement with, and complex relationship towards, authoritarianism in the Arab World.152 In this on-going engagement I was seen as a source of information and partner in dialogue. Whether by design or by compulsion I began to practice a kind of pressured participant observation. I could not extricate myself from my own position within the context of the field as a Syrian —however imperfect a one— nor as a person with strong political views on many topics, often at odds with my interlocutors. After all, these discussions were part of the wider political debates happening every day and everywhere in post-Ben Ali Tunisia. In a sense, this research is the sum of these discussions and arguments.

Fusion of Horizons My own experiences influenced my understanding and engagement with the field in both direct and indirect ways. A reflexive and abductive research process is about interrogating one’s own reactions; what one finds surprising and why.153 It was not at the outset obvious to me why the young men I spoke to would take such a keen interest in the goings on of Syria, nor discuss the merits of such leaders as Hafiz Al Assad and his son, of Saddam Hussein, of Abdel Gamal Nasser. That such figures remain focal-points of fascination and are still topics of relevance for many young Tunisian men—and not only

2011 events) this was not something I initially took for granted. My own biases quickly became clear. One leftist rebuked when I pressed him on the issue, “We are Arabs, why should we not know and care about our own region and its history?” This pointed not only to certain self- centered Middle Eastern tendencies (which I had surely inherited) but also perhaps reflected the academic tendency to divide scholarship between North Africa and the Middle East. This may have changed in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring. 151 The relationship between Tunisia and the Middle East is of course a dynamic and complicated one. Even before the Syrian civil war many Tunisians went to Syria to study. Today going to Syria means something else entirely, as testified to by the thousands of young Tunisian men having left to take part in the struggle against Assad, often on the side of radical Jihadist groups. 152 This is discussed in more detail in chapter 10. 153 Having spent part of my childhood in the Middle East meant that I had already a set of expectations when arriving in Tunisia, about youth, about gender, about the state.

98 | Chapter Three those that define themselves as on the left—pushed me to think about the role of masculinity in framing discussions of state and leaders.154 Similarly, my experiences of working in some of the poorest areas of India colored my perception of poverty in Tunisia. At times I resisted interlocutors’ definitions of themselves and their areas as “poor.” I found it hard to classify someone with a university degree and enough money for such “luxuries” as daily cigarettes, coffee and sometimes beer as “having nothing.” Yet, what appeared to matter to the young men was less their poverty in an absolute sense, but the discrepancy between what they had and what they expected. The daily humiliation of having to ask for money from their parents, of sitting idly by, of waiting and hoping for a better life, of the constant reminders that many in Tunisia and beyond had far more than they would ever have.155 Above all, their inability to realize the socially established norms of male adulthood made them, in their own eyes, “poor.” If ethnography is about turning the strange into the familiar, it is equally about de-familiarizing the taken-for-granted. The “failure” that defines the lives of many of my interlocutors, failure to find a decent living, failure to turn time—waiting—into something meaningful, is often experienced as a personal failure. But it is also public and shared. It is visible and thus political. This dimension of unemployment and waiting of the young men in Kasserine and Gafsa stands in contrast to its invisibility and individualization in many Western societies, not least my own. As many have said, ethnography is always, whether explicit or implicit, comparative. In writing about the young men, I am also writing about my own society. In all these ways, and many more, my research process has been informed by my own position. This dialectic process of discovery and self-interrogation in fieldwork can be likened to Gadamer’s famous conceptualization of hermeneutics as the fusion of horizons: “To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand – not in order to look away from it but to see it better” (2013:300). While fieldwork means being embedded in social relations, ethnographers are also well placed to trace some of the ways in which positionality conditions knowledge production. To be reflexive is not the same as saying that all knowledge is subjective or relative, but merely that it requires interpretation and is always partial.

154 As a friend joked about many leftists in Tunisia “They hate Ben Ali because he was a dictator, but they like Bashar because he is a dictator.” Again, these discussions appear highly gendered. I never engaged with or overheard these conversations with women. 155 This can be understood as part of the tension between absolute and relative definitions of poverty.

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ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY Engaging with others and using oneself as the instrument of understanding also raises ethical challenges all too rarely discussed in research. It is one of the strengths of ethnography that the ethical implications of research are constantly made visible as we interact face-to-face with those we research. As Schatz puts it “ethnography has the central virtue of keeping the researcher in touch with the people affected by power relations” (2009:12). This is indeed a virtue, but being close to those we study also involves ethical dilemmas that are often passed over in silence.156 In many ways, issues of an ethical nature turned out to be the hardest to tackle during my fieldwork among young men in marginalized regions of Tunisia. When speaking of ethics, I do not primarily mean issues of informed con- sent, or of assuring anonymity of those studied and avoiding to put them in direct risk. While of central concern for ethnography, these are issues where there are relatively clear guidelines (see for example Fujii 2012). These issues are often articulated in the negative; they involve avoiding harm. Thus, all my interlocutors’ names have been changed.157 And biographical details that may be used to identify them have been altered or are described in very general terms.158 However, there are other, more complex, less often discussed aspects tied to ethics of research that I believe become particularly “visible” in ethnographic research, even if they are surely present in all research.

The Problem of Speaking for Others In ethnography being “in touch” means gaining the trust of those we study in order to gain access to Scott’s hidden transcripts, and what Herzfeld would describe as living in the world of cultural intimacies. This double hermeneutic of fieldwork is what Bourdieu refers to as “a point of view on a point of view” (1999:625) – meaning that while we speak with those we research, we are in

156 Within the context of the research process itself, the term ethics is rarely defined and often treated as a residual category. Here I primarily use the term in relation to questions of responsibility towards those we research, both individuals and groups. 157 This has been done even if many young men themselves often may wish to be named. This undoubtedly reflects a disappearance of old authoritarian fears. However, the relative freedom afforded Tunisians today is in no way guaranteed. Furthermore, many of the stories that the young recount include smuggling, taking drugs and other illegal activities. I have not explicitly asked for such stories, but rather they form the backdrop of their everyday lives. 158 The biographical details that are changed are not those that have a direct bearing on the analysis.

100 | Chapter Three turn also speaking about them. A less academic way of putting it is to say that ethnography involves telling other people’s stories. Within mainstream political science, the tendency is towards studying “powerful actors” (Eckl 2008:197). Work with an ethnographic sensibility instead tends to “study down”, often with the intention of bringing to light hidden structures of domination and of “empowering” disempowered groups.159 The speaking with and about of ethnography entails ethical risks that are particularly acute when studying marginalized groups. The capacity of ethnographic research to include excluded voices also means the potential for exposing embarrassing or uncomfortable information about vulnerable groups. The researcher is thus confronted with the question of whether visibility is always warranted. And when, if ever, is it acceptable to reveal information that could be considered sensitive when dealing with marginalized groups?

Correcting and Over-correcting In studying down, the researcher may feel the need to act as a spokesperson, or at the very least to provide a corrective, when conducting research on groups that exist within narratives which simultaneously ignore and stereotype them.160 By making visible we may also feel compelled to make invisible. As Gans explained:

Every participant-observer becomes emotionally involved not only in his study, but also with the people, since it is through their willingness to talk that he is able to do his research[…]The identification is probably more intense if the people being studied are suffering from deprivation, and if they are a low-status group whose point of view is not being taken notice of in the world outside. In such a situation, the researcher feels a need to do something about the deprivation, and to correct false stereotypes about the people. (1976:54)

159 There are other reasons to “study down” as well. As I have argued, a view from “the margins” or “from below” may be more accurate, or fruitful in understanding dynamics in the center. 160 In the case of my research, such powerful narratives exist both within a national Tunisian discourse that frame young men from marginal regions as problems associated with violence, illegality and terrorism, as well as a larger discourse that treat young North African/Arab/Mus- lim men as threatening.

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This attempt to provide a fairer picture of those we study can easily slide into not just correcting “false” stereotypes but also correcting “negative” stereotypes.161 The degree to which the research should function as a corrective to negative narratives raises a range of ethical dangers and dilemmas. Donna Haraway cautions against the ever-present danger of “romanticizing and ap- propriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their perspective” (1988:584). Presumably, this romanticizing is part of an over- identification with those we study and therefore a tendency to overlook aspects that are “undesirable or unethical, and this can lead to partial or distorted findings” (Gans 1968:310). Even without assuming a tension between the quest for the unmediated truth and the need for expedient exclusion of facts, and supposing the researcher is able to walk a path between correcting and over-correcting; this does not however resolve the issue of responsibility towards those we study. If anything, it merely raises the question of the role of the researcher in this process of revelation.

Looking Down to Kick Up Ethnographers have found ways to try and resolve the tension between speaking and silence. For Herzfeld revealing unflattering facts of those one studies is justified by the process of demystification of the hegemonic narrative of nation states. He writes “exposing the privileged cultural and social intimacies of small or disenfranchised groups may not be a kindly act. But the worst consequences can be avoided if such reporting is coupled with an equally pen- etrating critique of the nation-state” (2016:188). Such information is included only to the degree to that it undermines a larger discourse of power.162 One way to put it is to say that one studies “down” in order to kick “upwards.” Following this approach, I might say that while my own research looks at young men in the margins, the aim is to situate that marginalization within the context of larger power dynamics. The research can include, but does not end with, the “negative” actions and words of those relatively marginal. Ra- ther it proceeds to put them in relation to, in my case, notions of normative democracy, state-citizenship and neoliberal governance. Thus, I treat the less

161Assuming such a distinction can be made, the researcher would then need to decide on what the stereotypes are that need correcting and what the correct remedy to this state of affairs would be. 162 Gans puts it even more bluntly: “if the people studied are participants in what appears to the researcher as a gross miscarriage of justice, he has the right to publish his conclusions, even if the correction of the injustice might hurt them” (1976:56).

102 | Chapter Three savory acts and utterances of those I study as displays of “the effects of power so that they can be better understood and contained” (Burawoy 1998:32). This is, broadly speaking, the approach I make use of in the thesis. While fine as heuristics, this “for the greater good” approach is, however, neither watertight nor does it resolve lingering ethical issues. For one, there is no way to know in advance the way that the research will be perceived and used. It assumes that the strategy of revealing the unflattering to fight a larger injustice will be successful. It also appears to commit the researcher to a view of power as “out there”, a position that assumes a clear distinction between the powerful and the powerless, between oppressors and the oppressed. It assumes that, “One can clearly locate power and discern power structures. Power is seen as something that can be found, pinpointed and consciously manipulated” (Go- rashi & Wels 2009:235). This view of power has been critiqued by a plethora of post-structuralist inflected scholars. Furthermore, while seeking to reveal patterns of domination, ethnographic work that embeds itself in the quotidian also brings to light the instability of abstractions like “subaltern”, “class”, and “powerlessness.” These categories, like the field itself, do not exist independent of the process of research. The category “young men in Kasserine and Gafsa” hardly constitutes a clearly delimited group, with a set of articulated interests and views. Research is profoundly influenced by what is asked, and who is asked, and within what theoretical framework it is conducted. Choosing to look at young men, means not looking at other groups. Invariably some voices are silenced, others ignored. Even the most in-depth of ethnographical works are always painfully partial. Another, less discussed aspect of interpretive ethnography, is what I term, the sin of irrelevance. As Allina-Pisano writes, “those who study political elites often cleave to epistemologies that admit to ontological truth, their research findings are articulated as truth claims about the world” (2009:55). By contrast, those that study marginal groups are more likely to embrace interpretive methodologies. Allina-Pisano continues:

The result is that while social research about the powerful claims a monopoly on the production of facts and causal inferences, research about the relatively powerless offers alternative epistemologies but not competing, or corrective, facts. (ibid)

One consequence of this is that research on marginalized groups tends to be less inclined to speak in the language of “facts” and thus articulate clear and

Methods and their Interpretations | 103 unambiguous conclusions about “what is to be done.” This may mean being less enmeshed in the discourse of power, and maintaining a “critical distance” to problematic projects, but the price is practical irrelevance. Finally, both a “Herzfeldian” approach that claims to critique power, as well as post-structuralist approaches that view power as “everywhere” or “ca- pillary”, can easily come to obfuscate the power imbalance between the researcher and the research, a dynamic at the heart of all ethnography.163 The researcher is still in the powerful position to frame – in the double sense of the word – the researched.

Dialogue and Danger The processes of placing the narratives of the relatively powerless in relation to power, which Herzfeld discusses, can often mean focusing on things that the participants themselves do not find central to their experiences; or framing them in such a way that does not resonate with them. Should the emphasis in ethnography be on “unmasking” the narratives of those we study or to let ourselves be caught by their dramas and dreams? Part of the ethnographic tension is that we, as ethnographers, seek to take the experiences of those we research seriously even as we retain the keys to the castle. Schatz writes: “An ethnographic study – all else being equal – is likely to grant descriptive and/or explanatory priority to the ways in which "insiders" on the whole understand their existence” (2009:7). However, the stories and self-understandings of our interlocutors are rarely the end, merely the beginning. Even without ascribing a “false-consciousness” to those we research, as truth accessible only to us the enlightened few, our theorizing tends to happen “behind the backs” of those we study. The goal of letting the researched speak for themselves is undermined by the very process of theorizing and writing. In my own research, I have striven to work in an open and cooperative manner with my interlocutors. I have endeavored to explain the nature of the project, and of participant observation, in as much detail as possible; asking when certain aspects of their experiences or narratives may be unsuitable and embarrassing.164 I often discuss my interpretations and conclusions with my interlocutors. Many of the discussions and debates that inform my narratives

163 While in the field, there are many contexts in which the researcher is relatively powerless compared to interlocutors, but within the context of the academic text, the researcher always has the final word. 164 Overwhelmingly, however, any hesitation to include potentially “negative” details comes from me rather than my interlocutors; who often insist on the importance of the “brutal truth.”

104 | Chapter Three are a direct product of these interactions and the open-ended aspect of fieldwork constitutes one of the strengths of participant-observation. The dialogi- cal nature of research becomes apparent in this process, but dialogue invariably means disagreement and the power-dynamics between the researcher and researched, as well as the process of research, constrains the scope of this dialogue. In ethnography, placing other people’s stories in context also means displacing them.

Symbolic Violence In ethnography, unlike in most mainstream methodological approaches within political science, the researcher speaks and the field “speaks back.” Much of the strength of ethnographic research comes from the dialectics of dialogue. Yet, as Burawoy writes, “As observers, no matter how we like to deceive ourselves, we are on "our own side," always there for ulterior reasons” (1998:22-23). Like in journalism, there is always an element of seduction and betrayal to ethnography. This is true no matter how open and transparent we are with the intent of our research. There is an unmistakable element of symbolic violence in any work of this nature, an appropriation of the voices of those we research, a “violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 2002:16). If ethnography as “being near in space and time” means becoming more aware of the fields of power at play, it also means being more intimately complicit in their logic. The tensions remain: between enabling and silencing, between placing and displacing and between the researcher and the researched. At times, fieldwork among marginalized groups feels like little more than a process of alchemy; to go searching for gold in the dark corners of despair. Transmuting others’ experiences of suffering into something more palpable. Perhaps these tensions can never be fully resolved within the narrow confines of academia, let alone within the text itself. Perhaps ethnography demands a bifurcation of the self. The more the researcher appoints himself or herself as narrator of the stories of others, the more these stories are found wanting. Reflexivity, unable to achieve its fusion of horizons takes a pause. Perhaps other modes of engagement need to follow. And yet, by raising these issues, I do not mean to suggest turning away. That too is a form of silencing and entails ceding the agenda to those that speak only in the language of certainties. If this study claims anything at all, it is that while uncertainty contains all manner of discomforting horrors, cer-

Methods and their Interpretations | 105 tainty is the realm of totalitarian fantasy. With Lefort in mind, and to para- phrase Kierkegaard, I would suggest that research, like democracy, resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning.

4. The Road to Revolution

What is neocolonialism? What is this other, ungraspable thing that has appeared since independence? Why this tremendous feeling of impotence in our thinking and in our social conscience in the face of the absence of liberty and democracy? Why was democracy not born with independence? Why have nationalism and anti- colonialism not been a force for liberty? Why has our national political universe become so closed, so crushing? – Hélé Béji

An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted – Arthur Miller

INTRODUCTION By the time I arrived in Tunisia, the mood among the young was one of anger and frustration, and a sense of widespread disappointment pervaded discussions. I wish to take this anger, frustration, and disappointment, in the revolution and transition, at face value but I also want to expand on it, by situating it in the context of the past state-citizen dynamics. The preceding decades of dictatorship will, I argue, have a continuous impact on the way democracy and democratization is experienced. A detailed investigation into the complex legacy of the Tunisian state under Bourguiba and Ben Ali is beyond the scope of this study. Nonetheless, this chapter will attempt to provide a brief background of post-colonial Tu- nisia. The emphasis is on political imaginaries, looking especially at young men in the interior and southern regions. The past state-citizen dynamics, formed as they have been under authoritarian rule, are approached indirectly, and are, by necessity, painted in rather broad strokes. The key argument of the chapter is that citizenship has been understood primarily in terms of “bread and dignity.” At the same time, the unmet expectations of the citizenry

107 108 | Chapter Four continued to give rise to contestations and confrontations, to forms of politics, often dominated by the young from marginalized regions. Following independence, the Tunisian state developed into a powerful force for mobilizing social and economic resources as well as channeling the desires and hopes of its population for a modern nation. The citizenship that came to be articulated was premised on an authoritarian state, and dominated by expectations of male respectability and “dignity”, understood as stable state employment. The realization of such expectations was always unevenly distributed. Interior and southern regions saw continued marginalization as the state prioritized industrial development and tourism along the wealthier coastal regions. Particularly hard hit has been young Tunisians, especially following neoliberal reforms that coincided with a "youth bulge" that reached its heights in the early 2000s. Even as the state continued to act as the major absorber of labor, the young, men and women, have increasingly been forced to seek employment in the expanding informal sector. The state that developed during Ben Ali’s rule became increasingly authoritarian and hampered by inefficiencies, nepotism and widespread corruption. Expectations, however, of a state that could provide, continued to hold sway among the marginalized and erupted in the revolution of 2010-2011. The democratic transition that followed, while having achieved many important political reforms, continues to be haunted by the political imaginaries of the past.

THE AGE OF BOURGUIBA Tunisia is a small North African nation squeezed between two larger neighbors, Algeria and Libya. It has a fertile coast, green northern areas, mountains to the west, and deserts to the south. It was a formally constituted Ottoman wilayat (province) from the end of the 16th century; it was ruled as an autonomous state within the Ottoman Empire by the Hussenitie beys from 1705 onward. Under increased pressure from European powers, the beys began attempts at “defensive modernization” (Anderson 1986) in the early 19th century.165 Notwithstanding some small measure of success, on 2 May 1881 French troops landed in Tunis and forced the bey to sign the Treaty of Bardo

165 Despite a relatively functional state and significant military, and educational reforms, the massive costs of these endeavors rendered Tunisia more dependent on European colonial powers.

The Road to Revolution | 109 that declared the territory a French Protectorate.166 Tunisia remained nomi- nally independent and the beylical family continued to act as the official rulers; in practice devoid of real power.167 While the number of French settlers in Tunisia during the Protectorate was relatively few, they were allowed access to the best land (Anderson 1986).168 The first major nationalist challenge to French control came from the Destour (Constitution) Party, founded in 1920 and composed of the traditional Tunis elites or notables (‘ayan).169 The name of the party harkened back to the Tunisian constitution of 1861; created by the energetic bey Muhammad al Sadiq and hailed as the first written constitution of the Arab World.170 The Destour Party’s leadership remained narrow and excluded the emerging working and middle classes (Zghal 1973; Murphy 1999).171 It was not until the founding of the Neo-Destour party in 1934, by disgruntled Destour members, that mass mobilization against the French began to take more definite shape. The new party signaled a shift in the leadership role of the independence movement, away from the traditional elites of Tunis towards an emerging professional class. French colonization had weakened the position of the traditional Tunis-based elites in favor of the cultivating farmers in the Sahel region: the fertile coastal areas (Zghal 1973:228).172 Much of the leadership of the Neo-Destour party, like its leader Habib Bourguiba, came from

166 Unlike the more violent and extended annexation of Algeria that had begun some fifty years before, the take-over of Tunisia was a quicker, smoother affair. Even more so, in relation to the extremely brutal Italian conquest of Libya, where up to half the population was destroyed (Ah- mida 2016:1). 167 When the French arrived in Tunis, the beys were already heavily indebted to European banks and states, and European powers had come to dictate Tunisian affairs at least since the 1840s. 168 By the time of the French Protectorate, Tunisia already had significant European populations. Particularly Maltese and Italians but few French. The Italians would outnumber the French settlers throughout the Protectorate. 169 This had been preceded by the movement of so-called Young Tunisians, inspired by similar groups in the crumbled Ottoman Empire and across Europe and its colonies. 170 The degree to which the constitution represented a brief time of early modernization, or was pushed by Western powers to increase their influence, remains a topic of academic debate. See Womble, T. L. (1997) 171 Disconnected from the political party in the capital, large parts of the countryside of the interior and the south saw continual conflict and violence between European settlers and local groups, following increased dispossession of land by the French (Perkins 2004:63). The early 1920s also saw the creation of the first Tunisian labor union, the Confédération Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (CGTT), which was quickly crushed by the French authorities. 172 While many farmers were destituted by French policies, a segment of the farmers and notables on the Coast managed to thrive. Brown writes that “the Sahilians, especially in the years following World War I, were among the Tunisians most aggressively exploiting new opportunities opened up by the French Protectorate” (2001:50).

110 | Chapter Four provincial landowning families and minor government workers from the coast, whose parents had invested in the education of their children.173 Many had been educated in the domestic francophone system and had then studied in France, often becoming doctors and lawyers (Murphy 1999:46).174 The dominance of Sahilians should not obscure the broad-based nature of the nationalist movement headed by Bourguiba – composed of the “weakened” Tunis elites, the emerging coastal middle classes, as well as workers and farmers. Bourguiba and the Party allied itself early with the new Tunisian labor union, Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT), founded in 1947. Strikes in the cities organized by the UGTT, together with the occasional violence of armed bands of so-called felleghas in the countryside and the political agitation of Neo-Destour, put heavy pressure on the French protectorate. Continual agitation led to internal autonomy in 1955, followed by independence in 1956. Bourguiba was declared the hero of national liberation. His dominance, however, was not uncontested; especially in the early days of the struggle for independence and just after its achievement. Bourguiba favored accommodation with the French and pushed for a radical Western-focused modernization, inspired by Turkey’s Ataturk. He faced his biggest challenge in Saleh Ben Youssef, who maintained a more Arab nationalist agenda and intransigent position vis-à-vis the colonial power. The struggle between Bourguiba and Ben Youssef is often put in ideological as well as regional terms, with Bour- guiba drawing support from the land-owners, petit-bourgeoisie and mer- chants from the coast (Anderson 1986:232). Conversely, Ben Youssef found his strongest support among artisans, religious authorities, as well as dissatis- fied tribes and peasants in the southern and interior regions, including armed falleghas (Ashford 1965:217). With shrewd political maneuvering, the support of the powerful labor union, and backing of the French military and police, Bourguiba defeated Ben Yousef and his falleghas and Ben Youssef fled the country.175 Given this contested transition, resentment in many southern

173 Despite the fact that Sahelians where dominant in the Neo-Destour party, the Sahel region had been relatively quietist both prior to and during French control. A notable exception was the 1864 tax-revolt. The violence with which the revolt was put down by the Bey hit the Sahel particularly hard. This may have been one reason why they did not join the short-lived insur- gency against the French in 1882 that was predominantly from the south and western regions. 174 Like in so many parts of the European colonies, it was the Europeanised elites that the colonial powers had sought to position as supporters and mediators of “European civilization” that eventually turned against their supposed benefactors and began to mobilize the masses. 175 Ben Youssef was assassinated in 1961 in a hotel in Frankfurt by men suspected to be acting on Bourguiba’s behest.

The Road to Revolution | 111 and interior parts of the country has remained strong to this day. The legacy of the falleghas and Ben Youssef has continued to be cultivated in the margins, beyond the official state-discourse.

Corporatist Populism By the early 1960s, Bourguiba had consolidated power as the undisputed leader of the nation, ignoring voices both within his party, and outside it, that called for more open and democratic procedures. In, what Perkins terms, a “presidential monarchy” (2014:137), the party oversaw elections to a powerless National Assembly. A new constitution was passed in 1959 that, although contained a host of civil and political rights, proved to be toothless in practice.176 The decades following independence saw a massive expansion in every aspect of state-formation. Bourguiba was able to control and expand a state apparatus that was relatively autonomous of social forces, even if it was dominated by elements from the coast. Scholars of the Arab states during the post-independence period often see this “over-development” of the state as a consequence of a weakly developed class structure. They postulate that Arab societies lacked both a bourgeoisie class that could lead industrialization, and working classes that could initiate social movements. Ayubi writes, “The state here comes to fulfil a compensatory function and to enforce a certain kind of formal unity on a body that is not socially homogeneous or balanced” (2009:173).177 Bourguiba instituted what is sometimes referred to as a “corporatist authoritarian state model” (Murphy 1999; Redissi 2004) or “corporatist populism” (Ayubi 2009). The political party responsible for national liberation took on the role of mediator of all social forces, claiming to represent all groups and classes and subsuming all potential conflicts under the banner of

176 However vacuous, it did on the level of political imaginaries, reinforce the importance of law and constitution. 177 Building on Alexander Gerschenkron’s classic work (1962), many political economy scholars have argued that the later a country develops, the more the state will take the leading role in development (Minns 2006).

112 | Chapter Four nationalism.178 The challenge of this form of corporatist populism was to simultaneously mobilize and depoliticize the masses.179 At times Bourguiba made use of socialist rhetoric, and his economic vision contained elements of a more radical socialist project, yet the general thrust of the corporatist model was to downplay class antagonism and focus on “consensus,” even as the state and more specifically Bourguiba himself became the only legitimate voice.180 Any social conflicts were played out within the party, rather than outside the system, and any potential challenge to the party was treated as a threat to the nation as a whole.181 The Party that Bourguiba had played such a large part in forming quickly became indistinguishable from the apparatus of the state, and increasingly indistinguishable from the person of Bourguiba.182 Bourguiba famously said, "The system? What system? I am the system” (Cited in Moore 1965:41). As Perkins notes, “Bourguiba cast himself in the roles of patriarch, teacher, and disciplinarian, making it clear that he, the founding father of modern Tunisia, knew better than anyone else what its people, his children, required” (2014:135-6). While repressive, this state-building process was also inclusive. It provided avenues for the emerging middle classes from the coast to enter into the Party and the state apparatuses. The Party saw a massive increase of its members

178 This is not in any way unique to Tunisia. Ayubi writes, “The state in developing societies attempts to manage, contain and repress – within the state apparatuses – the conflicts and struggles emanating from the social distress that accompanies development” (2009:180). This form of authoritarian corporatism was common in the developing world, particularly Latin America and the Arab World. This is what Schmitter (1974) terms “state corporatism”, and should be distinguished from the “societal” corporatism of Western countries, perhaps best represented by Sweden. The populist dimension, drawing on works on Latin America, refers to the inclusion of lower classes into the state apparatus for the first time (Ayubi 2009:217) 179 In the case of Tunisia, this entailed the cooptation of the labor union UGTT; an organization that had taken on a symbolic importance as the leading organizational force against the French. Bourguiba had to ensure that the UGTT became “an appendage of the party” (Perk- ings 2014:139). 180 Unlike many other Arab and post-colonial states, the Tunisian army remained small and subordinate to the party. 181 This can be understood to follow the logic of the authoritarian version of Lefort’s totalitarianism discussed previously. 182 As Murphy writes, “The state evolved from the personnel and mechanisms of the party, the two being fused together, much as the head is joined to the body” (1999:15).

The Road to Revolution | 113 following independence; several hundred thousand according to some esti- mates.183 The popular classes and marginal regions were incorporated by expanding the education system, health-care and housing as well as providing a range of state subsidies for staple goods, and offering promises of social mobility. State building came to signal a profound shift in the expectations of citizens towards the state. Undergirding this shift was a thoroughly “modern” and gendered notion of citizenship that was intimately tied to employment. As Ferguson & Li put it, it involved a “set of gendered expectations about the breadwinner and the family; the organization of time and space; the role of formal education; respectability and virtue; and contribution to the nation were rolled into the notion of the ‘proper job’” (Ferguson & Li 2018:1). This, in many ways, followed a classically social democratic model of citizenship; with employment as the central component, yet the price of inclusion was political passivity.184 If the state was never in complete control of the expectations of the citizenry, the expectations of social mobility and secure employment would prove resilient, and as will be detailed, have far-reaching consequences and continue to inform the political imaginaries of young Tu- nisians today.

Father of the Nation Bourguiba laid out the vision of what it meant to be “Tunisian” in terms of a synthesis between tradition and modernity, between Islam and Europe (Zayzafoon 2005:118).185 In implementing this vision Bourguiba went further than other Arab countries in curtailing the role of religious institutions and

183 Perkins writes “In 1957 the Neo-Destour boasted of an astonishing six hundred thousand members – almost twice as many as it claimed at the time of the party congress only two years before. While certainly exaggerated, the figure nevertheless reflects a surge in party membership as Tunisians who had previously stood aloof rushed to affiliate with the winners of the long battle for independence” (2014:138). This also increased the importance of the Party as a vehicle of patronage. 184 Turner writes “Within the dominant paradigm of Western social democracies a citizen is an economically employed member of the society who is able to discharge duties to a household in return for which he (or less frequently she) is the recipient of social rights to welfare benefits, unemployment payments and service supplements” (1996:ix). 185 The importance of this narrative of cultural symbiosis is explored in chapter 10.

114 | Chapter Four pushing for the “emancipation” of women from the yoke of tradition by education and reforms to family status law.186 It was not a French laïcité in which the state removed itself from matters of religion but a control over religion by the state – more akin to the Turkish model.187 Bourguiba, like many post-independence leaders, used the language of the family, and the paternal father. This was combined with ambitious state projects that aimed precisely to reduce the importance of the traditional family, and replace it with the new Tunisian “family” with Bourguiba at its head.188 Bourguiba’s self-proclaimed role as the savior of women also came to reinforce female subordination. As Tunisian gender scholar Lamia Zayzafoon writes:

In Bourguiba’s post-independence speeches, women are still barred from “power” politics; only “les hommes” or men can truly “[devote] themselves” to the business of governance. “When we reestablished the woman’s rights.” Bourguiba an- nounces, “we don’t make her man’s equal in all fields. We acknowledge, however, her equal right to dignity.” Bourguiba’s speech show’s that even though Tunisian women are being made citizens, they are not full or equal citizens. (2005:116)189

Even for the male populations, the vision of citizenship was a narrow and limited one. At the same time, throughout the 1950s and ‘60s Bourguiba and his policies were lauded by Western governments as enlightened and moderate. Furthermore, “Bourguiba’s unﬂinching Cold War alignment with the West, helped to secure the economic assistance of the United States, which touted Tunisia as a model for other developing countries” (Perkins 2014:145). Tu-

186 While so-called “state feminism” was common across Arab Republics, Tunisia stood out in its far-reaching reforms to gender rights, particularly a personal family law that remains unique in the Arab World. 187 Article 1 of the 1959 constitution clearly expressed Islam as religion of Tunisia, and the state maintained sole responsibility for training religious leaders. In this, Bourguiba’s Tunisia resem- bled Ataturk’s Turkey. 188 Bourguiba said “the family is no longer limited to the circle of parents. It extends to the village, the country, and beyond the frontiers, to encompass the Greater Maghreb, the Arab community, the entire continent” (quoted in Zayzafoon 2005:122). 189 Zayzafoon quotes another speech by Bourguiba where he explains to women how “little by little, you will get used to your new rights as we get used to pure air. Little by little you will become real human beings and our Nation, God willing, an exemplary Nation” (2005:116)

The Road to Revolution | 115 nisia also attracted the attention of political scientists and development scholars, who saw Tunisia as more “modern” in comparison to other North African countries.190

Social Contracts If Tunisia was considered more successful in its modernist drive, it followed a similar logic as many other Arab states. Such models provided little space for political or civic engagement. Mahmoud Hussein speaks of the post-independence period characterized by the “great” Arab leader:

This was a period of anguished growth of the individual. His collective self-awareness before brothers continued to deepen, his sense of personal dignity began to sharpen. He began to observe society and the world with a more objective eye. And yet the field of his fundamental rights was a wasteland, the extent of his political liberties tightly controlled. He was expected to assume responsibility for his daily life without the opportunity to assume responsibility as a citizen. He was accountable to the state but could not demand the same accountability in return. For all intents and purposes he was a citizen, yet he was shorn of that margin of real initiative that determines the conditions of his existence, such as the right to act upon the political options of the nation. (2012:121-122)191

Hisham Sharabi speaks of the post-colonial Arab state as one of an etatist patriarch, “in this kind of polity the ordinary person is a passive entity, a subject not a citizen, with no human or civil rights or power to influence decisions concerning society as a whole” (1988:66).192 According to Tunisian scholar Elbaki Hermassi, “The general belief among decision-makers was that citizens aspired to meet their material needs […] more than they aspired towards political pluralism” (1986:85). These state-citizen dynamics are referred to as “authoritarian bargains” (Kamrava 2014; Meijer 2014), or “authoritarian

190 See for example Rudebeck (1967) and Moore (1965). Tunisian scholar Elbaki Hermassi writes, “Political scientists seem more at home in Tunisia, where the existence of modern political institutions affords them the opportunity to substantiate theories of political development” (1973:207). While such scholarship on Tunisia were often rigorous and valuable they in many ways nonetheless came to partake in the construction of the myth of Tunisian exceptionalism. 191 Mahmoud Hussein is the joint pen name of Bahgat El Nadi and Adel Rifaat, two Egyptian intellectuals. 192 Across the Arab World, the republican states that rose out of the ashes of colonialism followed similar patterns, Baathists in Syria and Iraq, Nasser in Egypt, FNL in Algeria.

116 | Chapter Four modernization from above” (Santini 2018) or “populist neo-patrimonialism” (Hinnebusch 2015). They are understood as more or less hegemonic until the end of the 1970s. In this “citizenship from above” model (Meijer 2014:641), inclusion was primarily through a modernist, technocratic, and authoritarian vision of social improvement, led by the state conceiving citizenship in passive terms.193 This is often understood as a social contract (see for example; Bayat 2017; Ismail 2011; Waterbury 1998). Meijer writes on the nature of the social contract:

In citizenship terms, according to this deal the state acquires political power and demands political allegiance, while in exchange the population receives from the state jobs, education, housing, pensions, and food and petrol subsidies, and can expect the state to ensure social justice, foster economic development, maintain the national identity, and protect national interests. (2017:80)194

Yet, how exactly this social contract should be understood is unclear, since dissent was not tolerated nor counter-visions accepted.195 As we have seen, for political-economy scholars, the weakness of class as a mobilizing category meant that the state was able to impose its will independent of any presumed bargain or contract.196 According to Carole Pateman, the notion of social contract arose in the West precisely as a move away from paternal to fraternal

193 Meijer emphasizes the ways in which this social contract de-politicized citizens, and talks of a “culture of obedience” (2017:90). While this may be true, it is also important to emphasize that the modernist project did embed the notion of the state in the lives of its subjects. In many cases successfully, perhaps too successfully for the state. For when it was no longer able to meet expectations, it provided grounds for a politicization of groups that felt excluded. 194 Similarly, Santini writes, “Bourguiba and the Neo-Dustour party prioritized economic development over civil and political citizenship rights, under the aegis of a neo-corporatist compromise which characterized the Bourguiba era until 1987” (2018:18). Abdelmaki Hermassi writes “By this contract the poor forfeited their political rights in exchange for material benefits ensured by the government” (1994:227). 195 Furthermore, the very notion of corporatism is antithetical to social contract theory. As Ayubi writes, “A major assumption of corporatism (as an ideology or intellectual tradition) is that society is not composed primarily of individuals or groups that operate in an open, market- like relationship with each other or that function according to an imaginary 'social contract'” (2009:1984-5). 196 Ayubi writes, “In much of the Third World the individual, even though he has often been forced out of his primary group, has not yet enjoyed the protection of individualism as a juridic- intellectual concept, nor has he been accommodated within a clearly differentiated class structure. Thus we have a state of flux whereby the human being is partly nuclearised but not fully individualised, he is partly a member of his primary group and partly a member of an emerging class structure. The 'state' in such a situation cannot be 'derived' or deduced either from the presumably 'contractual' relationship that binds the individual to the government in liberal

The Road to Revolution | 117 patriarchy; as an instituting of equality between men (1988). In the context of a country like Tunisia, if we are to talk of a social contract, then it presupposes a level of political equality and thus cannot be purely imposed from above. I suggest that the term social contract is misleading. There was little in the way of open spaces where the citizens could formulate or articulate their demands. At the same time, the power of the state to set the boundaries of such expectations was always partial. The importance of the state lay, above all, in its power of interpellation (Althusser 2006) which allowed it to reach out to the whole population across class boundaries. It was not necessarily the ruling ideology, contradictory at best, which was internalized, but above all the processes that put the state in the position of bringing forth visions, to realize desires. That the state under Bourguiba was never all powerful, as Ayubi points out it remained infrastruc- turally weak (2009), did not necessarily diminish its significance as an engine of symbolic order and promise for the future. State ideology can be rejected, it seems, but not the state itself as a locus of material and symbolic actualiza- tion. The tension of this state-citizen dynamic is that the more it took root and the more citizens came to expect the state to deliver, then the more the failure to do so opened up the door for a politicized citizenry that demanded their due.

Contestations The 1970s saw the rule of Bourguiba becoming increasingly despotic, but it also saw a radical increase in protests across the country.197 Like in many Arab countries, the Tunisian state-led development model was running out of steam and became crippled with inefficiencies and corruption. This, together with the rising costs of basic goods and a demographic explosion, resulted in a crisis of the state across the region and led to widespread protests and riots. For a moment, the citizenry was passive no more, demanding an end to corruption, affordable social services and jobs (King 2003; Richards et al. 2013; Salamé 1994). In what has been referred to as a pragmatic and non-dogmatic approach to economic policy, the Tunisian state adopted a variety of methods towards theory, or from the presumed class domination that is supposed to give the state its character in Marxist theory” (2009:34). 197 According to one estimate, the number of strikes across the country went from 25 in 1970 to 452 in 1977 (Hermassi 1986:88).

118 | Chapter Four development.198 Following independence, economic policy was in the hands of Hedi Nouira, the director of the Central Bank of Tunisia, who pursued a liberal economic program, albeit with heavy state-led investments in order to enable industrialization. Bourguiba subsequently instituted a short period of socialist economic policy in the 1960s, under the guidance of labor union leader Ahmed Bin Saleh, then Minister of Planning and Finance, in order to speed up modernization efforts. The name of the party was changed to Parti Socialiste Dusturien (PSD), but after pressure from within the party and the land-owning classes, Bourguiba sacked Ben Saleh and shifted back to more classically liberal economic policies. Even following liberalization, the “percentage of government spending on the public sector more than doubled between 1972 and 1984, while the state’s share of total capital investment never fell below 50 percent” (Perkins 2014:163).199 Heavily indebted, the state began to roll back some of its subsidies in 1978.200 This was followed by major strikes across the country organized by students and the UGTT, culminating in the so-called Black Thursday in Jan- uary 1978, when the government opened fire on demonstrations. Bourguiba clamped down hard on the labor union and did much to reduce their semi- independent role (King 2003; Mabrouk 2011).201 According to Hermassi, besides economic factors, the protests were fueled by a “growing intolerance towards inequality” (1986:80) as well as a frustration with what was regarded as increasing corruption and despotism. He writes that, “the current crisis took on a political aspect with the current belief that success (and social mobility) are not related to competence and effort, but to other factors such as nepotism, barratry and regional considerations”

198 Hermassi quotes Bourguiba as talking of his strategy as "an agreement daily negotiated with a changing reality ... a policy that makes one step forward when the society is capable of absorbing what is being proposed" (1973:222). 199 Ayubi sees this ideological flexibility and tendency to shift positions radically as typical of the Arab world and due in large part to the weak class basis of political power, “The lack of class and ideological hegemony also explains the relative ease with which Arab governments seem to be able to reverse their political positions domestically and internationally: yesterday's ardent socialists are today's dedicated liberalists; yesterday's Soviet satellites are today's Ameri- can allies; yesterday's enemies of Israel are today's negotiators with its leaders” (2009:182). 200 By the 1970s, the Tunisian government had one of the highest ratios of debt to GDP in the world (Perkins 2014:153) 201 Camau and Geisser called the UGTT the “weak link of the regime” in the way that despite heavy regime repression and co-option, at the least on a local level, it kept returning as a vehicle for protest.

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(ibid).202 The tensions of the post-colonial state began to be manifest in the divergence between expectations and experiences. The widespread protests can be understood as a product of a “successful” state-building process where peripheral areas and groups now came to claim their piece of the state pie.203 From the 1970s onward, one can speak of a breakdown of the earlier populist corporatism.204 The pretense of a democratic façade was worn away, and dissent was crushed.205 With the labor union weakened and no avenues of political dissent, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, various Islamist movements began to gain support.206 The most well-organized and popular of these was the Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique led by Rached Ghannouchi.207 The movement was soon labelled as a “security threat.” According to Geisser and Camau (2004), the clampdown on Islamists heralded a shift away from an authoritarian state to a police state with ever more power accruing to the security apparatus. The crisis of the state and concerns over Bourguiba’s growing senility paved the way for a take-over by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, a general of the army and police, who had served as both minister of interior and prime minister. Ben Ali took power in 1987 by declaring Bourguiba mentally unfit to rule. By the time Bourguiba was dethroned in 1987, his star had long ago faded.208

202 It may be interesting to point out that Hermassi later became Minister of Culture during the rule of Ben Ali. 203 This brings to mind Huntington’s observation that instability and violence increased across the developing world in the late 1950s. He argued that it was due to, “rapid social change and the rapid mobilization of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions” (1968:4). 204As Ayubi puts it, “In general, expansionary phases are conducive to socially and politically inclusive practices, whereas contractionist phases are more conducive to socially and politically exclusive practices” (2009:25). 205 In 1974 Bourguiba was declared “President for Life.” Furthermore, in a highly symbolic move “the 1976 amendment of Article 4 of the constitution, altering the motto of the republic from ’liberty, order, and justice’ to ‘order, liberty, and justice’ (Perkings 2014:162). This was changed in the 2014 constitution to “liberty, dignity, justice, and order.” The same as the 1958 version except for the addition of “dignity.” 206According to Krämer, “By and large, Islamic activism continues to be a predominantly urban phenomenon. Its appeal to (semi-) educated youth and the intelligentsia, whether classified as socially peripheral or not, is amply documented by a strong presence on university campuses, particularly at the faculties of science, engineering and technology” (1994:203) 207 This “movement” later become the Ennahda Party. 208 As Brown wrote after Bourguiba’s death in 2000: “Alas for Bourguiba's niche in history, his political charisma was not routinized. Instead, it broke apart, piece by piece over the many years of his relentless rule from 1956 until the shell that remained in 1987 – a physically and mentally decrepit old man – was simply put aside like a worn-out toy” (2001:44). Robert Lang writes “Bourguiba’s forceful, charismatic personality and his ruthless consolidation of political and

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The Tunisian political activist and writer Gilbert Naccache, who was imprisoned and tortured under Bourguiba, wrote a short piece entitled “Bour- guiba and Us” after Bourguiba passed away in 2000. Looking back on the years of Bourguiba he writes of “the difficulty of speaking, of writing, even of breathing—that is not new” (2000:224). Naccache continues:

When we talk about Bourguiba, with the hindsight of the few years that separate us from the height of his power, we remember how we could not pursue our friendships, our loves, our passions whether for others, or for a culture, or an idea—without always having to keep it hidden. We were already in prison, before we’d even been judged. (2000:225–226)

The fractures that became apparent at the end of Bourguiba’s rule have continued to haunt the Tunisian political landscape; a sense of disenfranchise- ment of the youth, anger at corruption and lack of social advancement and growing regional disparities. All these dynamics came to play a part in the revolution and, as we will see, continue to inform the experiences of many young Tunisian men in the margins.

THE ERA OF BEN ALI After taking power, Ben Ali renamed the ruling party Rassemblement Consti- tutionnel Démocratique (RCD). He promised a more inclusive political solution, released political prisoners, discarded the president for life clause, opened up a space for civic groups, and instituted what was termed “the national pact.” This gave rise to expectations that Tunisia was in the process of democratization. Ben Ali also sped up the liberalization programs started by Bour- guiba, under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and entered into agreement with the EU on free trade zones (Alexander 1997; Willis 2012) Soon, however, opposition groups were attacked and Islamists jailed and tortured, various branches of the secret police began to flourish and the sense

personal power […]had over the course of thirty years come to have a paralyzing effect on the Tunisian people as well, producing a kind of psychological malaise from which, many felt, only his death would liberate them” (2014:1-2).

The Road to Revolution | 121 of being watched was endemic.209 By the end of the 1990s, Tunisia had developed into one of the most oppressive regimes in a region known for its repressive governments.210 Across all of Tunisia, portraits of Ben Ali hanging in offices and public spaces could be found. In many ways, however, Ben Ali represented a “system” more than Bourguiba’s personality cult.211 The Ben Ali regime put even more emphasis on the mythic vision of Tunisia inherited from Bourguiba. Ben Ali portrayed himself as the restorer of the “national consensus.” As Murphy writes:

On the assumption that Bourguibism at its height had represented the expression of such a consensus, Ben Ali sought to prove that, far from trying to overturn the existing political system, he intended to set it back on its original, albeit modern- ized track, the assumption being that Bourguiba himself had inadvertently set it off course in his final years as president. (1999:166)

This included emphasizing the exceptionality of Tunisia that positioned it as more educated and middle class oriented than its Arab neighbors; consensus and comfortable reformism were stressed too.212 As I will show in the empirical chapters, these narratives have continued to inform the political imaginaries of Tunisians and have given rise to expectations of citizens in relation to the state, as well as counter-narratives.

209 The crack-down against Islamists was partly in response to the civil war in neighboring Algeria between Islamists and the military, following the electoral victory of Islamists in 1992. 210 Ben Ali did open up the political system and allow for oppositional parties. These state- sanctioned “oppositional” parties were tightly controlled, however, and remained without a true party base (Willis 2012:134). Furthermore, this “inclusive” process happened in tandem with a massive increase in the number of police and security services. According to Schraeder & Redissi “the key to the state’s control was a set of security forces commonly assumed to number as high as 130,000 – enough to saddle Tunisia and its 10.5 million people with a police presence as large as that of France, a country with almost six times Tunisia’s population” (2011:6). They term Ben Ali’s rule a mukhabarat state, to emphasis its connection to other repressive Arab regimes. 211 Reflecting on the differences and similarities between the two personalities, Robert Lang writes: “Bourguiba, who was a brilliant orator and compulsive autobiographer—a raging nar- cissist of phenomenal proportions, who sought to make Tunisia in his own deeply secular and Westernized image and whose presentation of himself as the “father” of the country would have disastrously infantilizing effects upon the population, particularly its male members—was a very different creature from Ben Ali, who was secretive, uncharismatic, “heavy.” But in their suppression of free speech and their addiction to political power, the two men came to resemble one another” (2014:5). 212 The contradictions of these nation-state myths will be discussed in greater detail in chapter ten.

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The Miracle It is often argued that the 1980s saw a shift of the Tunisian state towards “neoliberal” policies, one that mirrored those of many other countries across the region and beyond (Guazzone 2009; King 2009; Salamé 1994). The effects of the so-called liberalization programs throughout the 1980s and 1990s are still being debated.213 Despite major reforms under the guiding hand of the IMF and the World Bank, the Tunisian state kept its subsidies on food items, provided free education, and continually increased the number of state- employees.214 Crucially, many Tunisians continued to expect the state to perform substantive tasks. As a multitude of empirically driven works have convincingly shown, neoliberalism often follows a contradictory logic of simultaneous state contraction and expansion; and Tunisia is no exception. As Schielke writes in the context of Egypt:

Although state subsidies have been dramatically reduced and many state-owned companies sold (often under questionable circumstances) rent income from oil, gas, the Suez Canal, and political alliances has allowed the Egyptian state to maintain some of its socialist structures […] Despite the neoliberal policies of privatization—formally and informally—the functions of the state, an Arab socialist image of the public sector prevails, in which it is responsible for solving societal and economic issues of all kinds. (2015:109-110)

Like in Egypt, the Tunisian state never completely shed its more statist skin and leaders again and again have come to call upon the “dignity of the state” (haybat al-dawla) and made use of a paternalistic discourse of obedience even as they extoled citizens to find their own way, to develop their entrepreneurial spirit.

213 Some scholars, like King, claim that what this language of reform and consensus hides was “a break from Bourguibism, from pragmatic bargaining. The party began to align itself more firmly with private capitalists” (King 2009:180). Others, like Murphy, claim that “real” reform never really happened (1999). Many scholars have seen these reforms less as “liberalizing” the country economically or politically, and more as “survival strategies of a regime which, in an extremely adaptive way, incorporated them in its system of domination” (Tsourapas 2013:24). As King writes, “Rather than giving rise to a democratizing or liberalizing trend, the period of accelerated marketization in Tunisia has been associated with the hardening of authoritarianism” (2003:5). Yet, it is not always clear what this “accelerated marketization” entails. 214 Hibou argues that the widespread privatization schemes across Tunisia have not led to a weakened state: “far from becoming impotent in the economic field, the state is adapting not only to external constraints, but to internal ones also. This adaptation takes the form of privatisation of states, a privatisation that is not so much a loss of control as an option for indirect government, using private intermediaries on an increasing scale” (2004:xviii).

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In the case of Tunisia, the Tunisian state and its elites used neoliberal reforms to create a dual economy. One “neoliberal” part was open to foreign direct investment in tourism on the coast, and in special industrial zones mainly focused on textile and chemical manufacturing. Another “statist” part focused on agriculture and small-scale businesses that remained under strict state control (Hibou 2009). The neoliberal economy was competitive and ex- ploitive, defined by short-term contracts, long work days, low wages and flexibility. The state-dominated economy was non-competitive, relatively secure and provided welfare benefits. This bifurcation of the economy was driven by a political logic of avoiding social upheaval and maintaining control.215 The Ben Ali period also saw the “marketing” of Tunisia as an international poster-child for structural adjustment programs. Hibou et al., (2011) have untangled this notion of “the Tunisian economic miracle.” This myth of Tu- nisia as a model World Bank and EU partner with high levels of growth gained support both inside and outside the country. Tunisian officials made a verita- ble art of turning rickety economic indicators into positive signs of the Tuni- sian success story.216 Behind the claims of impressive growth-rates during the decades of Ben Ali’s rule, growing economic disparities were hidden.217 Rather than treating its growing unemployment as a serious issue, the state that was continually manipulating and lowering the figures presented it as a minor problem that would eventually be solved through the same policies that may have exacerbated the problem.218 The hardest hit were youth, both educated

215 Hibou writes, “This dual organisation avoids putting Tunisian producers at risk, exercises no pressure to accelerate structural reforms, does not exacerbate the protectionist demands of entrepreneurs, and allows the central authority to preserve its leverage for action on the national scale. This positioning can be understood as being entirely a technique of power” (2009:328). 216 This included both sophisticated fudging of economic figures, as well as more basic tendencies to compare Tunisia, both by Tunisian officials and Western donors, to the worst performing economies in the MENA region and Africa. It could also include both withholding of unflattering data, as well as providing “disorganized and disaggregate date in the name of transparency that is all but incomprehensible” (Hibou et al. 2011:32). According Hibou et al., donors while not always fooled, still found supporting Tunisia expedient both for political reasons, as a stable and friendly country, as well as for its tendency to pay back loans on time. This art of statistics management is hardly unique to Tunisia although it does emphasize the dual dynamics of state and donors in propagating myths of success. 217 Meddeb writes that “every year, there are approximately 140,000 new jobseekers entering the labor market against only 60 to 65,000 job creations, mainly located in the Greater Tunis area and on the coastline” (2012:11). 218 It also means that while there are ample if uneven and not always accessible data on growth and employment figures on Tunisia, they need to be treated with caution. In an illuminating conversation with a former official at the Tunisian Institut National de la Statistique (INS), he told me “whenever you encounter any official demographic figure of Tunisia, the population

124 | Chapter Four and uneducated, from interior regions of the country and it has been here that the contradictions of the post-colonial Tunisian state-citizen dynamics have been the most apparent. The sections below will investigate these two “weak links” of the regime.

The Shadow Zones A common assertion, in both state-discourse and academic works, is that Tu- nisia is a homogeneous nation from the perspective of ethnicity and religion.219 In a regional perspective this appears accurate, as Tunisia does not have the religious, sectarian, or linguistic complexities of other Arab countries and has a relatively long history as a state.220 This has certainly helped the process of simultaneous state-formation and building up national unity following independence.221 A narrative of unity, however, overlooks the historical disparities between coastal regions and interior and southern regions. Part of “modernizing” the country meant incorporating historically peripheral regions into the nation-state. These regions had long been composed of dependent and semi- independent tribes, both settled and nomadic, with a complex relationship to the central authority in Tunis. Perceptions of these areas as “tribal and backward” date back to the French era, even as the distinction between the settled city dwellers, the hadar (literally civilized) and the nomads, badawi, is a much size of Tunis for example, always add the number by a third.” He worked in the INS in 1990s and argued that pressure to live up to World Bank standards that showed significant reduction in population growth led to constant under-reporting of birth rates. Whether this was or is still true, it points to the deep scepticism towards official statistics, even for people working in the INS. 219 While its Muslim population was wholly Sunni and overwhelmingly of the Malaki Madh- hab, Tunisia had a large Jewish population until the late 1960s. In the early 20th century one third of Tunis’s non-European population was Jewish (Perkins 2014:58). Today they number less than 2000. 220 As an example of this early state-formation, the Tenth Hussainid ruler began an ambitious defensive modernization program in the 1830s that included the conscription of peasants into the army. As Perkins writes, “In the short term, conscription did little more than add bodies to the ranks of the armed forces, but, in time, the practice contributed to implanting the concept that ordinary Tunisians could have a place in the apparatus of the state and, consequently, a stake in the nation’s future” (2014:18). 221 Zghal writes that, “Before the colonial conquest in 1881, Tunisia had all the characteristics of a nation as defined by the Marxists (a common language, territory, economy, psychology, and culture) but no nationalist ideology, in the exact sense of the term” (1976:225). Hermassi stresses that unlike Algeria and Morocco, the Tunisian state had already begun to bring its peripheries under control prior to colonialism (1973). For a similar argument, see Anderson (1986). Ghassan Salamé raises the point that unlike in the Middle East, the Maghreb (North Africa) had a longer history of state-formation prior to colonialism (1987).

The Road to Revolution | 125 older one (Anderson 1986:50). Even prior to French colonization, rebellions in south and interior regions against the central authority were not uncommon.222 By the time of independence, these regions had enthusiastically engaged in the struggle against the French and great efforts were made to incorporate them more firmly into the emerging polity.223 These efforts were hampered by at least two connected and major obstacles. Firstly, the coastal regions, which had suffered less during colonialism and had been able to develop strong com- mercial agriculture, were much better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities following independence. Secondly, the party and state apparatus were dominated by many of these coastal groups (King 2009; Perkins 2014). As Zghal writes:

Although class-based politics were to become increasingly important after independence, particularistic discrimination was not to disappear entirely, for the Bourguiba government continued to favor the provincial elite in general and the elite of his home region in the Sahil in particular. (1973:33-4)

King (2009:169) argues that for a brief period following independence, the “administrative elites” were able to pursue policies that were independent of any specific class or social interests. Yet, by the 1970s, the state apparatus had increasingly become beholden to the interests of the coastal bourgeoisie that made up much of its leaders and bureaucratic apparatus.224 Even during the height of statist Tunisia, however, regions like Kasserine, Gafsa and Sidi Bouzid lagged significantly behind other regions. Throughout the 1960s they received less than 4 percent of the factories established in the country (Seddon 1989:124). This relative marginalization increased during the shift of economic priorities towards coastal tourism that began in the 1960s.225 To this day, even among the youth, there remains in the south and interior a strong sense that these regions have been punished for their rebelliousness,

222 There is a long and rich history, going back at least to Ibn Khaldoun, of discussing nomadic peripheries Vs urban centres as the central axis on which North Africa revolves around. 223 As Zghal writes, “The modernist elite mobilized every means of mass communication to reinforce the program of urbanization and to accelerate the renunciation of regional differences and the absorption of modern values” (1973: 231). 224 Rather than simply saying that the state was dominated by wealthier coastal elements, which may be true of the very top, it appears more accurate to say that coastal elites and segments of the middle classes, while still dependent on the state, were in a better position to benefit from the relative liberalization of the economy. 225 Today, only around one tenth of foreign companies are present in the interior regions. (Meddeb 2020:2).

126 | Chapter Four intransigence and support of Ben Youssef over Bourguiba. Amine, a young man in Gafsa, despite being born in the early 1990s, expresses a clear narrative of historical marginalization:

Gafsa in the 1960s and 70s used to be the strongest wilayat (province) in terms of culture. We had theatre, one of the first cinemas, tennis courts and swimming pools. Music everywhere, people drinking on the streets, women out at night. In the 1980s Sousse got everything, because of tourism and Gafsa got a red card. It was marginalized because we protested.

This belief that the interior and southern region have been punished by the state continues to be widespread. Samir, an activist from Kasserine, tells me, “There is a well-known quote by Bourguiba, after independence, about us, the people in the interior. He said: Do not let them go hungry and not let them grow content. If they are hungry they revolt and if they are satisfied they revolt.” Many understand the economic underdevelopment of the dakhil as the product of conscious policies of the state and its leaders.226 The state has aimed to provide, but never enough.227 It can be understood to reflect a view where an economic logic is subordinated to a political, and personal, logic of the state. Bourguiba who was from coastal Monastir made it a central hub of education, and Ben Ali who was from Sousse, turned it into a tourist magnet.228 Many in the margins talk of the colonial-like resource exploitation in these areas; phosphate from Gafsa, oil and gas from Tataouine, agriculture from Sidi Bouzid and water from Kasserine, and continue to feel unjustly treated.229 Even if these regions receive significant state support, and poverty rates have decreased, their relative poverty in relation to the coast has increased. 230

226 A widely shared story on social media, following the revolution, relates that when the castle in central Monastir was rebuilt under Bourguiba’s orders, the stones were taken from the Ro- man ruins in Gafsa. The story, regardless of its veracity illustrates a perception of how the coast, in the guise of the Tunisian state, is erasing the interior regions from the past, and simultaneously marginalizing it in the present. 227 Following the revolution, the circulation of Bourguiba’s quote also got an added meaning; that the revolution happened because Ben Ali kept these regions “too hungry.” 228 A young man from Kasserine says: “The Dakhil is forgotten. There is no spreading of wealth to the interior. 80 percent of the national budget goes to the Sahel. Monastir, which was just a village, has dozens of universities, it even has an airport. And it has 30 municipalities, that’s double that of Tunis. How does that make sense?” 229 Meddeb writes, “Today, inland provinces hold 50 percent of the country’s oil, gas, and water resources; 70 percent of wheat production; and 50 percent of olive oil and fruit production” (2020:2). 230 According to the World Bank this is due to the fact that poverty has decreased at a faster rate in the coastal regions (World Bank 2014:283)

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Today these regions remain four times as poor as the rest of the country (San- tini 2018:30). More than in other regions, in the interior and south many have become increasingly dependent on the informal sector and smuggling to make a living. Ruth Hanau Santini discusses these areas as places in which there exists “limited statehood” that “refers to a partial state penetration in these politically, economically and socially peripheral regions” (2018:7). This limited statehood mostly refers to the prevalence of illegal activities tied to smuggling and, after the revolution, jihadist groups active in the borders between Algeria and Libya. According to Santini, this limited statehood should be understood as a deliberate strategy and part of a certain mode of governing:

In these areas, crossborder smuggling has represented a social and economic safety valve. Until 2010, this occurred under the benevolent eye of the regime, which simultaneously controlled it through local notables and security forces and prof- ited from it, by letting smugglers bribe state officials, be they notables or security forces. It also allowed the regime to concentrate resources and investment in the ‘useful’ Tunisia, the coastal areas, further increasing socio-economic regional disparities. (2018:7-8)

As more state emphasis was put on factories and tourism in the coast, the smuggling in the interior regions was “accepted” by the state and incorporated as mechanisms of rule.231 While the Tunisian state claimed to be aiming at reducing regional differences, it has simultaneously marked interior and southern regions as shadow zones (zones d’ombre) and rebellious areas.232 Yet if the state saw the widespread informal economy as a “safety valve”, it was a severely malfunctioning one. Gafsa in particular has seen two significant uprisings. The first, alluded to by Amine, in 1980, during the second anni- versary of the Black Thursday there was an armed insurrection, possibly with Libyan support, that took control over the city briefly before being defeated

231 The extent of “limited statehood” should not be exaggerated, however. Particularly in relation to other marginalized parts of the Arab World. Furthermore, if one applies the term limited statehood, then this is not only as Santini focuses on, related to particular spaces, but also has a generational dynamic, where it is above all the young that come to make up larger parts of the informal economy 232 Santini writes “The dual image of a civilized and organized urban space in the north and coastal areas opposed to a barbaric ‘Other’ dominated by nomads and ‘Bedouins’ became a narrative adopted by ruling regimes in their quest to break up horizontal, be they tribal or clanic, solidarities” (2018:68).

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(Perkins 2014:169). The second, larger one, was in 2008 and began in Red- eyef, a small town in the Gafsa mining-basin, the center of the Tunisian phosphate industry. The trigger was anger at corruption in the allocation of jobs, yet as protests spread to other mining-towns it went on to include a multitude of grievances and demand for dignity and regional equality. The uprising lasted for six months before it was brutally put down and the leaders jailed.233 There is, therefore, a widespread and shared sense of grievance in the margins. These may be particularly powerful in, yet are not limited to, interior regions like Kasserine and Gafsa. It also includes smaller towns and villages across the country, as well as the large informal settlements in the richer coastal towns.234 It is composed of populations that often make their living in the margins of the state, both dependent on its functioning and its lack of complete control.

Youth Youth has long been a category of both promise and fear in the Arab World. Tunisia is ahead of the demographic curve compared to other Arab countries; it started family planning programs early in the 1960s (Haouas, Sayre & Ya- goubi 2012:396). The higher level of education among both Tunisian men and women compared to the rest of the Arab world has also helped fertility rates declined at a faster rates.235 Yet, by the early 2000s, Tunisia was very

233 In fact, the Gafsa mining uprising of 2008 is claimed by many to be the true beginnings of the 2010/11 revolution. 234 The frustration of the forgotten parts of the country is often commented on by scholars. Ayeb writes, “There are two Tunisias: one, the Tunisia of power, money, comfort and ‘development’, which covers the coastal areas, particularly the capital city and its upper-class suburbs and the Sahel (including the Gulf of Nabeul, Sousse and Monastir) and, second, the marginalized, poor, submissive and dependent Tunisia (of the south, the centre and the west)” (2011:470). 235 Already by the early 2000s Tunisia had fertility rates on the same level as France; around two children per woman (Courbage & Todd 2014:22). Tunisia therefore has a higher median age than other Arab countries. In 2010 it was 29 years (World Bank 2010). In 2018, it was 32,8 years, compared to 26,8 in the Arab World as a whole (World Bank 2018).

The Road to Revolution | 129 much a country dominated by the young; the young make up about 30 percent of the population.236 The high percentage of youth, many of them educated but unemployed, in relation to the population has led to talk of a “youth bulge” in Tunisia and the Arab World.237 With the declining ability of the state and the economy to absorb emerging youth labor there has been a shift in the political discourse concerning the term “youth”; from an initially positive notion conveying the embodiment of the hope of a modernizing country in independence, to increasingly being synonymous with a social problem. Already in 1977, the Minister of Interior Tahar Belkhodja expressed his concern over youth in a speech to parliament:

The disorders that are occurring sporadically are mostly the doing of young elements, very young even, recruited especially from among dropouts from schools, the unemployed, the vagabonds, the anguished[..]The prestige of the state is, above all, moral[..] Tunisia is a land of moderation, careful weighting and not of unreasonableness about everything and nothing. (Tahar Belkhodja 2010:144-45 quoted in Mullin & Rouabah 2016:166)238

Despite high youth unemployment and public alarm at the socially disruptive effects, Ben Ali’s regime continuously attempted to downplay the problem by hiding behind the narrative of “the Tunisian economic miracle.” In terms of counter-acting youth unemployment, the focus was on training programs aimed at self-employment and entrepreneurship.239 Since the late 1980s, the

236 At the same time, and increased number of Tunisia’s marry late or not at all. As Sayre writes, “It is the high cost of marriage and housing, along with the high unemployment rate of young men, that leads to their inability to get married and thus to this delayed transition into full adulthood” (2016:79). 237 Many scholars see the outbreak of the Arab Spring as driven by this larger logic of youth bulge. Jack C Goldstone, the theorist of revolution, emphasizes the importance of a large pool of unemployed but educated young men as catalysts for the Arab Spring (2011). See also Cour- bage & Puschmann (2015) and Hamanaka (2017). 238 While the combination of regional frustration and youth unemployment would prove revolutionary in 2010, youth and geography acting as powerful has antecedents further back. The bread riots of 1984 that followed the doubling of bread prices began in the south and interior regions in December and spread to the large cities in January. Young university students and unemployed youth took up the call of the marginalized regions and protests across the country until they were brutally defeated. Godfrey Morrison, the Times journalist wrote at the time that it was “mainly the young unemployed, a section of society who until now have been largely ignored by both President Bourguiba’s government and political analysts” (quoted in Seddon 1989:119). 239 Paciello, Pepicelli and Pioppi write, “The growing stress on the need to increase youth education and skills, and on youth self-entrepreneurship, also had the advantage of placing the

130 | Chapter Four government had created a host of youth centered public programs and campaigns focused on youth (Paciello, Pepicelli & Pioppi. 2016:5). This was also a response to the growing popularity of political Islam among the young and the disengagement of youth from the RCD party.240 By all indications these efforts proved unsuccessful and unemployment rates continued to grow quickly throughout the new millennium.241 Another way in which Ben Ali attempted to deal with the issue of youth unemployment was to encourage university enrolment as a way of absorbing labor. In an interview with a college principle in Sidi Bouzid, he expressed what seems to be a widespread view:

Tunisian universities used to be very good. Only the best pupils made it. Ben Ali opened up the university system, made it easier for students to study. He opened more universities, offered economic incentives, lowered the quality. The main reason for this was to alleviate social pressure, as there were too many unemployed youths. But he only pushed the problem to the future and ruined our university system in the process.242

According to a World Bank report, the share of university graduates increased from around four percent in 1990 to over twelve percent by 2010 (2014:38). Unsurprisingly, then, there were not enough jobs for the graduates. The Ben Ali state both emphasized the social and moral importance of work and at the same time proved unable to provide more than promises.243 The previously discussed bifurcation of the economy had a number of unintended consequences: the textile and manufacturing services employed predominantly women from the countryside with little education. The tourist economy and a small francophone call-center industry employed both young men and burden of youth labour market insertion on the youth themselves, rather than on the state” (2016:5). 240 Yet as Murphy writes, “The paternalistic discourse which overlay all these initiatives suggested that youth had to be guided into responsible participation by wiser heads” (2017:686). 241 A World Bank report from 2010 put the youth unemployment numbers at almost 31 percent compared to official 14 percent. Official figures of unemployment from Tunisia during Ben Ali were, as discussed, notoriously unreliable. 242 Similarly, many economists have come to argue that one reason for the high unemployment is the poor quality of higher education. Boughzala writes, “While free and open access to education has led to a large stock of human capital, it has come at the expense of the quality of education and training” (2013:155). See also World Bank 2014. 243 In a speech from 1988, Ben Ali exclaimed that “Work is not only earning a living, but also constitutes an attribute of citizenship just as much as the bond with the land” (Quoted in Hibou 2009:333).

The Road to Revolution | 131 women. Nevertheless, the low pay, short-term contracts and perceived exploitative conditions meant that an increasing number of educated young men were left to their own devices. That the lack of stable and “dignified” employment opportunities should be particularly debilitating for young men is not strange given the gendered notion of citizenship and adult personhood, and the centrality of stable employment for the prospect of marriage.244 As Ferguson points out:

Wage labor (as a rich ethnographic literature has shown) came in the twentieth century to be an important foundation of male personhood. Relations between senior and junior men were radically transformed by young men’s access to wage labor (and the full social personhood it bestowed). (2013:228)

Given the deteriorating working conditions for private sector work, with increasingly low wages, and insecure employment (Hibou et al. 2011:67), the continued demand for public employment by successive generations of young should not come as a surprise. As Santini writes of the Tunisian state, “The public sector has historically been the main resource employed by the state to ensure social stability and peace” (2018.260). It has also become the surest path to social mobility and (male) adulthood. Working for the state, in a sense becoming part of the state, has become deeply intertwined with becoming an adult and to some extent a full citizen. Yet, while the size of the public sector had continued to expand, it had not been able to absorb the massive increase in youth with diplomas, even as state employment has itself become more “causal[-]ized.” What has followed is termed by Hibou et al., as “proletari[at- i]zation of graduates” (2011:68). At the same time, the frustration of youth is neither new nor can blame solely be laid at the feet of so-called neoliberalism. Elbaki Hermassi talks of a “disenchantment with the state” among the young across North Africa prior to the economic reforms in the 1970s. What Tunisian writer Hele Béji called le discenchentemant national (1982). Hermassi writes, “Maghrebi youth suffered [..] from the prospects of a hopeless future and inflated diplomas. Young people lost hope of social mobility and of even achieving the slightest partition of privileges of the previous generation” (1986:80). If the policies of the Ben Ali regime exaggerated the tensions of the Bourguiba state they did not create

244 Paciello, Pepicelli and Pioppi write, “Marriage is still considered the moment of transition from youth to adulthood, both for women and men, even if for the latter getting married requires first finding employment. However, currently a delay in marriage characterizes the life of many youth” (2016:9).

132 | Chapter Four them ex nihilo. What happened under Ben Ali was the intensification of exclusion. The political economy of Tunisia could be divided into three inter- connected parts. There was the dual economy, as previously mentioned, with one part export and tourist oriented, and another the subsidy-heavy and tightly regulated state sector. A third part is the informal sector that has come to incorporate more and more of the precarious young in the margins. Feltrin writes of the large groups that are unable to find work in state employment:

To a much larger extent than in Western countries, most new employment in services has little to do with qualified cognitive and creative work and means a wide and fragmented array of deskilled jobs in highly precarious conditions that provide very limited income. The informal economy is estimated to employ 32% of the Tunisian employed population, and 57% of those working in the informal economy are unwaged. (2018:49)

None of these three parts are outside of the state as such, but their relative relations have shifted over time and while expectations of young men remain wedded to the promise of secure state employment, the reality for many is a life in the informal economy. As Amer, a young man from Gafsa, tells me:

Even if we as Tunisians and Arabs don’t find all our meaning and dignity in our work, it is nonetheless central [to our identities]. I was part of the engineering association in Gafsa although I never got a job, and so many of us were working as waiters, or farmers or all kinds of things having nothing to do with our training. One guy was working as a watchman for a university dorm. If you are a student, studying civil engineering and the watchman of your dorm is a civil engineer from the same university: what should you think? You lose any hope or ambition.

It is this third and informal part where most of the young men in the margins that I investigate are located, even if many of them have a university degree. It is among them that the contradictions of state expectations and neoliberal governance becomes particularly stark.

Surplus Population Neoliberal transformation is not only associated with de-regulation and precarity, it is also tied to an increased emphasis on internal surveillance and border control. Not all “subjects” are understood as fit to govern themselves; particularly those in the margins, in the informal sectors, are understood as

The Road to Revolution | 133 unruly and potentially dangerous. Notions of “free and self-disciplining subjects” coexist with increasingly violent forms of control for populations deemed ungovernable. Thus, some authors stress the duality of “both liberal and illiberal techniques to govern their populations” (Akcali 2016:6). Some go so far as to claim that:

What the political economy of neoliberalism in the MENA reveals is how homo economicus tends within neoliberal systems of governmentality to be reduced even more to homo sacer (Agamben 1998)—outside the bounds of social and political law and regulation, and thus prey to whatever exploitation, degradation, and even death might make him a more profitable cog or tool in the broader capitalist system. (LeVine 2016:190)

Development scholar Tania Li discusses the increasingly larger groups across the globe that are dispossessed. Li calls this logic “surplus populations” signaling its connection to larger capitalist dynamics. She connects the creation of surplus populations to the increased enclosure of lands and the large-scale dis- possessions of rural populations in connection to the lack of industrial production that can incorporate them. Rather than being Agamben’s homo sacer, subjects that may be “killed but not scarified”, in Li’s reading they are simply “allowed to die” (2009:79). Certainly, in Tunisia a large part of the population, particularly the young, have gone through a process of precariousness; whether educated or not, they are increasingly left to their own devices and are forced to seek a living in the informal economy. While not the dispossessed farmers, as in Tania Li’s account, much of the experiences can be understood as expressing fear of becoming surplus populations. This logic is important, along with the way that it connects to a crisis of masculinity and waiting, and will be discussed more in-depth in subsequent chapters. Hamza Meddeb, in his thesis, followed the lives of many young and old Tunisians in the interior living in various states of marginality. He writes about “the inability to live with dignity despite the efforts made. This situation is all the more intolerable as it is accompanied by the feeling of being exploited and dispossessed of what one believes one deserves” (2011:39). Meddeb calls this living in a state of informality and precariousness “the race for el khobza” 245 and he captures this logic all too well:

245 Khubz is the Arabic word for bread. Chapter 10 discusses the importance of the term khubzist.

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[T]his cheating and these odd jobs are experienced as the product of […]corruption and clientelism. Unemployed, substitute workers, young precarious graduates, temporary workers, street vendors, smugglers, small traffickers or street traders, migrants, but also poorly-paid retirees, mothers trying to supplement the low income of the household, small officials or employees no longer able to provide for their families are the main figures of what the Tunisians call the "el khobza race.” Running behind el khobza reflects a daily life of toil and deprivation but also of uncertainty and insecurity: one must simultaneously be cunning and be able to "cash in" on the bullying and harassment that punctuate the daily life; a decommissioned, precarious and underpaid job must be accepted despite the frustrations endured each day; We must juggle the difficulties of everyday life and manage by living perpetually on the fringe of legality and being perpetually liable to be punished, racketeered or denounced. (2011:36)246

This tension between expectations of the state and the increased precarity and fending for oneself has come to engulf more and more of Tunisia’s population. This logic while to some extent effective is also deeply alienating and has given rise to continual resentment and anger. It should then be no surprise that the revolts, both of 2008 and 2010-11, started among youths in interior regions.

Between Myths and Mayhem If scholars like Meddeb see such neoliberal governance as an active strategy of increased domination in which the Ben Ali regime imbedded itself in everyday life, it is also the case that part of the contradictions arose out of the fact that the state never really disengaged and that the state did provide, but never provided “enough.” While for many scholars Ben Ali was primarily governing through force, there was more to Ben Ali’s regime than purely coercion.247 No one brings out the way that the state embedded itself in everyday life and the imaginations of its people better than Hibou:

In fact, contrary to the analysis widespread among political commentators, in the media, or among former members of the opposition, political domination was not embodied mainly in the absolute power of Ben Ali, in the rapacity of those in the President’s family, or in the way that violence and police control made all political life impossible. Opponents were very few in number [..]This obedience was, much

246 Original text is in French. 247 Santini for example writes of Ben Ali that, “Since the ruler had no authority he could count on anymore, governing was based on the politics of fear, in addition to mere coercion, and once this was exhausted, popular resistance could translate itself into actual protests” (2018:22).

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more profoundly, the result of a link forged between, on the one hand, the latent violence relayed by the police and the tight supervision of the single party, and, on the other, various powerful mechanisms of inclusion. (2011:xiv)

If Geisser and Camau talk of a police state, then Hibou uses the term “policing state” to connote a system of regulation whose power was as much derived from its manipulation of symbols and desires as from its coercive dimensions. Hibou has convincingly argued that the notion of consensus and reformism were the fundamental ideological underpinnings of Ben Ali’s rule. These notions were central organizing principles of legitimacy, the core myths, and yet diffuse and continually changing.248 The myth of a stable, consensus-driven and reformist Tunisia was important for internal as well as external legitimacy. Externally, it facilitated debt and aid support from international agencies. Internally, the nation-state myth of Tunisia as a regional model while increasingly vacuous nonetheless provides a sense of meaning and distinction. Robert Lang writes:

Tunisians are proud of their “modernity.” The official rhetoric proclaims that their country by nature is exceptional, a status deriving from the perfect equilibrium it has achieved among three components: Western modernity, a distinctive national identity, and a shared heritage with the Arab and muslim worlds […]Reformism and tunisianité are understood to be inseparable, and together symbolize Tunisian specificity. (2014:24)

These myths of modernity were not the pure invention of the Ben Ali regime but had been cultivated since the time of independence. During Bourguiba’s reign some of the dissident writers at the time reflected on their complicity in this myth that became more and more stifling. Hélé Béji wrote:

National feeling has become the central allegory of all of our mental activity, giving it a rhythm to which it cannot help submitting. We never stop holding up a mirror

248 Hibou writes, “In Tunisia, it can be analyzed as a cunning ploy to legitimize power, playing a key role in the deepening of national identity, particularly in this reformist cultural identity. And indeed, the use of the past worked for 23 years, via official discourse, to fill a void, that of the historical legitimacy of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali […] Reformism was, and remains, the ‘field of the politically thinkable’, which finds expression in hijacked meanings but simultaneously by the reinforcement of patterns of thought and implicit actions of the habitus of the elite. Obviously, the conceptions held by different people of reformism differ widely, but all refer to reformism as ‘good government,’ unintentionally reinforcing the discourse of the ‘regime’” (2017:66).

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to this discourse, like a gauge, to measure its depth. My complicity with the national discourse prevents me from seeing the web it has woven around me. (1983:30)

However, in many ways the manipulation of nation-state myths also made the regime vulnerable. Access to this “modernity” was proving highly uneven. And if the middle classes were seduced by notions of exceptionality, for many in the margins, modernity meant simply secure employment, something that was becoming more and more out of reach. For both the middle classes, and the margins, the discrepancy between vision and veracity became ever larger.249 Since the days of independence, one way in which access to political and socio-economic resources was achieved was through membership of the party. This had previously been offset by the simultaneous expansion of schools, hospitals and employment across the country, available to all. During Ben Ali, the RCD became increasingly important as an instrument for access to even the most basic goods.250 Under Ben Ali, the party acted simultaneously as a redistribution and patronage network, as well as a system of control and domination.251 The worst cases of outright pillaging of public resources were done by Ben Ali’s wife Leila and her family – the Trabelsis – a name that became synonymous with mafia- like behavior. As the regime invested ever more efforts into a production of political myths, and was less able, or willing, to “effectively penetrate and transform society” (Santini 2008:19), the threat and use of violence became more pronounced.

A State of Ambiguity The Tunisian state prior to the revolution was riddled with ambiguities and contradictions. In its symbolic function it remained a powerful force in its

249 Sociologist Halim Barakat writes that, “One highly distinctive feature of contemporary Arab society is the alarming gap between reality and dream” (1993:3). 250 Hibou writes, “Belonging to the party is a very effective instrument, since it determines citizenship, or at least social and economic citizenship. It is difficult to carry out economic activities and to succeed—obtain grants, add an extra room to your offices, gain access to seeds for sowing, profit from a subsidized credit, benefit from postponed repayment deadlines— without going through the RCD (2011:90). 251 The Party was less an arena of political struggles and more a forum for the accumulation of wealth, and those who benefited were those close to Ben Ali and his cliques who came to more and more monopolize access to resources in ways that excluded even card-carrying members of RCD.

The Road to Revolution | 137 ability to channel desires. Materially too, it remains crucial, even as state bureaucracy had gone from being understood as the engine of development to simply an absorber of labor. In the absence of credible alternatives, state employment remained the most desired path towards a respectable life. From the perspective of the state, the reasons for the continual reliance on public employment as a way to absorb labor can be seen as lack of secure rule and concordant fear of popular resistance. It was driven by attempts to weaken class distinctions by incorporating a potentially critical intelligentsia, and socially unruly elements.252 The tension of the populist authoritarian state that had progressively become less populist and more authoritarian, was that while the state continued to expand, it was both cause and consequence of the failure of significant economic growth. This lack of growth increasingly meant that access to the state apparatus, even lower state employment, became contingent on connections and resources. The majority of the population however, remained in one way or another, tied to, and dominated by the state. What Tunisia before the revolution came to highlight is the coexistence of economic liberalization with state intervention, transparency with crony capitalism, and a liberal discourse coupled with extreme repression; not understood as contradictions as much as modes of governing.253 And yet the incessant state language of progress, reform and modernity continued to resonate; giving rise to more and more frustrations. In many ways, the release of the secret diplomatic dispatches of the Amer- ican Ambassador to Tunisia in late 2010 brought these tensions to the surface. In the widely read letters, Tunisians could read frank accounts about widespread abuse of power by the top echelons of the state, particularly the Tra- belsi entourage. A mere two weeks before the fateful self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid that set the Arab Spring in motion, the dispatches of the American Embassy were made public by WikiLeaks and likely added to the rage, frustration, and sense of humiliation of Tunisians. What WikiLeaks revealed was what many already knew, or suspected, but

252 As Ayubi writes “rulers find the 'machine bureaucracy' with its elaborate hierarchy and strict chain of command an invaluable control device” (2009:320). 253 King writes about the regime of Ben Ali as one where “Liberal economic policies are being imposed by an illiberal political regime that hopes to combine what Clifford Geertz once characterized as a combination of a Smithian way of getting rich with a Hobbesian way of governing” (2009:182).

138 | Chapter Four could not express outright.254 The illusion of a miracle could no longer be maintained, and the hollow slogans of exceptionalism and reformism crumbled.

REVOLUTION AND AFTER By the time Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14th, 2011, he had been “re-elected” as president five times, each time garnering around 90 percent of the votes.255 The popular uprising that led to the toppling of Ben Ali brought together a confluence of actors from across the country. Youth unemployment and regional marginalization were key motivators, but hardly the only factors. While the emphasis on youth highlights the spontaneous aspects of the protests, and the importance of social media, it also obscures the historical antecedents. Previous protests had created networks of activists across the interior regions, but had failed to engage the middle classes on the coast. In 2010, as soon as protests erupted in Sidi Bouzid on December 17th, they spread to other regions of the interior as well as popular classes in Tunis. Soon bloggers and other activists from the coast went to Sidi Bouzid to participate, while others helped spread information online, and stage supporting demonstrations on the coast.256 If the youth were at the forefront, and came to embody the revolutionary spirit, the protests also revealed the extent to which Ben Ali’s rule had become unpopular among Tunisians at large.257 By the time the demonstrations spread to Sfax on the coast, calls for the overthrow of the regime were being shouted, and demonstrators were composed of a cross-section of society.

254 Bachrach writes “that the entire world now knew what these American had once quietly told each other. Humiliating above all that Tunisian themselves were not exactly ignorant of what the Ben Ali family had been up to – long before WikiLeaks had published a single syllable – and had done nothing about” (2011:37). 255 As Schraeder and Redissi write “With each passing term, the regime became more authoritarian and less in touch with local socioeconomic and political realities” (2011:8). 256 Honwana writes “As the uprising grew, an alliance developed between urban middle-class youths and the young unemployed protestors from the interior regions of the country” (2013:2). It was however in the interior regions where the crackdown of the police was most violent. 257 The revolt also showed the complex role of the UGTT, whose leadership had been largely co-opted by the regime but whose local base remained unruly and quickly came to mobilize with the protesters. Associations of lawyers and journalists soon joined the demonstrations.

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When it comes to the question of what the demonstrators wanted, the story gets complicated. A large number of grievances were expressed, from everyday frustrations around corruption, to regional disparities and lack of political freedom. The revolution is sometimes portrayed as having been composed of middle-class elements that were above all interested in political rights and an end to arbitrary and crony rule, combined with the popular classes pushing for socio-economic justice.258 They were united in a narrow demand for the over-throw of Ben Ali, “dégagé”, as well as the more ambiguous notion of dignity (karama).259 Quickly this came to be encapsulated in the most widely expressed slogans of ”work, freedom, national dignity” (shughl, hurriyya, karama wataniya) that combined calls for political and socio-economic rights. In this narrative, simplifying grossly, one might say that the demands of the coastal middle-classes were negative and classically liberal, a demand for protections against authority, while those of the young from the interior regions were positive: jobs and opportunities for social mobility. In this conceptualization, the coastal middle-class wanted a political revolution and the rest wanted a social one. There may be some truth to this, but it is at best only partially accurate.260 The question of what the demonstrators wanted is still a discussion that continues across Tunisia today. In 2018, two young men Saif from Moulares and Ahmed from Gafsa, discuss the events of 2008 uprising and their connection to the revolution:

Saif: It [the Gafsa uprising in 2008] started in Redeyef, then spread to Metlaoui and Molares.261 I was there [in Molares], there was no conspiracy, no secret services, or external influences, just people, coming together spontaneously and demanding jobs. The RCD were supposed to share the jobs, that was the agreement with UGTT, to give to some poor families that really needed it. Well the RCD

258 For example, Ayeb writes “While the marginalised classes protested with demands for employment, food and an end to marginalisation and exclusion, the middle classes fought tooth and nail for individual liberties, for political rights of expression, organisation and participation, for the consolidation or afﬁrmation of their new rights, especially for women” (2011:476). 259 Santini writes, “As reported by Ayari and Reiffers, reference to dignity as a response to the daily humiliations suffered by ordinary people at the hands of the Ben Ali regime had steadily increased throughout the 2000s across different sectors of the Tunisian society (Ayarim 2011)” (2018:47). 260 As Arendt writes “it is frequently very difficult to say where the mere desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom as the political way of life begins” (1990:33). 261 Molares, Redeyef and Metlaoui are the three major mining-towns in the phosphate rich region of Gafsa.

140 | Chapter Four

when they released the lists, took all the jobs through bribes or connections. And they, the union, that was supposed to give the jobs to the poor, that were supposed to represent us put in their own kids on the list. And so, protests started. And the police came and started hitting us, and yet the protests spread. During the day it was calm, and during the night we went out and hit the police and administration. After the demonstrations Ben Ali promised car factories and textile factories, for hundreds of jobs, but when the protests died down, he sent in the security forces to bring in the leaders and imprison and torture them. Karim: So, the demonstrations where about jobs? S: Yes, one hundred percent about jobs. If they say something else, they are lying. Ahmed: Yes, it was about jobs in the mining basin in 2008. But in 2010 it was not just about jobs. It was also about freedom (hurriya) and dignity (karma). S: No. It has always been about jobs, nothing else.

Even if, as Saif claims, the protests began as narrow demands for employment it is important to highlight that in an authoritarian system like Ben Ali’s any distinction between purely socio-economic rights and political demands is un- tenable. The act of demonstration, unless it could be diffused quickly, was understood as a threat to the regime, regardless of why people demonstrated.262 If co-option failed then the inevitable violent response by the state opened the possibility of increased demands.263 As Abdelrahman claims, in connection to Egypt, that “under the authoritarian regime of Mubarak, no struggle for any set of demands could remain conﬁned within itself but gave birth to and fueled other struggles” (2012:615).264 Furthermore, it is doubtful that in the “revolutionary moment” there existed a unity of purpose or goals, or that the

262 As Charles Tripp writes on the nature of dissent in authoritarian Arab states “By resisting the ways in which government demands conformity through deﬁant, sometimes disorderly public behaviour and by challenging its control over space[…] It gives the lie to the picture that the authorities wish to project of an orderly society, respectful of power and of the public institutions of the state. Public deﬁance in turn mobilizes growing numbers of people, giving them a shared language in which to voice their grievances and providing a framework for action that can change the balance of power itself. It is for this very reason that, across the region, political authorities have responded with ferocious violence” (2013:72). 263 Like Honwana one could argue that “The regime’s violent response to the protestors helped forge the connection between socioeconomic and political demands and contribute to the transformation of what was a largely spontaneous and localized youth protest against poor living conditions, police abuse and a lack of jobs into a determined national revolt” (2013:3). 264 Similarly, Santini writes, “Redistributive claims (Fraser 1995) linked to high regional inequality and immobile wealth (Boix 2008) lay the foundations for additional moral claims that appealed beyond the disenfranchised inner regions and spoke to all Tunisians, with calls for dignity (karama) and against humiliation (hogra) becoming elements of a shared narrative enabling citizens to imagine alternative state-society relations” (2018:46).

The Road to Revolution | 141 demonstrators aimed at “democracy” in any precise form. It was a mobilization of long-simmering resentments, tied together as much by affect as by concrete demands.265 Large-scale demonstrations are moments when the social order is turned on its head. It creates its own public, by realizing a kind of equality and unity that can only be temporary.266 This public that it creates defies representation and to some extent a voice. As soon as it speaks it no longer represents “everyone”, but “someone.” My point is not that the question “why did they rebel?” is unimportant, but that the revolution and its aftermath can be treated as a discovering of the reasons, articulations of demands in the light of day. James C. Scott writes of such moments that:

If the results seem like moments of madness, if the politics they engender is tumultuous, frenetic, delirious, and occasionally violent, that is perhaps because the powerless are so rarely on the public stage and have so much to say and do when they finally arrive. (1990:227)

The revolution, by opening up public space, allowed for free articulations of desires and expectations. The narratives, themes and desires that arose in its wake will be explored in the chapters to come.267 Nonetheless, from the early days of protests we can gleam certain insights. The demonstrations that coa- lesced in Tunis gathered around the Ministry of Interior, the center of the dreaded security service and police. After Ben Ali’s departure, youth attacked, burned and looted the luxurious estates of Ben Ali and his wife’s family that dotted the coast. These give an indication of what kinds of spaces that had become metonyms for the Ben Ali state. This state, of the secret police and the network around Ben Ali and the Trabelsis, needed to be destroyed. What state and what hopes would take its place?

Transitions The months following Ben Ali’s flight were tumultuous, with the creation of the first interim government led by the Prime Minister Mohammed Ghan- noushi and composed of RCD members as well as opposition parties. The

265 As Schielke writes about the Egyptian revolution, “Rather than being united by an ideology or organized, the revolutionaries were united by a common struggle and shared affect of rejection” (2015:191). 266 As Bayat writes about the events of 2011 in Tahrir Square, it was “a kind of fleeting egalitarian life that lies between the real and the unreal” (2017:14). 267 Specifically, in chapter eight to ten.

142 | Chapter Four government quickly promised an end to the oppressive system of Ben Ali and the stifling lack of freedom of speech. This was followed by an explosion of new civil society organizations and political parties. Many of the demonstrators, particularly from the interior regions, together with previously banned leftist parties and local UGTT members demanded more radical reforms, including the dismantling of the RCD and the security apparatus, and cam- paigned for “dignity” for the marginal regions. Under the banner of The Front of January 14th they organized what become termed Kasbah 1 and Kasbah 2; large demonstrations and sit-ins outside of parliament that had brought down two interim governments by the end of February.268 Zemni calls this period “a phase of continuous tensions between the constitutional legality of the government and the revolutionary legitimacy of street politics” (2015:3). In this phase, street protests won the day. With Ghannoushi’s resignation on the 27th of February, Béji Caïd Essebsi became prime minister. Essebsi had worked with Ben Ali as a minister and diplomat, but at 85 years old was proclaimed a “true” neo-Destorian who had served under Bourguiba. The politics of the streets, however, continued. A compromise of sorts was found with the creation of the Higher Authority for Realization of the Objectives of the Revolution, Political Reform and Democratic Transition, an organization composed of legal experts as well as opposition groups. Its aim was to oversee and organize elections as soon as possible. It also became the focal-point for pushing for more radical reforms of the state. It pressured the government to finally remove the secret police, and the RCD was disbanded, even if few were charged or convicted of crimes (Boubekeur 2016:111). While demonstrations continued, segments of the middle class had also begun “asking for a return to political normalcy and a stop to the many strikes that, according to them, harmed an already frail economy” (Zemni 2015:10). The first free elections were held in October 2011 for the formation of a National Constituent Assembly (NCA). The NCA was tasked with writing a new constitution, as well as choosing a new government. The big winner was Ennahda with almost 40 % of the national votes and 89 seats out of 217. Ennahda was the recently legalized Islamist party that had suffered severe per- secution under both Bourguiba and Ben Ali and that had been led from exile

268 The shift from demonstrating outside the Ministry of Interior to the parliment reveals changes in an understanding of where power lies, at least on a symbolic level. Interestingly, demonstrations outside the Ministry of Interior has never completely subsided.

The Road to Revolution | 143 by Rached Ghannoushi. Following the elections, the so-called Troika government was formed, composed of Ennahda and the two other large parties (the Congrès pour la République and Ettakatol) and led by the former Human Rights lawyer Moncef Marzouki as president. The NCA and the troika had to contend with increasingly confident and well-organized assemblies of civil society groups and social movements that demanded a say in the constitution building. While demonstrations and demands for increased social justice for marginal regions continued, much of the political and media focus was shifted towards issues of the religious “identity” and the character of the Tunisian nation. Many activists, and Tunisians at large, were initially shocked by the victory of Islamist Ennahda and feared that the “secular” legacy of the nation was at risk. Furthermore, following the revolution a number of more radical Islamist groups like Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia (AST) and Hizb ut-Tahrir sur- faced and caused concern over Islamist violence (Merone 2015).

Dialogue In 2013, the mood was tense, with a stalled constitution-making processes, the increased fear of radical Islam, and the assassination of a prominent leftist leader Chokri Belaid on 6th February. Things came to a head in the summer, when another leftist activist Mohammed Brahmi was murdered by suspected Islamists. The assassination led to large demonstrations that demanded the resignation of the government to the shouts of “out with the Islamists.”269 In April 2012, former Prime Minister Essebsi had launched a new political party, Nidaa Tounes. The party was explicitly framed as a counter to En- nahda, and Essebsi played up his association with Bourguiba.270 Nidaa Tounes made use of the crisis in 2013 to emphasize core aspects of “Tunisianness”; understood primarily as a rejection of radicalism. Emphasis was placed on Nidaa as the guardian of women’s rights. This message proved successful, in particular among the coastal middle classes and women. Following Brahmi’s assassination, leftist groups joined with Nidaa to form the National Salvation Front (NSF) and to campaign against the Troika.271 Despite huge pressures

269 These events coincided with the Military coup in Egypt against the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood, raising both hopes and fears of a similar non-democratic take-over in Tunisia. 270 From its inception, Nidaa Tounes has been accused, not without cause, to be a vehicle for the return of RCD and other members of the regime. 271 In August 2013, Ennahda finally supported the ban on AST, labelling it a terrorist organization; but demonstrations continued, in many cases numbering over 100,000 demonstrators.

144 | Chapter Four against the Ennahda led government, the crisis was finally defused through the work of the so-called National Dialogue Quartet, headed by the UGTT. The Quartet helped mediate between NCA, NSF and other civil society groups and guaranteed a more inclusive constitution-writing process. When the constitution was passed on 26th January 2014, it was widely hailed as a model for the region. Certainly, in its democratic nature and inclusive writing process, it remains unique in the Arab World. Declaring Tu- nisia a civil state (dawla maadani), the constitution enshrined a host of ambitious rights, including right to education, work, health, water, sports, culture, rights for the disabled and even containing special provisions for historically marginalized areas.272

The Cost of Consensus The legislative and presidential elections in October 2014 established Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda as the two major political parties. Nidaa Tounes was the big winner with 85 seats, to Ennahda’s 69 and Essebsi won the presi- dency.273 Nidaa skillfully marshalled the familiar narrative of the “dignity of the state” as well as the discourse of reform and moderation. Ben Ali, and his crony rule, was treated as an aberration, a figure mired in corruption and excess, epitomized by his wife and her family. Essebsi represented himself as a ‘return to normalcy’. This tapped into a lingering and increasingly public nostalgia for Bourguiba. As an old woman from Hammamat living in Tozeur expressed it:

Bourguiba, God bless his heart. You know, I am 63 years old, and Bourguiba taught me. If it weren’t for him, I would never have gotten an education. I would have worked on the streets. Now I speak Italian and French. It’s all because of Bourguiba. Ben Ali did not do anything for us. He did nothing. The opposite, he brought the thieves and they stole it all. Bourguiba, he lived in poverty and died in poverty. Not like Ben Ali with all his palaces and his wealth that he stole from

272 Santini (2018) considers the 2014 constitution as grounds for a “new social contract”, both in its creation and in later demands. She writes, “the Tunisian Constitution of 2014 […] stands as a full-fledged attempt to suspend previous rules and order and create new state-society equi- libria” (2018:21). I do not reject this claim. Yet even if the constitution may come to take on such a role in the future, most youth I have met and demonstrations I have witnessed in the interior have not expressed their sense of citizenship and relation to the state primarily in terms of the new constitution. Just as the old constitution provided civic and political rights that where disabled at every turn by an oppressive state, even if the new constitution provides socio- economic justice on paper, the youth do not experience it so in practice. The political imaginaries, as I will show, go beyond the constitution. 273 Ennahda fielded no candidate of its own.

The Road to Revolution | 145

the people. Some people have begun to say that it was better before [the revolution], but that is because Ben Ali and his gang have destroyed the country and not left anything.

Part of the power of this nostalgia was its imprecise nature. Bourguiba came to represent an array of sometimes contradictory desires: for a more enlightened leader, someone in touch with the people, a stanch secularism, a selfless improver of the poor and downtrodden. For some, Bourguiba is associated with the early expansion of the state; and Ben Ali with the more market-oriented policies, rising inequality and corruption. Despite Nidaa’s campaigning against Ennahda, the two parties formed a coalition government following the election. By employing the old narrative of “consensus”, Nidaa could also legitimate a shift by including Ennahda into this consensus. This, perhaps surprising, paring has both been lauded and criticized. Democratization scholars often see it as an important stabilizing force:

Tunisia’s ruling coalition between the two major forces, the secular Nidaa Tounes party and the Islamist-oriented Ennahda party, is rare. Usually when a country has a significant division in its sociopolitical life, whether it is along political, religious, ethnic, tribal, social class, or ideological lines, this usually dominates the transition and becomes the thing that threatens to rip the country apart. (Carothers 2018:5)

Others have argued that it has led to a stifling of democracy, by monopolizing power. Boubekeur argues that the results of the transition should be termed “bargained competition” between Ennahda and the old regime.274 While this has avoided violence, it has weakened structural changes to the old institutions, reduced transparency, and led to inter and intra-party contests for spoils (2016:108).275 Despite the positive developments of the new constitution, the inclusive process that had brought it about, the flourishing of civil society, and loud voices for more inclusive economic policies, the rise of Nidaa also signaled a return of more repressive state elements. The police and the ministry of interior regained some of their authority. The return of old regime elements coincided with, and was helped by, an increased sense of chaos and

274 Boukhar calls it an “elite settlement” between Ennahda and Nidaa (2017). 275 Although I would argue that it is an exaggeration to claim as Boubekeur does that “the two blocs have increasingly monopolized the political arena, and the revolutionaries’ demands for change and participation have been re-channelled into a reductive form of pluralism that ostensibly pits Islamists against representatives of the old regime” (2015:109).

146 | Chapter Four violence. 2015 saw two major terrorist attacks, one on the Bardo Museum in March and a second at a tourist resort in Sousse in June. The attacks led to an abrupt decline in tourism, which had already been hard hit by the revolution. This, together with cross-border terrorist activities in both neighboring Libya and the Cha’ambi mountains with Algeria near Kasserine, meant that the pressure to reform the Tunisian security sector diminished greatly (Boubekeur 2015; Boukhars 2017; Merone 2015) In terms of social and economic issues, the Ennahda-Nidaa Tounis government represented a continuation of the status-quo (Santini 2018:29).276 The consensus around economic policy continued the old practice of simultaneous liberalization and state-expansion. In fact, despite repeated warning from the World Bank and pushes from the EU and IMF to reduce the public spending of the Tunisian state, the state continued to absorb labor at ever higher rates following the revolution.277 This meant putting further strain on the already fragile economy that had been hit hard by the upheavals of the revolution and its aftermath, and created resentment among groups that felt excluded from this form of state patronage.278

Exclusions One of the unresolved challenges of the transition has been that the interior regions as well as the youth in general, have continued to feel excluded. Nei- ther of the two established parties, Ennahda nor Nida Tounis have been able, or willing, to reach out to youth in general and marginalized youth in partic-

276 As Dalacoura writes “Nahda are comfortable with neoliberal structures and do not aim to challenge or transform them in any fundamental sense” (2016:62). There is a substantial literature on the connection between Islamist parties and neoliberalism. 277 The number of public sector employees rose from 480,000 to 580,000 between 2010 and 2013 (World Bank 2014). According to former finance minister Fadhel Abdelkefi “public- sector wages [went from] 6 billion dinars [$2.7 billion] in 2010 to 13.2 billion dinars [$5.9 billion] in 2016, which is 70 percent of our ﬁscal revenue” (Quoted in Muasher, Pierini, and Aliriza 2016:8). 278 A number of factors could be behind the continued state expansion, including Ennahda insisting on “rewarding” its loyal members through public sector jobs (Boubekeur 2018:114). It may also be a way of placating continued protests. Whatever the reasons it reflects an inability, or unwillingness of the new governments to break from old patronage network. As Hibou has showed, the distinction between public and private actors was rarely clear during Ben Ali (2011), and this may not have changed substantially following the revolution; a tension discussed in chapter 10.

The Road to Revolution | 147 ular. Unemployment figures have continued to rise for youth with and without diplomas.279 According to a survey by Arab Barometer the percentage of Tunisians that trust the government has gone down drastically in the years after the revolution.280 They found that in 2018 the number of young that rated the economy as doing well was a mere seven percent (Robbins 2018:2).281 In another study, 91 percent of youth reported a lack of confidence in the parliament and 95 percent in political parties (Yahia 2016). Following the revolution, various radical Islamist groups began to emerge and many young men left to fight in Syria. As the security situation deterio- rated, the security forces began to clamp down on what they saw as “dangerous elements.” The young men from marginalized regions went from being hailed as heroes of the revolution, to be treated with suspicion again and to be blamed for the ills of the transition. As Merone writes of these youth:

When the transition went on into the ‘normality’ phase, they were unable to find a party representing their interests, and in general they refused to engage in the institutional process […]Thus, this new subject is composed of the revolutionary and marginalised youth that, in the post-revolutionary context, holds the rest of society accountable for not sharing the material and, equally important, identity and intangible benefits of the revolution. (2015:80)

These are the revolutionary reserves that at every moment threaten to disrupt the everyday working of the state and that have continued to engage in protests and strikes across the country. For Merone, it has been the failure to include them in the political process that has been the main factor behind their radicalization. It was the radical Islamist groups that emerged after the

279 Youth unemployment hovers around 40 percent. For youth with graduate degrees it is as high as 50 percent. Sarah Yerkes writes that “according to the Tunisian government’s own statistics, one million youth are considered “NEET”—no employment, education, or training. This is a staggeringly high number in a country of 11.2 million people” (2017:17). See also World Bank (2014). 280 The survey finds that “In 2011, 62 percent of Tunisians trusted the government, meaning there has been a 42-point decline in the years since” (Robbins 2019:7). 281 It was 27 percent in 2011. The report further writes that, “At the same time, hopes for a better economic future have plummeted. Today, just a third of Tunisians expect the economy to improve in the coming years, compared with more than three-quarters (78 percent) in 2011. Youth and those who are better educated are especially likely to have lost hope in the country’s future” (Robbins 2019:3).

148 | Chapter Four revolution that were able to harness and articulate the frustration of marginalized youth.282 Similarly, Olfa Lamloum in her study of youth in two disadvantaged neighborhoods of Tunis, sees youth exclusion as a major cause of radicalization.283 While the youths do not form a coherent group, they are nonetheless united in a shared sense of marginalization, social inequality, low status and lack of access to public resources. Lamloum writes:

The young people of Douar Hicher and Ettadhamen feel cheated by the elections and political parties, ignored as usual by the state and sidelined from the ‘democratic transition’. As a result, young people are turning to their local neighbourhoods more than ever, as the only basis on which they can build links with political or civil society groups. Even then, there is little on offer except charity-based groups, which are most prevalent, followed by Salafist groups. (2016:6) 284

Almost half the respondents in her study felt that their lives had not changed or become worse since the revolution. Economic problems are cited as the major issue followed by poor treatment by local authorities; the harsh treatment by the police is mentioned as a particularly troublesome issue (2016:12). Despite the widespread disappointment and cynicism towards the transition among Tunisian youth, demonstrations and protests have continued unabated, and many have claimed new cultural and political spaces.285 If youth have spurned formal politics, they have been highly active in the domain of civil society both in terms of institutionalized NGOs and popular social movements (Yerkes 2017). Much of the protests have taken place in the interior and southern regions. They have often been small and localized; strikes, sit-ins, hunger-strikes, but some have come to take on larger forms. One such movement began in Kas- serine in January 2016 and was triggered by the death of a young man after

282 Merone writes that, “The process of radicalisation of the disenfranchised youth, on the contrary, is part of the struggle of marginalised social classes to be included in the ‘Nation’. Their exclusion from the nation-building process and institutions of governance, and particularly from the benefits of the economy, is the most powerful indicator of what has not changed in Tunisia” (2015:76). 283 When Merone and Lamloum talk of “youth”, their focus is young men. 284 The emphasis on the connection between youth and Islamism, both in general discourse and in academia, has its problems. ⁠ There are indications that scholars such as Merone and Lamloum overstate the class element of jihadist recruitment, since although youth from marginalized areas are somewhat overrepresented, they represent only one group of jihadist youth. ⁠ And the vast majority of youths, such as those I have studied, while alienated from the political processes are not Salafists or part of any jihadist group. 285 Lamloum too finds that despite a sense of marginalization among the young that she studies, “people are beginning to demand their political and social rights” (2016:10).

The Road to Revolution | 149 having been removed from a list for government employment. The demonstrations spread, and brought together labor unions, leftist parties and civil society groups across the country. Similar events took place in Tataouine in the south, and Kerkennah in the east (Feltrin 2018). Heightened activism appears to coexist with passivity and an acute sense of marginalization. The state has dealt with these protests, both small and larger scale protests, by promising a number of socio-economic inducements, as well as by occasional police brutality, although never on the scale of Ben Ali. But as the promises of help rarely materialize, demonstrations have continued. This indicates continued frustration, particularly from the those in marginalized regions, but also a certain resilience of the new political order. Part of this resilience may be due to the more decentralized nature of democracy, where there is no longer one locus of symbolic power, and thus no center to attack and negotiate with. As Huntington writes, “Complexity produces stability” (1968:20).286 But it also shows the inability of the state to respond to demands and the potentially fragile nature of this stability. The ratio of youth in relation to the total population in Tunisia is estimated to decline over the coming years and decades (Courbage & Todd 2014), in the meantime, however, the young continue to demand their inclusion. Youth, particularly from the interior regions, continue to feel marginalized and forgotten.287

Revolutionary Disappointment Jessica Greenberg, in her study on disappointment among student activists in Serbia, pinpoints “March 12, 2003—the date of the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić—as the day the spirit of Serbia’s democratic revolution died” (2014:1). The disappointment and disillusionment of youth in Tu- nisia however, cannot be placed at a particular date or event. There are many landmarks on the road to the current widespread experience of frustration. For some, the disappointment started already on October 23rd 2011 when Ennahda emerged as the largest party in the elections for the Constituent As- sembly, tasked with writing the new constitution. A young doctor from the

286 He writes, “The simplest political system is that which depends on one individual. It is also the least stable. Tyrannies, Aristotle pointed out, are virtually all " quite short-lived" (1968:18). 287 Meddeb writes “Far from reversing the old patterns of regional subordination, post-2011 political elites have reproduced the same mechanisms of, and rationales for, government that shaped center-periphery relations since Tunisia’s independence in 1956” (2020:5).

150 | Chapter Four posh Gammarth district in Tunis expressed it thus: “There was so much optimism after the revolution. But when Ennahda won, I was shocked. I, and my friends, felt that we did not understand our own country and people. How could they vote for these Islamists that wanted to take back our country 100 years?” For many leftists it was the 6th of February 2013 and the assassination of popular leftist politician Chokri Beleid. For others it was the victory of Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi on November 23rd, 2014, in a presidential election that signaled the failure of the revolution. Yet, each of these events could, for some, be counted as victories, or at the very least events that galvanized as much as they pacified. For most, perhaps, it was a more diffuse and slow process in which it was the absence of events, an absence of change that proved disappointing. In which revolutionary time was inevitably returned to its ordinary rhythm, and the prospect of a bright future, both for themselves and the country, slowly appeared more and more dim. A sense of disappointment may be inevitable in the wake of such momentous events. The revolution was disappointing both because it failed and because it succeeded. Disappoint- ment, however, is not only pacifying. It reveals expectations, hopes and desires, and can give rise to new forms of actions. Greenberg states, “Disappointment emerged as people compared the expectations of revolution to the realities of democracy in an impoverished country marked by the legacies of state violence and repression” (2014:8). Among those activists studied by Greenberg, this “politics of disappointment” takes the form of an increased understanding and navigation of the limits and contingency of activism and an abandonment of an idealized and future-oriented politics. She writes that, “This turn toward the present signals a refusal of a long-standing modernist link between youth and futurity” (2014:25). In the case of youth in the interior, they too deal with “the realities of democracy in an impoverished country marked by the legacies of state violence and repression” (2014:8). In their case, however, it makes little sense to talk of a refusal of modernist visions. Unlike in former Yugoslavia, the revolution in Tunisia was never a revolt against a totalitarian vision of the past, present and future. While the revolution brought together a multitude of actors with different agendas, hopes and interests, the slogan Shughl, hurriyya, karama wataniya is still the defining slogan during protests, particularly in the interior regions. It is a sign of the continued relevance of modernist narratives of national progress and state responsibility. Questions remain, however, regarding the ways in which these expectations of modernity are played out in everyday life, and how this comes to inform the experience of the transition.

The Road to Revolution | 151

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has looked at the state and citizen dynamics of post-colonial Tu- nisia. The authoritarian character of the state since independence has led to a legacy of passive citizenship, dominated by desires for (male) respectability via state employment. At the same time, this citizenship remained ambiguous. As the state has become less able, or willing, to provide the basics of citizenship, this has led to waves of mobilization and, to some extent, a more active citizenry. In this way the Tunisian state is similar to other Arab states, and many post-colonial countries. If there are particularities, it may lay in the combination of state “success and failure.” On the one hand, an effective dual state and nation building process that has incorporated marginal regions and populations into its state-building efforts. On the other hand, the continued lag- ging behind of interior regions and the inability to provide respectable employment opportunities for university graduates and youth more generally. Much of this may be due to demographic and larger economic trends outside of the control of the state, as well as shifts towards more neoliberal forms of governance. This neoliberalism is partial, as the state has continued to maintain a tight grip on parts of the economy, even as unemployment has increased and the informal economy has continued to expand. The chapter has argued that while the Tunisian state’s ideological power and legitimacy, such as it was, has long ago been spent, its symbolic power and center of “clusters of promises” remains. Following the overthrow of Ben Ali, Tunisia has seen a host of impressive developments with regard to free and fair elections, emerging civil society groups, popular mobilization and the passing of a new democratic constitution. The period that I have followed young men in Kasserine and Gafsa, between 2015 and 2019, is one where many of the formal challenges of democratization appeared to be already settled. It is also a period when the revolutionary euphoria has dissipated, when security concerns have emerged in the wake of terrorist attacks and a civil war in Libya. Furthermore, it has been a time when many youths still feel excluded, and disappointment and demonstrations are widespread. In many ways the democratic transition appears hampered by the ambiguous legacy of state-citizen dynamics of the authoritarian period, and its failures of inclusion.

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The remainder of this study will investigate in greater detail, through interpretive ethnography, how the expectations and responses of marginalization come to be played out in everyday life, and how this interacts with the experience of the democratization process.

5. Café Communitas

Nothing happens …It's awful – Samuel Beckett

Every day is just a movement from our house to cafés. We have nothing real to talk about, since nothing real ever happens – Ghassan

ETHNOGRAPHIC INTERLUDE 1: JUST ANOTHER DAY

It’s September 8th, 2016. I met Rami around eight in the morning for his first coffee of the day. Rami is a 26-year-old unemployed electrical engineer who graduated in 2013, but has yet to land a stable job. Like many young men in the region, he subsists on a combination of odd jobs, a government stipend of around 200 dinars per month for unemployed youths with graduate degrees, and financial support from his parents.288 We are near his house in the neighborhood of Qsar, a middle-class suburb of Gafsa.289 Our café is a neighborhood coffeehouse called Al- many. Its concrete walls are barely concealed by fresh paint, its clientele is exclusively men of different ages. This morning it is filled with mostly older men, sitting on plastic chairs at old tables, playing cards and smoking shisha. Greetings and enquiries are exchanged and Rami congratu- lates an older man on the wedding of his daughter a few days ago. When I ask why he chooses this particular café in the mornings he explains, “The original inhabitants of Qsar hang out here in Almany. The newer residents hang out in Amigos, along the street. That's for people that are born here but are not from here. And the two cafés we walked past earlier are just people from outside Qsar.” To my untrained eye they all look indistinguishable, somewhat run-down, typical of the so-called

288 In 2016, one Euro was about three dinars, and so 200 dinars was about 70 Euro. 289 Middle-class in the sense that it is distinguished from the “popular” informal settlements.

153 154 | Chapter Five qahwe sha’abia (popular male-only cafés) dotting the Tunisian cities and villages, where the price of a coffee is set by the government, and hovers around half a dinar. He continues to explain, “There are a few more cafés here where the original inhabitants hang out. I make sure to avoid Al- ‘Arabi though. That’s where my father usually sits.” When I ask why he doesn’t share the same café with his father, he is unable to give a clear answer, “In Tunisia sons and fathers don't sit in the same cafés, that's just how it is.” After an hour or so we take a local shared taxi to the center of Gafsa. We head to Metropolis, a hip café started after the revolution. It is a popular hangout for politically and culturally active youths, with as many young women as men. Rami greets the owner; they are both members of the same leftist party – although neither are very active. Some of Rami’s friends are there preparing a small play about gender-equality for school kids and ask if we want to help. When we step out into the streets again around noon, it’s busy as people rush home to eat lunch. “Sometimes if I can catch a ride, or my mother has made something special, I might go home to eat lunch and then head out again.” Today we eat a fricasse, a small deep-fried sandwich, for half a dinar. After lunch, we walk to Dar Charif. It’s a so-called salon de thé, a pricier category of café; the result of market reforms in the late 1990s, allowing the price of a coffee at this different class of establishment to range from 2 to 4 dinar. They are popularly known as café mixte, reflecting their status as spaces where genders mix. Dar Charif is made into a mock-Arabic house with an open inner courtyard, roman archways and arabesque tiles in the Tunisian style. Besides the covered courtyard there are four large private rooms and an upstairs terrace with plenty of space for couples to get some privacy. As usual the same albums of Fairuz and George Wassuf are playing on repeat, even as the large plasma TVs are showing Arabic pop-songs. Rami has arranged to meet a girl there, but she cancels at the last minute. He appears almost relieved “Dating is an expensive habit. Those with more money might go between Dar Charif and Fontana daily, but most will only go there a few times a week, usually to meet a girl.” Fontana is another café mixte in Gafsa, it looks like the lounge of a fancy hotel and is popular with couples. The time is now 2 pm, and the city is quiet, but for the young and old men out. Some are sitting on the few scattered benches around the park

Café Communitas | 155 but most are sitting in cafés. “I’m restless, I can’t spend more than an hour or two in the same café. Some spend a whole day there though,” Rami comments. We head to another café by shared taxi a few kilometers from the center and next to Gafsa University. We sit down with a group of former and current students. They are discussing student politics and the growing influence of Islamists but Rami appears uninterested. As we are about to leave Rami remarks, “Half the people in this café are unemployed former students of the university, what do you think that signals to the current students?” We are back in the center around 5pm and the cafés are more packed than ever “The men have finished work” Rami explains, ”They would rather spend time with their friends than with their wives.” We head to another qahwa sha’abia, which is so crowded there is barely room to sit, where he meets two friends who have just finished their work. He’s particularly interested in hearing if their respective offices will be hiring, and whether they can put in a good word. Like many young men with a university degree, Rami’s goal is state employment. It’s almost 8:30pm by the time we finish and we discuss whether to go to a bar or buy some beers and find a remote place to drink them. Drink- ing outside somewhere is cheaper, but requires a car in order to find a secluded space, and since both money and cars are in short supply we head back to Almany, for a last coffee and some rounds of cards before finally heading home around 10 pm. The next day promises to be more of the same.

INTRODUCTION This chapter argues that both space and time are important dimensions in understanding how the state is experienced and citizenship is constructed in the margins, and by extension, how the democratic transition has come to be experienced. Understanding the way young men experience democratization, entails looking at some of the places where these experiences happen as well as the ways in which temporality conditions such experiences. This, and the following, chapter asks the questions; what role do cafés come to play in the post-authoritarian period? And in what way do they come to condition the experience of democratization?

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This chapter looks at the implications of the public presence of young men in Kasserine and Gafsa, by looking at cafés as central public spaces of post- revolutionary Tunisia. The reclaiming of public spaces was one of the driving forces of the Tunisian revolution, and the democratic transition has led to a change in the dynamics of these spaces, as people are now much freer to express themselves. The transition process has allowed the opening of previously hidden transcripts, (Scott 1990) and cafés are central arenas where those freer discourses can now play themselves out. More than the content of the public transcripts that are expressed, in this chapter, I am interested in some of the implications of place itself. I seek to show that expectations and political imaginaries can be read not only in narratives, but in practices of public spaces as well. Cafés function as central nodes in the lives of young unemployed men even as they come to represent boredom and failure. They have also come to perform political imaginaries, by signaling expectations towards the state. Waiting in public space, I argue, is a way of understanding hope, expectations and desires. What the chapter shows is that the young men are still waiting for “bread and dignity.” And yet their waiting is not only passive. I treat cafés as liminal spaces of waiting, and of attempting to turn this waiting into something more meaningful. It is also a social and shared waiting, that can trigger protests and form bonds of communitas. The shared and visible nature of their waiting occasions a break with the atomizing logic of neoliberalism, as the young men’s “failure” becomes political rather than purely personal. The chapter argues that public spaces like cafés contain aspects of “bracketing,” “contestation,” and “visibility”, and each of these both reinforce and undermine the current order. Cafés are public spaces in which generations and classes meet and are separated and where the fractures are made more visible. They are also highly gendered spaces, even as this gendered dimension is both contested and reinforced. As part of emerging public space, cafés come to signal what has not changed as much as what has changed.

A HISTORY OF COFFEE Cafés crowded with young men are visible features of the social landscape of Tunisia in general and its peripheries and semi-peripheries in particular. As was illustrated in the section above, coffeehouses are very much part of the everyday life of many young men in Tunisia. These cafés and their social importance are nothing new. Their history can be traced both to the Ottoman

Café Communitas | 157 conquest in the sixteenth century, as well as the French Protectorate (1881- 1956) that brought their own version of this practice.290 Other chapters deal more in-depth with the content of the discussions among the young in cafés and public spaces more broadly. In my own experience, much of the talk in these cafés revolves around mundane topics and gossip, as well as issues such as how to get jobs and how to get to Europe by legal or illegal means. Unsurprisingly, most of the youth in many of the cafés in either Gafsa or Kasserine that I have talked to do not define themselves as political. Nonetheless, I seek to show that “things” happen in these spaces, potentially important “things”, with implications for the success and failure of Tunisia’s democratization process. According to Jürgen Habermas (1991), in his classic work on the emergence of the public sphere, cafés constituted important elements in the building block of Western democracy. By contrast Rodney Collins, in his historical and ethnographic account of coffee, cafés, and masculinity in Tunisia, argues that since independence the primary importance of cafés has not been as incubators of democracy but as place-holders for what constitutes the social- cultural order. The Tunisian state has long seen coffee and its use as a “social good founded upon a cultural imperative” (2009:10). During the time of the French occupation, coffeehouses had been associated with rebellion and resistance, but since independence it was taken for granted that every coffeehouse had its local state informants (2009:92). Cafés, argues Collins, remained central during the dictatorship of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, not as spaces of resistance or as sites of Habermasian “discursive will formation” but in their social relevance:

The institution that most Tunisian’s claim as “representational space” par excellence, whether as a surrogate for understanding of ‘the public,’ of ‘the city’ or of ’men’ and without which the Tunisian socio-cultural order is said to be unimagi- nable: the coffeehouse. (2009:11)

They are key physical and symbolic sites in the social manifestations and assemblies of what it means to be Tunisian, or rather; a Tunisian man. Collins looked at cafés in downtown Tunis, during the Ben Ali dictatorship. He found that for young men cafés, were primarily important as homosocial

290 The coffeehouse is a Levantine, Arabo-Islamic invention. Originating either in Damascus or Aleppo.

158 | Chapter Five spaces; as sites of a performance of masculinity that is divorced from democratic practices. He writes, “If the coffeehouse proved to have no other function, it allowed these men to evade the circumstances of their everyday lives and to an extent maintain a distance between masculinity and manhood” (2009:243).291 It is worth retracing some of Collins findings in the context of peripheral Tunisia in transition. In so doing, this chapter will seek to show that cafés reflect political, as much as social, dynamics, and that the young men’s waiting in cafés captures dimensions of political imaginaries and democratic experiences.

CAFÉS AND MARGINALITY

Emerging Publics Many works on public space in the West take their cue from Habermas’s seminal The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991) and as such adhere to a narrative of decline.292 For Habermas, the introduction of mass politics and mass media, the increase in state prerogatives, the development of industrial capitalism, and the specialization of knowledge, all played a part in the demise of the public sphere and helped turn active citizens into passive consumers. Richard Sennett in his The Fall of the Public Man (1992) discusses how modern forms of public spaces are alienating and atomizing, having lost their publicness. In urban planning and human geography, the discussions on public spaces in the American context have long been focused on the “death” of public spaces. The market-dominated logic at play in American cities facilitates the creation of homogeneous and constricted spaces catering to consumption and security rather than communication and diversity. Former public spaces have fallen into private hands, or have become “pseudo-private spaces” (Mitchell & Staeheli 2006). A similar theme runs through the work on public space in Europe, where the “villain” is inner city gentrification. Like in the US, public spaces are understood to be in a process of disintegration,

291 Collins distinction between manhood and masculinity is discussed in the final section of this chapter. 292 While in later works Habermas made a more explicit attempt to rehabilitate communicative action as a foundational basis of modern democracy, the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is in essence a tragedy: the very forces that brought the public sphere into existence would invariably work to undermine it.

Café Communitas | 159 having been turned into sanitized spaces that are progressively limited to the middle classes, at the expense of poor and marginalized groups (Harvey 2012). Therefore, much of the discussion has been connected to issues of “rights to the city” and reviving public space as truly public (Lefevbre 2009, Harvey 2005). In transitional countries like Tunisia, and particularly in peripheral areas, the issues of public space are somewhat different from those that scholars discuss in the West. There has been no past, real or imagined, in which public spaces were prevalent, open and central for the polity.293 Rather than revival, the post-revolutionary challenges in Tunisia involve creating and strengthening such insipient spaces. In interior Tunisia, it is not primarily markets, gentrification, or highly sophisticated surveillance technologies that are the barriers to free public spaces, but authoritarian legacies and social norms.294 There are similarities in Tunisia to former Socialist states, where the state had invaded almost all facets of life and one of the major challenges was the creation of public spaces outside of the state.295 In interior Tunisia, cafés represent the dual process of “surplus population” and “masculinity crisis” discussed in the previous chapter. It is the place where young, unemployed or underemployed men like Rami spend their days. At the same time, I wish to make the case that even as spaces of “failure” and waiting for something else, cafés still play an important role in transitional Tunisia.

Popular Public Space Above all, it is the qahwa sha’abia among Tunisian coffeehouses that are understood to constitute a central part of the social, and this is the first place to look for the public, both old and emerging. The term sha’abi has no exact

293 Some scholars claim that mosques have been the central public spaces in the Arab and Mus- lim World (Bowen 2004; Mazumdar & Mazumdar 2002). I do not reject such claims, but argue that at least for the modern Tunisian republic, it has been cafés rather than mosques where the quotidian vision of “public man” comes to be articulated. Furthermore, in the authoritarian context of Tunisia, mosques, even more than cafés, were heavily regulated spaces. Neither places however, where true public spaces in the sense discussed in chapter two. 294 This does not mean that there are no convergences. Perhaps the West is experiencing the kind of state surveillance over spaces that people in countries like Tunisia have long been accustomed too. 295 As I have stated previously, Tunisia was not, however, a totalitarian state. During Ben Ali it was an amalgam of socialist and neoliberal forms, an expression of a kind of authoritarian populism, to use Stuart Halls term (1985), that had progressively become more authoritarian and less populist.

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English equivalent. It is usually translated as “popular.” It comes from the word sha’ab: people.296 Sha’abi conveys that something is representative of popular tastes and sentiments and as such “authentic” and at the same time associated with the lower classes.297 This linguistic connection between qahwa sha’abia as both “the People’s cafés” and “popular cafés” is revealing and important. The term qahwa sha’abia simultaneously reinforce the marginalized position of its occupants even as it reveals their heightened normative importance as a placeholder for the People. Distinct from other forms of cafés, in qawha sha’abia the price of coffee is set by the state and heavily regulated and subsidized. In other words, they are at once private and public enterprises. Even in their appearances sha’abi coffeehouses, with their run-down arabesque tiles and plastic chairs on the streets, blend with the surroundings and blur the line between public and private, distinctions among streets, pavements, and coffeehouses are dissolved. While qahwa sha’abia are sometimes associated with the popular, lower classes, they are not defined by their class character. They are places where, at least ideally, lawyers sit side by side with day-laborers. This follows one key aspect of what is often understood as central to public space, termed by Cas- segård as “bracketing.” He writes that, “Publics [..]arise when participants systematically disregard real differences and relations of dependency in order to create a semblance of equality between participants” (2014:692). As spaces in which men of different social backgrounds and ages mix, these cafés to some extent constitute the Tunisian public.298 This bracketing is a central dimension of qahwa sha’abia both between the young and older generations, but particularly among the young men. Yet, as the section with Rami showed, these cafés simultaneously re-inscribe differences, as sha’abi cafés reflect distinctions in neighborhoods, backgrounds, generations, and above all exclusions based

296 A closer equivalent may be the German word volk, except that the word sha’ab does not connote ethnicity. 297 Similarly, Agamben discusses the tensions in the word “people.” He writes, “Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term "people" must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, "people" also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics” (1998:176). 298 In England, and the broader Anglo-Saxon world, the pub could be said to play a similar role (Fox 2004). It is at once quintessentially “English” and associated with working-class men. Here too, the “masculine” aspects of this public space have been discussed (Campbell 2000).

Café Communitas | 161 on gender. Sha’abi cafés are defined as much by their exclusively male character, as by their bracketing of differences.299 This is not surprising given the extensive critique of the Habermasian public sphere for being by its nature exclusionary (Calhoun 1996; Fraser 1990; Warner 2002). It is important, however, to emphasize that while locally, in the context of the semi-urban settings of Kasserine and Gafsa, the qahwa sha’abi are “dominant” spaces, within the larger context of the Tunisian public they can also be considered “counter-public spaces” (Fraser 1996); composed as they are mostly of those marginalized by space and age. As places in the margins, as areas understood to compose the “internal other” of Tunisia, both the old and young alike in their cafés represent a sort of counter-public. On the other hand, as participants in a male-only activity that is visible and carries historical and normative significance, they constitute the public itself. Another way to frame it is to say that a public space may be both counter-public and simultaneously a locally excluding public space.300 The importance of popular cafés lies in their ability to both represent and exclude, to simultaneously bring together and divide.

Café Communitas One way of seeing popular cafés both as spaces of bracketing inequality and as counter-public spaces is by focusing on their importance for young men as spaces of shared struggles and sociality. The bracketing, I argue, is part of the liminal experience of young men. This shared sociality, as part of what Victor Turner called communitas, comes precisely from their exclusion, from their liminality. With communitas Turner focused on the positive and regenerative side of the liminal. He claimed that as people experience the destabilizing process of liminality it creates strong bonds of equality among those that pass through it. It can open up for new forms of engagement and new ways of being, even if it ultimately serves the purpose of social reproduction (1969).301 While for Turner, communitas is a creative and generally positive process, for others it is more ambiguous. Bjørn Thomassen writes:

299 As Ghanam writes about Egypt, “the coffeehouse (’ahwa) is an important space where men with different educations, professions, ages, and experiences could interact and negotiate the norms that guide their masculine trajectories” (2013:22). 300 The contentious logic of counter-publics is explored further in the next chapter. 301 If the revolutionary moment created its form of communitas then cafés are more quotidian, semi-permanent instantiations of liminality and communitas.

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The communitas that comes out of liminality may be recognized as a deeply bonded human collectivity; but whether this collectivity engages in loving care toward the other or in violent destruction we really cannot say in any general way. (2014:84, italics in original)

Whether generative or destructive, for the young men in interior Tunisia, their communitas is experienced as a burden. Part of the tensions is that their liminality is neither temporary nor delimited. There is no master of ceremonies to guide the neophytes back to the established order. As a form of communitas, the sha’abi cafés represent not so much the social order but a suspension of it. A common and revealing phrase, both by youth themselves and by their elders is that “the young men are lost” (al-shabab dai- een), this implies a displacement, a disoriented state in which traditional signposts have disappeared. It is not necessarily the case that there are no longer any known ends and goals, but that there are no longer any clear directions on how to get there. When many of the young men talk about themselves and others like them, they use a similar language of being lost and aimless. Ali who graduated in 2012 as an engineer and finally managed to find a job in March 2017 looks back at the time when he was unemployed:

It was a very difficult time in my life. I didn’t know what path to walk. I tried to find jobs or projects, even work in the private sector, but didn’t get anything and eventually I gave up. I lost myself. I spent my days doing nothing, just sitting in cafés.

The turmoil of a life without aim and the experienced chaos of post-revolutionary Tunisia mingle, they become hard to divorce. Ultimately, the presence of youth in public spaces becomes a physical representation of a larger social and political failure. Out of this visible failure grows a sense of communitas. The belonging and bracketing that the daily life in cafés comes to represent is a result of an inability to escape from an in-between state of waiting. Cafés come to bracket inequality among the young men or at least create a sense of belonging, but also to reinforce them as a category apart. Many cafés are nothing but spaces of unemployment; the young men’s constant presence is a signal of their exclusion from the public, from “normal” society, from the normative and gendered ideals of a stable and preferably state employment. They are spaces where the young claim themselves as part of the public, but also where they are marked out as less.

Café Communitas | 163

Visibility and Recognition The centrality of sha’abi cafés as public space is brought out even more in terms of their importance as places of visibility and contestation. For Don Mitchell, drawing on Arendt, a central dimension of public space is presence:

[P]ublic space is a place within which a political movement can stake out the space that allows it to be seen [....]Public space is the product of competing ideas about what constitutes that space-order and control or free, and perhaps dangerous, interaction-and who constitutes 'the public.' (1995:118)

For Arendt, it is visibility that distinguishes the public from the private, it is the “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me” (1958:199). The public is public only to the extent that it entails being seen. If one is not seen, then one cannot be heard or part of the public proper, one lacks “the right to have rights” (1958). Visibility is a precondition of recognition as an equal within the public. It is precisely the aspect of presence that dominates the Tunisian social landscape and that is understood as missing in the West:

Michael Walzer has argued that whereas at one time Americans entered public spaces for multiple reasons including people watching and just “being there,” now they go to such places only for pre-planned, single-minded purposes, such as shop- ping, attending a concert, or conducting personal transactions with government. This pattern undercuts the social spontaneity of urban life, Walzer says, and also diminishes public space’s capacity to educate the populace in civic deportment, such as becoming tolerant of cultural and ethnic differences. (Goodsell 2003:363)

Visibility is a key factor for being recognized as part of the public, in spaces that allow for spontaneous interactions; Kohn (2008) terms this “intersubjec- tivity dialogue”, when people engage with one another. However, there are tensions, I argue, to this visibility and presence for young men. If in the West- ern context, according to Walzer and Mitchell, there is a lack of presence, of “being there”, by contrast in places like Kasserine and Gafsa there appears to be little besides just “being there.” Presence itself is a dominant public activity. It is however not the “enlightened”, the employed and educated middle classes, but the unemployed “dangerous and disruptive” young men that occupy these spaces. For these young men their very presence is experienced as waiting and is less about understanding themselves as a public and more a daily reminder of their precarious positions. They are seen but not recognized as full citizens. Very often the young men themselves, just as society at large, present

164 | Chapter Five their own public presence in cafés as something negative. Consider these comments from young men in Gafsa and Kasserine:

We have a lot of time: but no money. That’s why we sit in cafés all the time. We drink coffee for half a dinar and spend three to four hours there. (Rashid 25, Gafsa)

Most of us young here just sit in cafés, talking about football. Every day is just a movement from house to cafés; we have nothing real to talk about, since nothing real ever happens. (Ghassan, 24, Kasserine)

Being in cafés is a kind of work. It’s our day job and night job. (Saif, 26, Kasser- ine).

Cafés represent a kind of labor where the young men struggle to make time meaningful, to escape from the ever-present clutches of boredom. While the young men often experience their everyday existence as boring, it is not the boredom itself that is the crux of their experience. Bruce O’Neill, who looks at boredom as an “everyday affect” (2014:11) regards it primarily as connected to consumption, or the lack thereof. Among the homeless men in Rumania, he argues, their sense of alienation and boredom is above all tied to their “failure to consume” (2014:23). The young men I study are in some instances among the most “active” consumers in Kasserine and Gafsa, filling cafés and bars, yet this consumption is still experienced as boring. This indicates the limits of a focus on boredom, for while consumption provides a temporary release from the burdens of boredom, consumption becomes another aspect of waiting, of liminal time, above all because it is experienced and perceived as meaningless. It represents no forward momentum but its own anesthetizing aesthetic.302 Their boredom is not temporary, but liminal and in-between; it is time made meaningless. It is the lack of meaning, primarily understood as a lack of “dignified” labor, that makes the consumption-driven lives of the young men “boring.” Respectable labor is seen as central, not only for its own sake but also for its ability to afford the consumer goods necessary for marriage and middle-class respectability. Like Rami at the beginning of the chapter, many young men

302 This argument should not be pushed too far. It is likely that a good deal more things are going on. A tension perhaps between the desire for consumption and the desire to escape it. A “Zizekian” reading of it may be something like, they cannot enjoy their consumption precisely because they can do nothing else. Cafés represent both the logic of enjoyment and consumption and the negation of it. The waiting in cafés exists within a context of the call for capitalist gratification of desire (Žižek 1989) and the postponement of “real” life.

Café Communitas | 165 want nothing more than to have access to a stable job and eventually a house and family. In this, the young men in Kasserine and Gafsa, are no different from the many youths across the global South who have acquired education or at least expectations of a “modern” life, yet remain stuck in insecure jobs in the informal sector, underemployed or unemployed. Their waiting reflects both the powerlessness of youth as well as their expectations of the state. Yet, crucially; they are not altogether powerless. Their subordination, such as it is, is to a set of expectations of the state that “it” is no longer able to deliver, rather than to the state itself. The young men in cafés represent a kind of “time-work” (Flaherty 2014), an active attempt at elevating the boredom of waiting and turning it into something else. Their presence signifies, in part, a self-governing of leisure, a demand for dignity, a reinforcement of passive citizenship and a rejection of it. Cassegård discusses what Fraser terms subaltern counter-publics as spaces of “contestation” which act as “a polemical visibilization of inequality which at the same time functions as an accusation against existing forms of the public sphere and which disrupts and challenges the bracketing on which it is constituted” (2014:695). The visibility of the young men can be understood as a form of contestation in this sense. It highlights the unfulfilled promise of the revolution and the socio-economic order more broadly. Yet, unlike Mitchell’s (1995) notion that claiming public space is a self-consciously political act, a movement; these Tunisian youths are pushed by a complex confluence of factors. Their encroachment and presence in public spaces is driven as much by boredom, by unfulfilled expectations and demands of work and dignity as by desperation or convictions. After all, cafés are places of consumption, leisure, and sociality as much as places to be seen and heard, to exchange ideas and form identities. For these young men, their very presence is experienced as waiting and “being seen”, and is simultaneously about understanding themselves as a public, a daily reminder of their precarious positions, an attempt to elevate a lack, and a constant humiliation. Their presence predates the revolution and comes to reinforce how much that has not changed, and the continued failure of the state to provide.

Young Men, Old Dreams The young men’s presence in cafés is not a public movement in Mitchell’s sense, but their public presence, however, is not without political importance.

166 | Chapter Five

The young men come to represent an in-between existence that they, individ- ually, and state and society more broadly, are unable to bridge. As Flaherty writes, “No one volunteers for waiting and boredom[…]unrewarded and endless waiting signals subordination and powerlessness” (2014: 181). If dignified labor is what they are waiting for, then who is understood as responsible for providing it? As sites of liminality the ubiquitous presence of working age young men in cafés is a reminder of the failure of the state and, society more generally, to provide for the new generation. Cafés, in their popular, sha’abi form, are heavily regulated and subsidized by the state. As such they are another dimension of the Tunisian khubzism (Sadiki 2008:127) of the Bourguiba era. This khubzism holds that the state will provide the most basics of life’s necessity, even leisure.303 The cafés can be understood as a form of visualization of central dimensions of the political imaginaries of khubzism in Tunisia’s margins. Furthermore, the public presence of youth can be interpreted as a reinforcement of this old statist model, a waiting for the realization of its “cluster of promises” (Berlant 2006). The young men’s presence is a quotidian articulation of the demand for this sociopolitical vision of Tunisia. Despite reforms that could be termed neoliberal the Bourguiba state that Ben Ali inherited, and now the democratic transition, remains suffused with modernist and socialist visions of material and social progress. The presence of youth in cafés, their apparent non-action can be read as a visible, and thus social, reproach against a state that has not lived up to its responsibilities. The waiting of the young men is a waiting for the state to do what the young implicitly understand that “it” has promised. As such the young men’s public presence can be viewed as a refusal to accept a neoliberal form of state-citizen dynamics. A dynamic that ultimately rests on a retreat of state prerogatives and “on tutoring people to build their capacities and become self-dependent, responsible citizens who can take care of their own welfare and govern themselves” (Sharma & Gupta 2009).304 If such a neoliberal dispensation dictates that the young should fend for themselves, then rather than accept this shifting of burdens, the young in their waiting signal, instead, a demand for more state. This waiting is, like all waiting, premised on a sort of faith. A faith, full of tensions and ambiguities between demanding and

303See also the discussion of khubzist in chapter ten. 304 Interestingly it may be the older generation that has more readily come to accept the new neoliberal narrative about individual initiative and state irrelevance, and the youth that cling to the older, paternalistic model.

Café Communitas | 167 doubting, between hope and despair, it signals a future that is wished for, that is desired, but a fear that it may not come to pass at all. Presence, while a form of contestation, is not seen as a privilege but reflects a social and political failure. The failure to find a decent living is often experienced as a personal failure, but it is also a shared one. It is political and visible. The liminal waiting of the young men is social and not completely individualized. Here again, public space plays a part both as a space for sociality and sharing, but also for visibility. While visibility is not enough for the young men to feel recognized as citizen and adults and represents failure, it is a shared failure at odds with the individualization and invisibilization of neoliberalism. What the young are demanding is not, pace Mitchell, a right to public space. Even prior to the revolution the young made up the bulk of those that sat in cafés. Rather the cafés make the failure of the struggle for rights and dignity visible and this very visiblization becomes a form of contestation. Waiting becomes a visiblization of the neoliberal crisis of masculinity, and the fact that it is expressed in such shared and social forms mitigates the in- ternalizing of failure. It comes, instead, to signal a larger failure of the sociopolitical order. After all, if this failure to earn a respectable living, to become a man, is so widely shared, it becomes grounds for communitas, and thus for social bonds of the kind that goes counter to neoliberal atomization. This is not to say that this communitas is not experienced as personal failures, or that this does not come to reinforce the marginal positions of the young men. The waiting of the young men reveals a model of citizenship that is premised on a certain kind of employment, a certain kind of middle-class respectability, that is highly gendered, and that the young men are waiting for. At the same time, the very presence of young, unemployed men in their association with socially disruptive behavior as well as their potential for political mobilization is a direct, even if “unwittingly at times” (Zayani 2015:19), challenge to state authority. It could be argued that the public presence of youth is a disruption of the old citizenship model, with its assumed passive citizens, by making apparent its breakdown.

Encroachment of the Everyday There are dimensions of Mitchel’s public space as struggle (1995), as well as Fraser’s counter-publics, in young men’s presence in cafés. Yet, they take more

168 | Chapter Five of a quotidian and less expressive form, more in line with Asef Bayat’s influential work on “social nonmovements” in the Middle East. For Bayat, the use of public space by people generally excluded from them becomes ways of undermining an unjust order:

[F]or those urban subjects (such as the unemployed, house wives, and the “informal people”) who structurally lack institutional power of disruption (such as going on strike), the “street” becomes the ultimate arena to communicate discontent. (2008:34)

The situations that Bayat terms “politics of presence” or “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” are piecemeal, haphazard and leaderless expressions of frustration, and as such they are rarely self-conscious political actions.305 They open up and normalize new spaces, activities and practices that previously were considered illegal or transgressive. For Bayat, looking at public spaces and places is about exploring “unnoticed social practices that may in fact be a harbinger of significant social changes” (2008:26). This perspective brings a focus on “the silent, protracted, but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied, powerful, or the public, in order to survive and improve their lives” (2008:56). As such the everyday presence of young men in public spaces fits well into Bayat’s framework. Bayat specifically discusses youth behavior, and youth “cultures” more broadly, as forms of social nonmovements. He claims that new forms of youth identities emerge via everyday encroachments, “The identity of a youth non- movement is based not as much on collective doing as on collective being; and the forms of their expression are less collective protest than collective presence” (2008:58, italics in original). Bayat looks at the ways that the young in Egypt subvert the order through “accommodating innovation, a strategy that rede- fined and reinvented prevailing norms and traditional means to accommodate their youthful claims” (2018:134). Bayat calls this a “politics of fun.” He defines it as “ultimately about claiming or reclaiming youthfulness” (2008:116). I would argue that, in many ways, the young men in interior Tuinisia are

305 Bayat distinguishes these nonmovements from social movements through four dimensions; 1) they tend to be quiet, yet action driven rather than ideological. 2) They do not focus on explicit demands but they “practice what they claim”, 3) they form part of the routines of everyday life, rather than extraordinary political action, 4) it is not a small and dedicated group, but large, fragmented and uncoordinated (2010:18-26). All these dimensions, I believe, fit the young men’s presence in cafés.

Café Communitas | 169 attempting the opposite. Their “hanging out” in cafés can be said to be “youthful” in that it is dominated by young men. Yet, ultimately, their presence in public spaces reflects an inability to escape their youthfulness. Their youthfulness grows out of an incapacity to end their liminality and be reintegrated as full members of the community.306 What I find interesting is less the intentions or efficacy of these strategies of innovation, but rather how their presence in the public arises out of waiting. The “fun”, such as it is, of the young men in public spaces in Kasserine and Gafsa is less aimed to subversion and more at alleviating the condition of waiting and keeping boredom at bay. If there is subversion, it comes from the failure of these strategies of “fun.”307 The young men appear to have accepted the social goal of male adult breadwinner. It is in their inability to realize it that they come to act out their youthfulness.

Unbidden Revolutionaries Fundamentally, for Bayat, “The story of nonmovements is the story of agency in the times of constraints” (2008:28). While the young men experience their waiting as a loss of meaning, an inability to reproduce social norms, they are not without agency or options. Throughout the Tunisian south and interior regions, it is the idle young men in public spaces that again and again come to rebel. Mere presence, it seems, can turn into political action. Many of the young men in cafés that define themselves as apolitical admit to having participated in several protests. Like during the revolution, anger, boredom, frustration, and a rejection of the present dispensation all play a part in getting young men to participate. It is possible that the politics of presence, with its sociality of frustration and camaraderie of communitas also produces protests

306 I recognize that the desire for respectability and adulthood is more complex than I have sometimes made it out to be. Nonetheless, the sense that the move toward adulthood is more and more out of reach makes youthfulness experienced less as a choice or a self-conscious goal and more, perhaps, as a condition. 307 Unlike Bayat, I am cautious of using the term necessity as a way to describe what fuels these nonmovements. Bayat writes “these actors carry out their activities not as deliberate political acts; rather, they are driven by the force of necessity—the necessity to survive and improve life” (2008:58). Even ignoring the difficulties of defining necessity, can one claim that young men’s presence in cafés is “driven by the force of necessity”? As I have endeavored to show, I see their presence as driven by a multitude of factors and reducing it to necessity may obscure more than it illuminates. At the very least, Bayat appears to implicitly acknowledge that necessity should be understood very broadly when he discusses the politics of presence in terms of youthfulness and fun.

170 | Chapter Five and direct confrontations with authorities.308 Nevertheless, while the connection between presence and protests is worthy of further study, I claim that these public spaces should be understood as more than merely the timber for the activist fire. As Bayat writes:

[T]he transformative effect of nonmovements should not be judged merely by their eventual elevation into organized social movements. Nonmovements, on their own, can have significant transformative impact if they continue to operate in society. (2008:28)

I am less interested in cafés as sites of manufacturing confrontation and more interested in them as sites of failures. These failures, both social and individual, have their effects and political consequences. But these consequences are neither straightforward nor only reducible to activism. I agree, in part, with Bayat that “this type of quiet and gradual grassroots activism tends to contest many fundamental aspects of the state prerogatives, including the meaning of order, control of public space, of public and private goods, and the relevance of modernity” (2008:46). I think, however, that this contestation is fundamentally ambiguous and that it often comes to both reinforce and destabilize established patterns of state and citizen dynamics.309 The youth, I argue, should not be reduced to purposeful actors (rational or otherwise), nor understood as reproducing the dominant social norms. It is their inability to reproduce many established values and norms that set them apart, and their sometimes silently visible, sometimes audible demands, of the state to fulfill the promise of modernity. If the order is subverted, it appears almost acci- dental. They are thus what I term unbidden revolutionaries. The revolutions they enact may be barely discernible, quiet, slow and quotidian, or they may be sudden and violent and shake the system, and the world, for a time. They may push established social norms to their breaking point and engender new and more radical forms, or they may also come to reinforce a conservative renewal or authoritarian rebirth. The outcome of their disruptive presence remains unknown, yet whether the young men wish to or not, whether they act out of necessity or not, whether they intend to or not, their presence itself signals that change is afoot and functions as another marker of uncertainty for an already destabilized order.

308 It is also possible that cafés do the opposite, that they act as “safety valves”, as containers and restrainers of resentment. 309 Nor is there much direct confrontation involved, while authorities express concern over “youth” specifically young men, there is no attempt to remove them from cafés.

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GENDERED PUBLIC SPACES

Café Mixte: Private and Invisible If, as Arendt claims, without visibility one lacks the “right to have rights” (1958), then the most conspicuous group absent in this visible waiting is women. Young men, even in their perceived marginalization, through their mere presence inadvertently come to reinforce certain elements of what is a highly gendered public space. Tunisia is on the one hand often hailed as a positive outlier in the Arab World when it comes to women’s rights, on the other hand the implementation of these laws and their diffusion into social practices remains shaky (Grami 2008). This is true across the country, but particularly true in the poorer southern and interior regions, which are generally considered more socially conservative compared to the Sahel.310 There appear to be two important and connected aspects of women’s presence, or absence, in public spaces in both Gafsa and Kasserine. Their presence is socially accepted, but primarily in so far as they are always moving and engaged in productive, goal oriented, and concrete activities; such as moving from house to work, from school to home, or buying food and clothes. While men, particularly young and old, are rarely involved in anything specific.311 This could easily be conceptualized as a dynamic in which men are the inhabitants of public space and women its guests. This is the familiar gender model that equates men with the public and women with the private. Women, furthermore, to the degree that they take part in the leisurely activities of coffeehouses, are relegated to salons de thés, like Dar charif and Fontana in Gafsa, mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. In the big coastal cities, there are many café mixte, while places like Kasserine and Gafsa have seen an increase in the last few years, most of those cafés are qahwa sha’abia. The mixed coffeehouses are private in the double sense of the term. On the one hand, they are clearly demarcated spaces of money. They look different; expensive, alien, and imported. Their air of globalized commodification gives

310 Describing the interior and southern regions as more conservative than other parts of Tuni- sia is both common and somewhat problematic. In this context I refer only to gender dynamics as more conservative in relation to public space. 311 In a context where much of the political and cultural activism, along with business and informal networking, occur in coffee-places that traditionally women are not expected to frequent, this presents obvious barriers for women in the interior.

172 | Chapter Five them a decidedly “unlocal” flavor.312 Their very existence is a product of economic liberalization reforms of the 1990s. On the other hand, they are also private in the sense that the mixed coffeehouses are sequestered, transported, made invisible. Some of these cafés, like Dar charif, are modeled on old Arabic houses; another extension of the privacy of the home. They are closed off spaces, not visible in the same way as the sha’abi cafés, but spaces for privacy. There are, as Collins has shown, both legal and political-economic reasons for this clear distinction between more “popular” cafés and the newer mixed cafés:

The qahwa sha’abiya and salon de thé represent two formulations of the coffee drinking institution in the terms of divergent political and economic factors and arguably what could be considered a distinction between cooperative versus competitive market practices. On the one hand, the qahwa sha’abiya are held to policies that were designed at the height of Tunisia’s socialist era and operate as the anchor for the social. On the other, the salons de thé benefit from contemporary neoliberal competitive market practices including transnational investments. (2009:25)

It is the newer “privatized” cafés that young women have access to, but presence in such places is aimed at invisibility. It reinforces the association between public and maleness, as well as between privilege and privatization. The newer salon de thé represent at once market reforms, gender mixing and the secluded private, while the older cafés represent the old socialist-inflected model and the primacy of the male as the public. This distinction remains true in post-revolutionary Kasserine and Gafsa, as much as it did in Tunis of Ben Ali.

Symbolic Gender Tensions While the highly gendered dynamic of cafés persists, I would cautiously suggest that there might be some tension in the gendered logic of coffeehouses and public spaces more broadly, in the way that it is experienced by young men. On the one hand, the physical divide, the notion that women are hidden away from the male dominated public spaces is being continually reinforced. On the other hand, the presence of women in the more “western” coffeehouses which in their expensiveness and their “modern-ness”, are in some

312 In the context of her fieldwork in Cairo, de Koning writes that “upscale coffee shops and restaurants provide new public spaces that intimate First World pleasures and belonging” (2009:xxi). She also writes, “It speaks both to Egypt’s new liberal striving and to deep-seated desires for a First World existence” (2009:3).

Café Communitas | 173 sense translocal spaces of privilege in stark contrast with the local yet marginalized, somewhat suspect character of the sha’abi coffeehouses. The women who can afford, and are allowed, to attend these comparatively expensive spaces are all the more removed and thus for many young men represent another barrier and another dimension of waiting. The stipend of a few hundred dinars that the state provides many young men means that they can, on rare occasions, afford the relative luxuries of mixed cafés. This it is not enough, however, to remove the barrier that salon de thés represent – access to a “modern” gender mixed space is a privilege mediated by class and gender as well as space. Similarly, the same conservative gender logic where men are associated with the public and women with the private is also strained. In the semi-urban margins, the towns like Kasserine and Gafsa, neither fully urban nor fully rural, women are literally always on the move and young men are spectators. While in some sense the public spaces exist for young men, they are not the male flaneurs casually strolling the urban landscape at whim and observing without being observed. They are in a sense part of the space itself, they are objects, part of the unchanging landscape, while women are in some sense its subjects: always moving and buying. If women represent movement then young men represent waiting, immobility, and even stagnation. While I do not wish to push this argument too far, it is nonetheless an interesting reversal of sorts, of what gender scholars like Gillian Rose (1993) have discussed as the common association between women as waiting, as local and passive and men as global, free and active subjects. Zayzafoon writes about the pre- and post-independence discourse in Tunisia where in “the Tunisian woman is the embodiment of tradition, it is the Tunisian man who takes upon himself the active task of redeeming or regenerating the dead body of the nation into modernity” (2005:111). In this political imaginary, it is the prerogative of the male citizen to actively form the modern nation.313 Bondi & Davidson write of the place what men occupy as “a space of action and achievement, command and control” (2003:329). Instead, the young men’s cafés are spaces of inaction, even if it is not wholly passive. The young men are waiting, and through a lack of “command and control” experience their spaces as limiting and liminal. The women, old and young, are mobile and

313 Connections with men and action on the one hand, and women and passivity on the other is particularly common in relation to war. The “good woman”, according to the German sol- diers Theweleit studied merely “waited” as men did battle for the fatherland (1987).

174 | Chapter Five dynamic even as their mobility is heavily socially circumscribed and defined by its own liminality.314 This symbolic and experiential tension needs to be put in a context of where much of this male waiting, with its everyday consumption, is made possible through the “invisible” female labor, both by women working at home, but also the large number of women working in factories across the country. When I meet Fatima, a young woman that works as a librarian in Firyanah, close to Kasserine, she tells me she cannot sit in a public café but takes me to a sandwich shop and explains:

See all these men, sitting in cafés? All these brothers and father and uncles. All these men that don’t want to work. If it was not for their sisters and daughters, they would not even be able to afford a single coffee or cigarette. The women are off to the coast, working for 16 hours a day and send the money back to the men. And when the women come back home, their brothers and fathers curse them for wearing ‘bad’ clothes and beat them for wearing lipstick. The bars here are full of men drinking away the hard-earned money of women.

Fatima is not alone in expressing her frustration at the double burden of being excluded from public spaces and carrying a heavy financial responsibility for the family. Zahra is a 27-year-old woman from a small village outside Kasser- ine, “It’s not even on the map. We don’t even have internet,” she says. Zahra is studying design at the Kasserine Arts Academy:

I worked for seven years in the textile and chemical factories in Sousse and Tunis. It was mostly women like me, from the countryside. It was hard and I suffered physically. I did my baccalaureate at the same time, but I didn’t tell my family. I managed by myself, I studied in my free hours. I took a bus from Sousse to Kas- serine to do the exam. I arrive just before the exam, did it, and then went straight back to Sousse to work. My family was surprised when I told them I passed my baccalaureate. Studying is a privilege for me, something I had to fight for […] Women here, in the interior regions, work hard. The men do not. I worked for years to send money to my brother, who does nothing. He just wants to marry a foreigner and leave the country.315

314 As de Koning writes about Cairo “Unaccompanied young women, in contrast, had a liminal and ambiguous status as marginalized, and potentially illegitimate and disreputable, passersby (cf. Ghannam 2002). They were supposed to be on their way somewhere, have a clear destina- tion, and not linger for too long” (2007:137). 315 Like in the French system, baccalaureate is the national examination needed to qualify for higher education.

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While reliable data is hard to come by, at least part of the ability of young men to wait, to remain liminal, to return home for a prepared meal, is due to this often invisiblized labor of women.316 The young men wait because they can. The highly gendered understanding of citizenship is tied to the notion of the male breadwinner and in terms of men’s right of access to “real” and “dignified” work, i.e. stable employment that affords a socially respected position and allows for marriage. This means that the young men feel entitled, are perhaps even expected, to wait to become full citizens. No such expectations reside for women. Their labor need not be “dignified” or stable.317 This neoliberal paradox is that men, in their “yearning to labor”, are waiting. And in the meantime, the burden of labor often falls to young women; excluded from the “responsibility” of expected breadwinners. Cafés as public spaces then come to articulate a crisis of masculinity, they are visible signs of the failure of the breadwinner model, yet they also reinforce a conservative gendered public. I argue that when it comes to public space, the position of young men is ambiguous. The fact that it is enabled by the precarious labor of women only emphasizes this ambiguity of the young men´s position and the place of this space. Scholars like Bondi & Davidson emphasize the way that place becomes gendered in highly unequal ways:

The more men become involved in a particular place, the more respected that place becomes; and conversely, the more valued the place becomes, the more likely it is to become a ‘male preserve’[…]In contrast, the more servile and superficial business of ‘women’s space’ is likely to be trivialized, denigrated and domesticated, that is, excluded from the peculiarly defined ‘public’ sphere of influence and importance. (2003:329)

The young Tunisians, however, both are and are not men in the sense of privileged symbolic construction. Their presence does not automatically confer value to a place, even if it reinforces a gendered logic. Theirs is not the “serious

316 In sharp contrast to young men, in my encounters and discussions with young women across Tunisia, they rarely, if ever, complain about being bored. Schielke has similar experiences in Egypt (2015:33). To what degree it is due to the fact that they have less time to be bored, or the way that discussing boredom is highly gendered or my own social position (both as a man and outsider), I cannot say. 317 At the same time many women, young and old, express sympathy for the situation of young men. And would perhaps agree that it reflects a failure of the state. Just as the young men may express a sense of frustration and even shame over the difficult labor of their female siblings.

176 | Chapter Five business” of constructing a public discourse or an active creation of the modern nation. They are instead made to wait for its realization. Young men are “feminized” to the degree that they are made passive. Gender mediates mobility and immobility and the leisure of cafés. Yet seclusion into male-only, homosocial spaces, is no longer experienced by the young men only as a privilege but also an affliction. Waiting comes to both undermine the social order as well as notions of male economic responsibility, even as it reinforces it through privileging access to public space and underwriting the notion that citizens are men with access to dignified labor and public space.

Refuge for Men For Collins, cafés provide opportunities for a performance of masculinity without manhood. He treats manhood as the normative ideals that need to be realized in order to be seen as a respectable man, such as having a stable job, a house, a car and marriage. Collins writes, “In the course of conversations with Tunisian men, I have learned that the strictures of manhood are elemental: employment, housing, marriage and children” (2009:236). Masculinity for Collins is the everyday practices such as drinking alcohol, picking up women etc., which may often be at odds with attaining manhood.318 The implication appears to be that the often “problematic” aspects of young men’s behavior are due to this inability to realize manhood. What Collins terms performances of masculinity certainly persist in public spaces in Gafsa and Kasserine made manifest through boisterous behavior, excessive drinking and drugs, and occasional fights with authorities and each other; another dark side of waiting. Yet, I do not see cafés merely as training grounds for disruptive forms of masculinity, but also as forms of bracketing and contestations, if highly ambivalent ones. Collins sees sha’abi coffeehouses as a kind of refuge for men, as if manhood itself is under siege. And while it is true that such sentiments are sometimes expressed by older generations with such phrases as “it’s a place where men can be men” in Kasserine and Gafsa, I have not heard such sentiments from young men.319 For the young men spending time in cafés it is not expressed in terms of reclaiming a lost masculinity as much as simply a way of wasting

318 This tension between manhood and masculinity is not unlike the way that Migdal (2011) looks at the state through two lenses: the image on the one hand and the practices on the other that often undermine this image. 319 Not to say that such notions do not exist.

Café Communitas | 177 time. It is not a place where they “become men”, whether understood as masculinity or manhood, but rather where they are waiting for their inability to become men to pass. And yet, it is also this waiting that differentiates them in relation to gender. The young men, in their waiting to “become a man” are constituted as citizens-in-waiting. Women, while rarely waiting in the same public way, are not carriers of the same kind of potential citizenship. Many of the unemployed young men I have spoken to have indicated that one of the reasons they prefer to spend their times in cafés rather than be at home is to avoid confrontation with their parents, particularly their fathers, who tell them to get a job, any job, rather than stay at home. One young man in Gafsa said, “Our fathers’ generation believes that being unemployed is the greatest humiliation, and so they want us to work, even if it means working as a fruit-seller making 300 dinars a month, although we have a master’s degree in engineering.” This can be understood to show the gap between their own expectations and their fathers’; the increased educational opportunities of the young generation open up for a different set of middle-class expectations compared with previous generations. Furthermore, as Nixon writes on the rise of flexibilization of jobs available to marginalized young men in Brit- ain, “such jobs do not move young men out of poverty or provide economic independence” (2018:68). Together, this may signal a profound generational rupture between fathers and sons, which I discuss in chapter ten, where neither the fathers nor the paternal state can provide for the sons. This gap, perhaps, explains the informal rule of avoiding sitting in the same café as one’s father that Rami mentioned. It can be read as avoiding to make explicit what “everyone knows”; that the son, and perhaps the father too, have not lived up to their expected roles as men. It can also be understood as a nod to patriarchal authority.320 As Schielke writes about smoking in Egypt:

But it would be disrespectful to smoke in front of one’s father because smoking as a social practice is characterized by a sense of camaraderie, such as between friends, peers, colleagues, cousins, and the like. Smoking in front of one’s father is disrespectful in that the father is being treated as an equal (2015:58).

Avoiding the same cafés is what Schielke terms “a moral performance of respect towards patriarchal authority” (2015:59), and yet it is simultaneously reflecting a failure of that authority. If paternal authority, whether in the guise

320 The avoiding sitting in the same cafés also applies to, in many cases, older brothers.

178 | Chapter Five of the father or the state, had been able to provide the means of social respectability then avoidance would not have been necessary. The young men are part of the public but also separate from it. Cafés are sites of liminality that both reflect and produce communitas, where the youth recognize each other as equals and are visible to each other, in the Arendtian sense of public space. They are also counter-public spaces that are built as spaces for the excluded and marginal. The tension is that as public spaces they have also become the spaces for certain kinds of marginality. They are forms of counter-public cafés that both bracket differences and challenge authority however inadvertently, and yet simultaneously maintain their places as a form of hegemonic public space – particularly in relation to women. If the public demands being seen, and perhaps also being recognized as equals, the young men are equals only within their own liminal existence. The “fathers” come to represent the boundaries of that recognition and thus the limits of the publicness of the young men.

CONCLUSIONS While scholars disagree over what constitutes public spaces and why they are important, many nonetheless emphasize bracketing, a space where people can act as if they are equal, and/or dimensions of challenging and contestation either through visibility or within temporary confines of safer spaces. The popular cafés in Kasserine and Gafsa, I argue, are public spaces as sites of bracketing, visibility and contestation. And yet the bracketing is partial. The young men are both included and excluded from this wider understanding of the public. To the extent that they are included in the male dominated public, they are not equal to the ideal, their very presence is a manifestation of their failures as both citizens and men. Above all, the bracketing of inequalities occurs within the group, as young men stuck in liminality where their communitas is manifested and produced as a category apart. They are both visible and marginalized; seen but not recognized. Similarly, cafés represent the tension of activating and pacifying spaces, and young men are neither completely its subjects or objects. The young men’s own experience of waiting in cafés is one primarily of failure and disappointment both as individuals and as society and state more broadly. The old equation of qahwa sha’abia, as the popular, equal

Café Communitas | 179 and male remains true, but has also been undermined by emptying it of positive meaning, presence in cafés is associated with doing and being “nothing”; a negative, an absence. I have argued that sha’abi cafés are preeminent public spaces and the place of young men in them reveals the expectations that the young have of the state and their own citizenship, which is one where the state provides, above all, stable and dignified employment. However, this is a highly gendered form of citizenship; the situation where the young men can continue to demand and wait is largely facilitated by the labor of women. Waiting in public reinforces them as potential citizens, even if it simultaneously reinforces their exclusion from full citizenship. While the larger question of what part these public spaces can play in the transition process remains unanswered, I suggest their importance may lie less in their ability to constitute the public, however perceived, and more as vi- zibilization of failure. Collins argues that in pre-revolutionary Tunisia, cafés have taken the role of placeholders for the social. I claim that cafés have also come to signal the failure of the social order, even of this failure also reproduces a gendered understanding of citizenship. This failure is political by its nature and thus poses a challenge to authority. The young men become, in their visibility and liminality, unbidden revolutionaries of sorts. Their very presence is disruptive and contesting and, purposeful or not, may come to have profound effects on politics as well as established social norms and values. In relation to the overall objective of capturing experiences of democratization, it appears that despite the opening up of new spaces of expression, many young men are still experiencing the transition as waiting. Thus, a tension of public space in post-revolutionary Tunisia is that while it represents a new openness and ability to discuss more freely, it also reinforces the continuities between authoritarian and democratic Tunisia. At least part of the political imaginaries, the expectations of state-citizen dynamics, appear to have remained unaltered, even if they signal new challenges for the democratic transition.

6. Counter-Public Cafés

I want to provide the young with opportunities to think for themselves. To dream – Tawfiq

Girls can come here and smoke, we protect them – Samir

“Let’s go.” “We can’t.” “Why not?” “We’re waiting for Godot – Beckett

INTERLUDE 2: ACTIVE WAITING

During my first trip to Gafsa, in mid-October 2015, the one contact I had was a young man named Wadih. I had gotten his number through a young female activist in Kasserine who referred to him as a “Jordanian Amnesty International activist.” When I arrived in Gafsa, Wadih met me at the bus station. In his mid-20s, he has a Jordanian mother and Tunisian father. He studied law in Syria before and during the civil war, but was eventually forced to return to Tunisia around 2013. Wadih quickly developed into, not only an invaluable interlocutor, but also a good friend. His insider/outside status, having lived for many years in Jordan and Syria, has been particularly helpful from an ethnographic point of view. When I first met him, he was waiting for his Syrian law degree to be accepted by the Tu- nisian Board of Education. This was a long and, in the end, unsuccessful process. Throughout this wait, Wadih has been involved in multifarious activities, out of conviction, boredom and sometimes the small funds they might provide. He has been active in a number of civil society organizations particularly Amnesty International, one of the few internationally known NGOs with a strong presence in the interior regions. He is also an active member of the Workers' Party (Hizb al-'Ummāl); one of the leftist parties in the so-called Popular Front, the largest coalition of leftist parties

181 182 | Chapter Six in Tunisia. The Workers' Party has a history of strong presence in the interior and southern regions, particularly in the Gafsa Governorate and tends to be heavily involved in protests and demonstrations. He is constantly in touch with young activists across the interior and south, sharing information and organizing protests in Gafsa and beyond. During our first encounter Wadih told me “anywhere you go in Tunisia, just let me know and I will put you in contact with someone.”321 Together with a few friends, Wadih also runs his own civil society organization. It is not registered and receives no funding. Via this organization, he and his friends, in and around Gafsa, attempt to focus on the importance of books and reading, particularly for young kids, “I engage in politics out of necessity, but books are my real passion” Wadih will often say. He is at the intersection between civil society, social movements and party politics, between informal and formal politics. A clear example of how these categories tend to flow into each other. When I first arrived, Wadih took me straight to Metropolis. It’s an almost hidden, blink and you’ll miss it, café in central Gafsa. It’s the kind of hip and relaxed café that I associate with “alternative” scenes of more urban environments. Its interior is plastered with movie posters and graffiti, it has barrels for chairs and it plays lounge music, jazz and rap. The tables have photos of regulars and various events that the café has sponsored. It’s clear that thought has been put into everything. Near the en- trance there is a white board where people are free to write an inspiring quote. It’s lively and full of youth, men and women, smoking cigarettes, playing chess, discussing loudly, and practicing various musical instruments. There, Wadih introduced me to his friends. Yousef who studies at Gafsa University and was a leading member of the Students Union, the leftist student organization in Tunisia. Rahma, who studied media communication, paints and plays classic Arabic music. Reem, who is the regional coordinator of Amnesty and youth leader of the Workers' Party. Today they are planning an upcoming demonstration in a nearby town, and they are getting the younger kids in the café to help out with posters and signboards.

321 Incidentally it was, among other things, this prospect of a nation-wide network of activists that eventually shifted my focus towards youth.

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As I would come to understand, Wadih is a central figure in Metropolis. He has his hands on many projects. He goes there to hear the latest gossip, find people and plan events. For Wadih and his friends, who spend much of their days in the Metropolis, it functions as a workplace of sorts. He and his friends meet daily, exchange experiences, show each other videos and make plans for upcoming actions.

INTRODUCTION This chapter continues the investigation into the significance of cafés as important forms of public spaces. It should be clear by now that I do not treat the cafés of Kasserine and Gafsa as the bourgeois public sphere of Habermas’s communicative ideal. I do not attempt to force his normative ideal onto the landscape of Tunisia’s demoralized youth. If such an ideal sphere ever existed, it looked very different from the rough and tumble spaces found in interior Tunisia where the young waste away their days. I do, however, treat cafés as important forms of public spaces. The notion that cafés are more than simply places for youth to waste away their time, but also potentially activating spaces that form part of a growing public, is most clearly seen through the new kinds of cafés that are opening up in Kasserine and Gafsa following the revolution, what I term youth-oriented counter-public cafés. These places are, I argue, kinds of subaltern counter-public spaces as Fraser understands them, “they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdis- courses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (1990:35). This chapter argues that they represent new aspects of post-revolutionary interior Tunisia. They are informal spaces started by and for activists, loosely defined, with both cultural and political dimensions. They are important as spaces that turn waiting into something that is experienced as more meaningful. They are “prefigurative spaces” (Polletta 1999) where more horizontal social and gender roles play themselves out. Yet, the price of these more inclusive spaces becomes other forms of exclusion as well as invisibility from the larger public. The cafés highlight the tension of waiting as at once passive and active, as at once opening up for new ways of being and reinforcing old ones.

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I also argue that the very aesthetics of these places sets them apart and plays an important role in their social function. I will therefore describe in detail how the places look in order to show that the form of these spaces is important in its own right. These spaces come to enact and visualize desires for an urban, open and more gender-equal Tunisia.

EVERYDAY REVOLUTIONS

A Dream, Not a Café There are two counter-public cafés in Gafsa. The oldest is the above described Metropolis. It was opened by Walid, a former geology student, in 2013. Walid says, “I built this place myself, with the help of my friends and brothers. I wanted the interior to reflect a new Tunisia and a new Gafsa, one of possibilities.” The other similar café in Gafsa is called Space. At Space, the focus is on culture. Work by local artists is exhibited in the café, it has a small library and a stage in the back where they have regular events such as open mic night, theatre and karaoke. Besides the art and books the inside is more bare-boned than Metropolis – its walls white and simple. It attracts many of the same people as Metropolis and is often filled with school kids, university students and the unemployed youth, often practicing theatre or music in the back. It was started by the former director of Gafsa Theatre Festival in 2015, Tawfik. For all intents and purpose, it is a cultural center; except it receives no support from the state and everything is paid for by the owner himself. Tawfik explains:

Even if you manage to get money from the government, if it doesn’t all disappear into someone’s pockets, it always has strings attached. There is always an agenda and restrictions on what we can do. I want the young here to be free, to do what they want. That’s true culture.

Kasserine has one counter public café; the Andes. It is centrally located, but inconspicuous from the outside. Inside it is filled with guitars, books, pictures of Latin American revolutionaries and a computer where people are free to play music or movies. It was started by a married couple Ali and Aziza in 2015. Ali tells me:

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My wife and I built this ourselves. Everything here was done by us, it took us two years to build. This is not [just] a café, this is my dream. Since I was a kid, I had dreamed about Latin America, its culture and way of life. I dreamed of opening an open space with the relaxed and easy-going attitudes of Latin America, particularly the indigenous population. People think they are backwards but they are happier than we modern people are here in Kasserine.

He shows me an old book on the Andean mountains, “I used to look at the pictures and dream of opening a place like this: even the colors are taken from the book.” These cafés stand out from both salon de thé and sha’abi cafés in their aims of being more than simply places of leisure, as well as their more personalized and urban aesthetics. They are not sha’abi cafés, so their prices are not set by the government, but they are also not as expensive as many salon de thés.322

Waiting for Godot All three cafés were started between 2013 and 2015. This is no coincidence. They were started in the context of a dwindling of revolutionary enthusiasm and an increased frustration with the transition process, and reflect a desire to “institutionalize” the socially creative forces still at play. They represent both a need for inclusion, as well as exclusion. Walid, owner of Metropolitan, tells me:

My aim was to create an intellectual space. A place where youth could come and read, think, and discuss politics and culture in an open and trusting way. This we have achieved. The larger aim is to create a Metropolitan generation, a group of culturally and politically conscious people. This has been harder. The youth no longer have ambitions or goals. It was easier after the revolution: then everyone wanted to talk politics, but now they have lost hope. The political parties are just looking out for themselves. And if people lose hope in politics then they will also lose hope in culture. They will just want to escape. This is what has happened now.

For Walid, there is a clear connection between the failure of politics, disappointment and passivity. Tawfiq the owner of Space similarly sees the lack of hope as a central problem facing the young, “The main issue in Tunisia, and

322 In Metropolis and Andes a coffee is one dinar, and in Space one and a half. That is twice the price of the state regulated qawha shaabia, but half of the salon de thés.

186 | Chapter Six particularly the regions here, is not lack of jobs and corruption, even though of course these are issues, but that the youth have no dreams. I want to provide them with opportunities to think for themselves. To dream.” The owners Ali and Aziza, like those of Metropolis and Space, have consciously created the café with the purpose of social engagement and change, “There is so much negativity everywhere. We wanted to make a space for the young people that are doing good. We want to create something positive in all the negative.” While all the owners have political backgrounds and have been active in political parties, they stress that they have no wish to impose their particular political ideals on their customers. In all three cafés, the owners see their places as responding to social and political failures. Tawfik explains:

Tawfik: The problem is in our system of education, its processes, and mechanisms. It doesn’t teach the kids to dream, to be creative or to think for themselves, but just to consume. Even the universities just churn out mediocre students, particularly in these parts. There is no critical thinking; they learn only to listen to authority. The young here proclaim, “I am Muslim. I am Tunisian” When you ask them why? What does that mean? They don’t know, they don’t think, they just accept what they have been told. The youth are just like the play Waiting for Godot. What are they waiting for? No one knows, least of all them. Karim: And can you solve this with culture? Tawfik: It’s ultimately a project for the state, we can only do a small part, not change much. But we have to do something.323

While the new cafés are a symptom of the wish for the young to escape their everyday marginality, the owners also want them to be something more, to be spaces that provide opportunities and training in new ways of thinking and being.

Activist Spaces By calling these spaces counter-public cafés, I signal their connection to what Nancy Fraser terms subaltern counter-publics (1990). Fraser understands these as spaces in which marginalized groups are able to understand and articulate their identities and demands against a larger public sphere that may often undermine their claims and existence:

323 Tawfiq claims that the youth do not know why they wait. I would argue that many young men themselves are a good deal more certain. As I have discussed previously, much of it is about waiting for stable and dignified employment. Whether it is “worth” waiting for is another matter.

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Subaltern counter-publics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics. (1990:82)

Rather than “bracketing”, it is public space as a place for challenging and “contesting” authority that is central for Fraser. There are certainly dimensions of contestation in the cafés. These cafés are fulcrums in a web of inter- connected spaces, relations and movements; they are offices of activism. As I described in the beginning of the chapter, for those like Wadih with a conscious political agenda, these spaces “function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (Fraser, 1990:82). These cafés are important in the way they function as incubators for activists. Yet even for Wadih, and those like him, these places are also a way of passing the time, part of their larger existence defined by waiting, and seeking to turn waiting into something meaningful. These cafés attract many politically active youths like Wadih, but they are also more general gathering places for young men and women. Some like Khaled, 26 and unemployed, had their hopes raised by the revolution, hopes that have now soured, “Why would I get politically involved? I don’t trust our politicians. They are all corrupt.” Khaled continues, however, to come to Me- tropolis and Space in his free time, “I like it here, people are more interesting [than in other cafés]. Although we don’t have much to talk about, we try and keep things less superficial. It’s not just drinks and football.” For Khaled, places like Metropolis are important because they offer a break from the tedium of everyday life. Some like Hamza, a former literature student in Monastir, come to hang out, play music and plan cultural events, “I used to be a member of the Workers' Party, but I’m not interested in politics anymore. I just want to focus on culture. People are culturally and socially backwards here and we need to change the mentality before politics can do anything.” Hamza followed a path that seems common: he dabbled in organized politics after the revolution, but found it wanting and now focuses on culture. Despite his disappointment of politics in post-revolutionary Tunisia, in these cafés he finds other avenues of expression, through theatre and music. For others like Sami, a slam artist and regular at Andes, any easy distinction between politics and culture is problematic, “We don’t want to be political, but if you want to do or talk about art, you end up with politics. That is life

188 | Chapter Six here, our society and state is such. There are no cultural spaces in Kasserine, so we have to fight to get them. That’s politics.” The line between activist and non-activist is ever blurry. Even in these cafés many of the youth resist the label activist or political. Yet regardless of how the young label themselves, in a context in which few political actors have given a platform to the youth, and often treat them as a threat, creating spaces by and for youth is important in itself. These cafés, by their very existence, put the agency, needs and demands of youth in the center, regardless of their content. These counter-public cafés can be construed as “free spaces” in the way that Evans and Boyte’s understand it:

[W]hat we call free spaces, are the environments in which people are able to learn a new self-respect, a deeper and more assertive group identity, public skills, and values of cooperation and civic virtue. Put simply, free spaces are settings between private lives and large scale institutions where ordinary citizens can act with dignity, independence and vision. (1995:31)

As free spaces, these cafés offer both an escape from the travails of everyday life, as well as opportunities for self-improvement and exchanges. Hiba, a young woman puts it this way: “Sometimes when I’m here I forget that I am in Gafsa.” These counter-public cafés are in a sense escapes from time and space, escape from of the marginality of their position and Gafsa and Kasser- ine in general. The very names, Andes and Metropolis, evoke the far away and urban. These spaces are also more “real” as their reflection of an urban aesthetic and avowed cultural and political nature makes them spaces in which “something” happens. As an environment that signals urban cool in contrast to the provinciality of its surroundings, it reflects and reinforces the sense that reality is happening “somewhere else.” In counter-public spaces the void of the everyday life for the “useless” youth is pushed back and their space and time shift. They are somewhere else and their temporal ennui is kept at bay; if only for a moment. In Tunisia, as elsewhere, class is mediated by space. Gafsa and Kasserine constitute marked spaces that are part of the “other Tunisia”: forgotten, backward and dangerous. These activist cafés are in a sense trans-local spaces, mediating a different kind of place beyond the margins. Unlike the expensive salon de thé cropping up everywhere across Tunisia that signal a similar allure of the desired modern, the counter-public cafés reflect an aesthetic were “au- thenticity” is valued over commerciality. It is the bohemian side of the privatization of cafés. It is not only price and activism that sets them apart, but also

Counter-Public Cafés | 189 gender-dynamics. Salon de thé are explicitly places for genders to mix, although that mixing also conforms to more rigid notions of courtship and dating. In the counter-public cafés, young men and women enact less gendered roles. It is a space where women are also smoking, playing cards, talking loudly. It follows both the more informal dynamics of the sha’abi cafés as well as another kind of notion of what constitutes modernity and cosmopolitanism. If sha’abi cafés are representations of older political imaginaries, premised on a male bracketing of differences, these new cafés are expressions of something else; desires and expectations that could not be visualized under the authoritarian regime. They signal desires, at least for some of the young, for a more progressive, vaguely leftist, Tunisia, but also a more open, urban and globalized one. They signal what the revolution was supposed, but failed, to realize.

Prefiguring Change The cafés are not only visualizations of expectations, they also enact and prefigure other ways of being. Although the reality rarely plays out the expectations and ideals of the café owners, these are still spaces in which the youth talk, discuss and prepare cultural and political events. A young man tells me, when I first arrived in Metropolis, “You can sit down anywhere and just talk, even if you don’t know anyone here. This is a space for exchange and communication. A safe space.” Words like safe, relaxed, comfortable, familiar, trusting, free are common when people talk about this and the other cafés like it. One thing this signals is an attempt to realize more relaxed mixing of genders. In their vision of more horizontal socialization, particularly across genders, these cafés are what Polletta calls prefigurative forms of free space:

[F]ormed in order to prefigure the society the movement is seeking to build by modeling relationships that differ from those characterizing mainstream society. Often that means developing relations characterized by symmetry, that is, reci- procity in power, influence, and attention. (1999:11)

These prefigurative spaces demarcate what these youths perceive as threats. They are defined in opposition to certain groups, ideas and practice; against the state, particularly the law enforcement; against a judging society; against certain forms of male loitering and posturing. These are ideally places in

190 | Chapter Six which women are made to feel welcome, where a different kind of gender dynamics plays itself out. These cafés arose out of a kind of failure or disappointment in the post- revolutionary context, and yet they can be understood as revolution through other means. Combining an emphasis on free spaces and an anarchist view of action as instituting new forms of being in the world (Graeber 2009), these cafés can be understood as spaces that are enacting a certain kind of continuation of the revolution though everyday life. Here waiting becomes something else, these spaces transform them into an already arrived moment. The hoped- for future is now, in all its imperfections, the young come to enact a present that is different from the outside. The importance of spaces in which waiting can be transformed should not be underestimated. Marone (2015) and Lamloum (2016) both convincingly point to the ability of radical Islamist groups, such as Ansar al Sharia (AST), to mobilize young men by providing them with purpose and meaning. These radical organizations are able to turn the young men’s waiting, hanging out in neighborhoods, into something else: they become the moral guardians of their community. The everyday presence of young men in these communities, previously a symptom of their marginalization, is transformed. Public space is an important dimension since radical Islamists are particularly effective at es- tablish a link between themselves and houmas, traditional Tunisian neighborhoods:

The daily practices of social life in the neighbourhoods, which generally are male- dominated and gender segregated spaces, made it easier for these young activists to accept AST’s ideological framework. The AST movement sublimates the strong masculine relationships typical of those social spaces, and charges them with further spiritual value[..] Such identification with a ‘special group’ of elected individuals allowed these young men to finally overcome the enormous social complex they suffer from vis-a`-vis the bourgeoisie, which had treated them as backwards and failed men. (Merone 2015:85-6)

By imbedding themselves in established spaces and reformulating the previous meaningless waiting of the youth into meaningful religious community, Salafist groups succeed where the state and political parties have failed. Coun- ter-public cafés perform similar functions, of turning failure into something meaningful. In counter-public cafés, this is done by subverting notions of the masculine social spaces rather than amplifying them. Even if, as I show below,

Counter-Public Cafés | 191 this subversion is only partial. Furthermore, even in these counter-public ca- fés, Godot still lingers with his absence, for the outside remains “stuck” and immobile. The prices and the limits of these counter-spaces is that outside the confines of the cafés, the failures of the state, the economy and the revolution continue.

EXCLUSIONS

Safe Spaces There are dimensions of the “claimed spaces” that Mitchell considers central for public spaces (1995) in these cafés. The cafés are understood by both owners and many customers to be self-conscious efforts to create spaces to contest and correct social injustices. Yet, unlike in Mitchell’s, and by extension Ar- endt’s, emphasis on claimed spaces as being visible, here it is the ability not to be seen that is important. Fraser points out the “dual character” of counter-publics; as spaces of both activism and “withdrawal and regroupment” (1996:125). As spaces of withdrawal the cafés contain elements of both exclusion and bracketing. These new cafés are centers of organization, and they are places in which a different kind of urbanity and social dynamics is played out, in particular when it comes to gender. They are spaces in which the owners and the young have consciously attempted to create a safe space for young women and developed strategies for getting in the “right” clientele. Ali of Andes in Kasserine expressed it in the following terms, “I only allow people that work for the future. People that are doing good.” His wife Aziza discusses how their selecting process works similarly:

We don’t let in just anyone. If they are not open people, if we don’t feel relaxed with them and they insist on coming in, we say that the café is closing and everyone leaves their stuff and goes out and then comes back again after three minutes. We are all like a family here, all the kids here know how to make their own coffee and have the keys and there has never happened anything. People come here to study, relax and do political and cultural activities.

The space in the Andes is physically smaller, and its customers more socially vulnerable, than the two cafés in Gafsa. Many of the young in Kasserine talk

192 | Chapter Six about a sense of siege. One youth said, expressing what appears to be a common sentiment, said:

We are trapped here, by the mountains, by the police, by the state. We are harassed in our own town, and when we go to Tunis, walk in Avenue Bourguiba we get stopped by the police, asked for ID, and when they see we are from Kasserine, they tell us, “What they hell are you doing here? Go back to your hellhole of a town.”

Unlike the cafés in Gafsa, in Andes the door is generally locked and one needs to knock before someone opens. This is to prepare people in case it is the police or other unwanted attention. The work of keeping Andes a positive and safe space requires constant vigilance against external threats, it requires keeping people out. In order to enact the “proper” notions of an inclusive public they must exclude those that cannot live up to its ideal. The owners and core activists are forced to engage in constant control over these spaces to keep unwanted elements out, mostly young men “that don't have the right mentality”, but also conservative elements of society as well as the police, who are still perceived as the blunt and often violent instrument of the state. The Andes is also popular among couples, even those in their mid-thirties, away from prying eyes and is perhaps the only place in Kasserine where one can see women smoke cigarettes—a rare sight even in many parts of Tunis. This smoking together signals a form of inclusion into the communitas of youth, now shorn of some of its most obvious gendered dimensions. It also signals a more urbane attitude. For these young women to feel comfortable enough to engage in acts that are heavily ostracized, such as smoking cigarettes, requires that the gaze of society be physically kept out. Sami, a regular in Andes, says:

Kasserine is one of the most conservative governorates in the country. It’s hard especially for women and different kinds of youth to have spaces for creative expressions. Andes is one of the only places where we feel relaxed. Girls can come here and smoke because we protect them. The door is locked, not everyone can come in. If the police come, we don’t let them in. We know our rights.

An inclusive social atmosphere still demands male gatekeepers. This exclusion dimension exists in the counter-public cafés in Gafsa as well, but functions more subtly. There are no locked doors in Gafsa, and both

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Metropolis and Space arrange cultural events with much greater frequency, often going outside of their spaces to organize these events. Gafsa, with its larger size and long history of urban life has a somewhat more relaxed attitude towards women in cafés than Kasserine. Yet even in Gafsa, these cafés are less noticeable and more hidden than other kinds of cafés, tucked away on side streets with no way to see inside. Even here women smoke openly in a way they are unable to do in other public spaces. A young woman put it this way, “I feel safe and relaxed here, everyone knows each other, no one judges you.” Walid, the owner of Metropolis, is aware of the dilemma of clientele: “There are three categories of people that come here: those that do culture or politics, those that just hang out, and those that look for girls or boys. All are welcome, but we sometimes have to explain how things work here. We want people to be comfortable.” Achraf who works in Metropolis put it like this, “We don’t have to force anyone, they understand that they are not welcome. We know ninety percent of people that come here, they are like family.” “And if a stranger comes in?” I ask. “Then in time he will become family too” he responds. Despite this however, the owner Walid has been discussing the idea of turning the café into a kind of closed club, with membership cards. When asked about the dilemma of getting the right people in Aziza, the owner of Andes, responds with recounting an event:

Once a young man came in to the café and sat down, started looking around at our phones, at our computers. Eventually the café became empty and me and my husband had an errand to run so we left him in the café, and we told him “here is the key and we will be back in a bit.” He was so surprised. When we came back he was still there and hadn’t touched anything. He told us “How could you trust a stranger. Don’t you know I’m the most famous thief in Kasserine?” Now he is our friend. If someone we know gets something stolen somewhere in town, we call him, and he brings it back. Our motto here is: if you treat people well they will respond in kind.

The story is interesting in the way it frames the space of Andes in relation to the rest of society as a space of trust, as a gentle family, one in which the youths, through a kind of informal education, learn to enact a different set of social norms. The term “we are like a family” used by owners and clientele in all three places is a revealing statement. Metropolis even has a sign in Arabic calligraphy that says “The World is a Family.” The constant association between these spaces and family signals that these cafés function as correctives

194 | Chapter Six to the traditional family and the state/father that have failed in their task of providing the right role models. As discussed in chapter four, the Tunisian state and leader used the sym- bolism of the family as analogous to that of the nation. This often signals a highly (neo)patriarchal order: with the state/leader as a father-figure that demands obedience. Yet, in the face of the absent father/state another family comes to take its place. Here “family” comes to signal something else, a reimaging of the familial sphere as one of more horizontal dynamics, particularly between genders. It signals that the biological family has failed, and in its place comes the communitas of the marginalized. Even if, ultimately this new family is merely a temporary refuge. In these spaces the difference between public and private, so central for Habermas and Arendt, has broken down. This is an indication that the ideal is not, pace Habermas, one of rational communication, nor, pace Arendt, necessarily a space for visibility. Rather a kind of safe space where one is free to engage in meaningful activities. A space where one is protected from some of the threatening dynamics of larger society even as one is gently guided towards another way of being. This raises issues of the tension between spaces as safe as opposed to open. A family is by definition exclusionary: not everyone can become family. If, as gender scholars often argue “the family has been a prime site for the reproduction of patriarchal relations” (Poletta 1999:6), in the counter-public cafés the model is reversed: this “family”, the café, is marked as the space for less rigid gender dynamics in contrast to the family proper, state and wider society. The price, however, is a locked door.

Public or Private All three places talk of being open spaces. The seeming contradiction is that in order to be open they need to exclude some categories of people. This reinforces the balancing act of remaining open spaces for change and innovation and at the same time keeping open only for the “right kind of people.” Critics of the public sphere have long pointed out that exclusion has been written into its DNA from its very inception:

Greek agora, Roman forums, and eventually American parks, commons, market- places, and squares were never simply places of free, unmediated interaction, however; they were just as often places of exclusion (Fraser 1990; Hartley 1992). The

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public that met in these spaces was carefully selected and homogenous in compo- sition. It consisted of those with power, standing, and respectability. (Mitchell 1995:116)

However, in this case, of course, the counter-public cafés in interior Tunisia are not primarily for those with “power, standing and respectability” but rather the opposite. They are subaltern counter public spaces for the marginalized voices; although they also function on the basis of exclusion. While for some public space scholars there is a clear difference between private and public space in that the private is defined by exclusion and the public by inclusion. For Mitchell & Staehli, privately owned spaces cannot be public, rather they are “pseudo-private spaces”, for “property rights can be defined as a right to exclude” (2006:148). This understanding of public spaces as those that are publicly owned would reduce public space in Gafsa and Kas- serine to parks. Both Gafsa and Kasserine have small parks in the center of town, yet women, particularly young women, do not frequent them. While there are no legal reasons to exclude women from parks, the force of social pressure is such that men dominate them. Given their central place in the social life of Tunisians, rather than consider cafés as pseudo-private spaces, it makes more sense to regard them as public spaces proper. For Arendt it was not ownership but public visibility that defined the public space. From an Arendtian perspective, the “pseudo-private” sha’abi cafés may be considered public in all their presence and visibility, but not the newer sequestered salon de thé and particularly not the intentionally hidden counter-public cafés. Nonetheless, I suggest that both exclusion and inclusion form important parts of public spaces and that a free space without exclusion, legally or otherwise, is hard if not impossible to imagine. This distinction is not just a question of terminology. While discussions on public space are often focused on the negative dimensions of exclusion, there is also another side. As geographer Ted Kilian writes, “Without the ability to exclude, ability to limit contact, without boundaries, one is at the mercy of the power of others” (1998:125). In the context of interior Tunisia, exclusion is seen as an important strategy in order to safeguard the possibility of positive change, and particularly of including young women as something other than objects of dating or marriage prospects. By extension one could argue that invisibility could also be part of the public. While for Arendt, Mitchell & Staehli, being seen is a central aspect of public spaces, for vulnerable groups it is also the case that not being seen is an important dimension to a free and safe public space. I do not argue that

196 | Chapter Six the importance of being seen should be dismissed. In the case of interior Tu- nisia, the closed character of the counter public cafés means that the visible spaces remain male only, that only men are seen, that a more conservative gender dynamic is reinforced. Particularly in Kasserine, it is not unusual to hear youth complain about the exclusionary character of Andes. An activist and poet in Kasserine says, “I’m against places like Andes, against the idea that you can run away from society, and talk about culture in isolation. Go out into the streets, talk to people, speak out but don’t hide.” Clearly there is a trade-off, between being externally open and internally safe. Kilian suggests that the choice is a stark one, “A subaltern counter-public can either engage with “the public at large”, hence facing the power relations therein, or remain an isolated group, perhaps as a utopian community” (1998:122). Houssam, a young musician that often hangs out in Andes responds to the criticismc of isolationism: “We have to first change ourselves in order to change anything else.” This is the dialectics of public space mentioned by Fraser: the voiceless first need to find their voice in order to then speak up. Their immediate inclusion into a larger public would only make them invisible, neither free nor safe. Yet at some point, they need to “return” to the larger public sphere to stake a claim for it, and through visibility and struggle to expand and change the public discourse. In part, these cafés can be understood as fulfilling the need for exclusive public spaces in order to struggle for inclusion in the larger, more hostile, public sphere of the nation. Nevertheless, it is not clear in the case of interior Tunisia whether these counter-publics prefigure wider social changes, represent a vanguard, are simply out of tune with the dominant trends or are merely spaces of escape.

Between Citizenships If the qahwa sha’abia represent a remnant of the male-only socialism of early Bourguiba and the salon de thé represent the market-oriented policies of Ben Ali and its consequences of gender-mixing and growing class inequality, then do these counter-public cafés represent a new dimension of democratic Tuni- sia? Certainly, their very existence is a direct product of the new freedom afforded after the revolution. They are a refuge for the young that are seeking new forms of sociality and politics beyond the traditional homosocial camaraderie of qawha sha’abi and expensive and regimented dating of salon de thés.

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Yet, they contain elements of both types of older cafés, which have lost none of their relevance, as equalizers of the social (popular cafés) as well as spaces in which genders can mix (salon de thé). Counter-public cafés are also popular with couples, although unlike salon de thé, they do not offer privacy but a strong social character and visibility similar to the qahwa sha’abi, at least within the confines of its four walls. As such they are expressions of the post- revolutionary expectations of the young: more equal spaces that provide them with opportunities and activities. This puts their agency in the center, and lets them renegotiate the narrow confines of societal masculinity. If, following Za- yani, citizenship can be understood as everyday “dispositions and practice”(2015:18) then these counter-public cafés point towards renegotiation and reconstruction of citizenship along more dynamic and gender-equal lines. The young come to imagine their role as something else, beyond passive consumption, where the youth take matters into their own hands, even if its main mode remains a form of waiting. The cafés have afforded some young women access to this “privileged” mode of being. They too can “wait.” In fact, they too are now made to wait. The counter-public cafés, while overtly political, can also be read as a further strengthening of the market-driven logic of the café mixte. They serve as private cafés that are less a space of shared and visible communitas, but become spaces for distinction and separation, where the ability to pay and the right attitude become markers of merit. These new cafés are then to some degree a corrective to the older forms of public spaces, but the price is isolation. They are a new aspect of peripheral areas of transitional Tunisia, but also reinforce the continuities as they make apparent that outside the safe confines of these few spaces little has changed. Furthermore, as was shown in the example of Rami at the beginning of the previous chapter, while counter-cafés present alternatives to the older types of cafés, they are not replacing them. Young men can and do move between all three kinds of cafés, often within the space of a single day. Counter-public cafés exist precisely because the state and society have not provided for the needs of the young. They are both a consequence of that failure and an attempt to mitigate it. On one level, by providing an arena for change, these cafés work to undermine the current order; on another level, they may come to reinforce it as spaces in which the waiting becomes more bearable. As places of almost-there, they contain their own sense of liminality, of citizenship-in-waiting.

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CONCLUSIONS This chapter, and the chapter preceding it, have attempted to make the case that space and time are crucial dimensions in understanding how the democratic transition has come to be experienced. That public space and the waiting that happens therein reflect larger expectations of state and citizenship. Cafés are central dimensions of public space in interior Tunisia, particularly important spaces for the young and unemployed men who have little else to occupy their time with. Cafés are public expressions of the waiting of young men. The previous chapter argued that this waiting and public presence can be seen as a call for a return to an older state-citizen model; with a state that provides for both work and leisure. It can be read as a rejection of the neoliberal policies of the last few decades. This waiting can also be perceived as a challenge to the democratization process by constructing citizenship in passive terms. Yet, this chapter and the previous one argued that the young men in cafés are not just passive but come to both challenge and reproduce the social and political status quo. This chapter has shown that democratization entails new forms of public spaces, new forms of waiting and new experiences. I have argued that what I have termed counter-public cafés are clear physical manifestations that “something” has changed since the revolution. They represent continuations of waiting and a disruption of it. They are important as spaces in which the youth can turn waiting into something meaningful and can find a voice in a context that has provided few opportunities for youth as an independent group, unmediated by larger power dynamics. In a context where the state and political parties are seen as having failed to provide both materially and give meaning for the young men, and radical Islamists have been better able to mobilize space, these new cafés become particularly important as sites of meaning-making. They are also a space in which new gender-roles are played out; a broadening of the spaces of communitas that now include women, as well as new forms of social engagement. They are a kind of revolution through other means, through the everyday. How effective these spaces are in enacting new forms of state-citizen dynamic remains to be seen. The bracketing of one sort of inequality gives rise to other sorts of exclusions, less based on money or gender but on the right kind of attitude. Furthermore, the flip side of separation is isolation and ob- scurity.

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While the concepts of free spaces and subaltern counter-publics capture important dimensions of these activist cafés, there are certain ambiguities and dimensions to these spaces that are missing in these concepts. These cafés have clear political and cultural dimensions, as sites of discussion, debate and mobilization. At the same time, like the other cafés in interior Tunisia, they are spaces in which unemployed youth spend their time in the perceived absence of other credible options. Politics and culture are, in a sense, simply other forms of waiting.

7. Entrepreneurs of Desperation

“Nec spe, nec mutu” (Neither hope nor fear) – Caravaggio

We may live in the jungle but that doesn't mean we have to live like animals – Sari

It is we who are passing when we say time passes – Henri Bergson

INTRODUCTION This chapter follows five young men over a period of four years. I believe these “biographical” accounts can serve as important additions to other, more the- matically driven, chapters. This chapter explores more fully the varieties of experiences of the young men in the margins during periods of transition, and the kinds of understandings, stakes, dreams and practices that emerge in their wake. This is done in order to better situate the crises of political imaginaries discussed in the last three chapters of the thesis. In previous chapters I have discussed how the state-building process has removed individuals from their social ties in the promise of state-led modernity, but has increasingly failed to deliver. Thus, young men in the margins live under “the shadow of the state”, a condition that entails their postponement of adulthood; of respectable labor, marriage and starting a family. Even though characterized by waiting, none of the young men are passive, in any sense of the word, even if their actions may also come to reinforce their marginalization. All face major obstacles towards the realization of a decent and “modern” life. Escape is the dream of many, while marginality, unemployment, or informality is the burden of most. In their precarious existence, oscillating between various states of unemployment and semi-employment, between legal and illegal labor, the young

201 202 | Chapter Seven men represent the implications of the neoliberal condition par excellence. Yet, the young men have not internalized their condition, but understand it as a social and state failure. They do not primarily blame themselves for their economic precariousness but continue to expect the state to provide. This, holding the state to account, can be considered their resistance against both the failure and success of this model of governance. However, I wish to be cautious in the way I use terms like rejection or resistance and to show that neither resistance nor compliance are unambiguous. Furthermore, while many of the young men are critical of the democratic transition, they are clear in the way that the democratic processes are conditioned by socio-economic realities.

POET OF DESPAIR The young men of Tunisia’s interior wait for what they understand is their due. While they wait, their day-to-day survival often depends on the social bonds they form with other young men. Their lives are defined by both the necessity of flexibility and that they are deeply embedded in the local. Sari is a young man in his early 20s, who lives in a so-called “popular” (sha’abi) area of Kasserine. It is an informal housing area composed of lower- income families. He lives with his parents and his two younger siblings. His father is unemployed and his mother occasionally sells vegetables from her extended family’s farm.

Sari: My relatives have been in this region for generations since our tribe the fa- rashish came here. My grandfather was a shepherd and collected pine nuts. He was a fallegha that fought against the French. My father settled in the town and worked as a construction worker. My father and grandfather both married many times, as many times as money allowed. Here, before and during colonialism, girls were married off when they were young, because a family didn’t want the burden of daughters. My mother’s grandmother is still alive, since she and her mother married so young. Karim: How old is your mother? S: I don’t know; I never asked. She reads and writes, but at a very basic level. As soon as the men made some money, they divorced and married again. My father has been married four times and divorced thrice. I have eleven siblings, nine are my half-siblings. Many live on the coast, one of my father’s wives was a Saheliyya:

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they are quite well off, but I have no connection to any of them.324

Sari has not finished his baccalaureate and he started working early:

I dropped out of school at 17, the year before the bach. I was restless and didn’t have much money. I wanted to do other things, but now I would go back if I had the financial means, but it’s expensive. I did a four-month training course in theatre but had to work nights to afford it.

While Sari is continually in various states of unemployment or underemployed and has little formal educational attainment, he still represents a generational and social leap forward from his parents in terms of expectations and cultural capital. When we first met, he was heavily involved in performing street art. In 2015, he wrote and directed a play.325 He gathered some friends from the district and performed for a few weeks across the interior regions, “If I had the money, I could make the greatest play in the whole Arab World.” Sari is also a poet, often performing in cultural events in the city and beyond.326

I feel something for Arabic, it has depth and feeling, not like the European languages. The Tunisians on the coast, they always speak French. French is the language of prestige, but Arabic is for the soul. Yet I have no borders, I seek knowledge, I want to learn, to keep learning and growing. Tunisians, although we have culture, we are kept down by the state.327

Despite being the oldest son in the household with an aging father and having a financial responsibility for the family, he survives mostly through odd jobs in Kasserine, intermittent work as a mechanic in Monastir and the charity of friends. Often, he cannot even afford the eighteen-dinar bus fare to the coast, even if a job presents itself. In many ways, he embodies the just make-do- attitude of many young Tunisian men in the margins:

324 As I found out later, this is not quite true, as Sari often goes to Monastir and works in his half-brother’s garage shop. 325 He had gotten some training funding from a Tunisian art NGO. 326In 2017 he came second in a national poetry competition in Tunis, yet he could barely afford the bus ticket to the capital and back. 327 While Sari speaks and writes fluently in Modern Standard Arabic and can understand almost every dialect of Arabic, his French is, as far as I can tell, basic at best. This reflects both a generational shift away from French following Arabization programs, but also class and regional disparities in the quality of schools.

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I had only twenty-dinars, but I wanted to go to Tunis for the World Social Forum. I bought a bus-ticket, arrived in Tunis with 5 dinars, bought a pack of smokes and a coffee and managed to talk my way inside the Forum without a ticket; through persistence and poetry, the guard let me in.

Sari, like so many young men, is perpetually short of money, living hand to mouth. He has cultivated a remarkable ability to get by. He somehow always manages to have enough for cigarettes, coffee and once in a while some Tu- nisian beer.328 One way in which this is made possible is through maintaining a dense network of other young men. Sari is a self-described khubzist, a “pragmatist without morals.”329 The time he spends in the pursuit of forming strong bonds with other young men, however, is considerable. Sari has a large network of friends in their twenties or early thirties, from cities and towns around the country; people he has met through jobs, theatre, or just by happenstance. They are overwhelmingly young men in similar positions of marginalization. Their sense of camaraderie partly explains how many young men can “manage” despite their precarity. The young share what little they have: exchanging information about jobs and opportunities, both legal and illegal. When I first met Sari, he was working as a smuggler. His wide social network was crucial in knowing the best routes and avoiding trouble. These social networks are doubtlessly important in getting by on very little, but they are equally crucial as forms of emotional support. 330 On a visit in December 2017, Sari was living at his friend Fares’ house in a village a couple of kilometers from Kasserine. Fares is an electrician at the local cultural center. He lives with his grandmother after his parents passed away. He is gentle and calm in sharp contrast to Sari’s dynamic and somewhat temperamental demeanor. When I asked Fares how it was that Sari had come to live with him, he answered:

We were in a play in Sfax about a year ago. I was the sound engineer. I had hurt my hand and had a cast on. I was having some difficulty eating my food because of this. Sari sat down next to me. He didn’t say a word, he just cut my meat into pieces and helped me eat. He moved into my house a few days later and hasn’t left since.

328 Sari, like many other young men, does occationally receive money from his mother and sister. 329 There is a more extended discussion on the meaning of khubzist in chapter 10. 330 Sari has a girlfriend; although partly due to the limitations of mixed gender spaces, most of his time is spent with his male friends.

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Fares, as an electrician in the state-run cultural center has, in theory, a source of stable income, yet in reality he shares elements of Sari's precarity. He gets paid only irregularly and his salary is too low to consider marriage. Fares and Sari support each other financially, whoever has money will pay for gas, cigarettes and beer. They go on trips, drink together, get into fights, but in-between bouts of bravado the young men also share their sorrows and burdens. These male fellowships of the margins provide mutual support, recognition and communitas. Sociologists of the post-modern, like Zygmunt Bauman (2013) have claimed that under neoliberalism, social class no longer functions as a category for action or shared meaning. By contrast, in interior Tunisia, it appears that the shared conditions of precarity and marginalization allow for a form of collectivity that is meaningful, and as the revolution proved, potentially politically potent. Age, region and gender intersect with social class. The people in Sari’s world are overwhelmingly young men from various parts of the interior. While southern and interior regions are often considered “tribal” by the people from the coast, the everyday networks of the young men are rarely familial or tribal in orientation, but based instead on an equality of inequity.331 Another important factor in the political economy of “making do”, is the situation of being in debt, or deferring payment. As Meddeb writes in the case of Tunisia (2011) and Schielke in the case of Egypt (2015), much of the everyday economic transactions for the poor and even middle classes are based on deferment of payment. Fares explains it, “We don’t pay directly for most things that we buy. The shop-owner, who we know, lets us buy food and cigarettes, until we can pay it back.” This local economy is both detached from, and follows, the larger logic of credit. The Tunisian state is given credit by the international organizations, the state provides credit to companies and banks that in turn provide credit to consumers (Hibou 2011). These mecha-

331 The often-heard argument put forth by the coastal middle classes is that the proliferation of protests in interior regions is due to their “tribal cohesion.” This is an explicit repetition of fourteenth century sociologist Ibn Khaldoun’s claim that the peripheries are characterized by asabiya, “community-feeling”, that allows them to conquer the rich cities (2015). This claim by many in the coastal areas, however, severely underestimates the degree to which the Tunisian state has undermined, replaced and fundamentally altered tribal dynamics. This is not to say that familial and tribal systems of obligations and ties do not play a role in parts of life in the interior, particularly in smuggling.

206 | Chapter Seven nisms of loan-giving are central in the whole political economy of capitalism.332 Yet they also exclude large groups. Despite the growth of so-called micro-credits, through NGOs and companies in Tunisia, for the young men, like Sari and Fares, access to the formal circuit of credit remains beyond their reach.333 Instead, for those in the margins, access to credit, even only a few dinars, is made possible through dense networks of social bonds. The local shop-owner cannot force Sari and Fares to pay back what is owed. Neverthe- less, since the transaction is embedded in a context of familiarity, a moral economy of sorts, it requires no legal mechanisms to function, nor is it premised on growth. It is part of the global circulation of capital, yet firmly rooted in the local. This is another reason why place, why the local, why “home”, remains a fixed point for so many young men, and why despite the limited opportunities there, returning home is often a necessity. For Sari, the ability to be mobile, to move to the coast, and other places if required by work, is key in “making do.” Yet, like many young men, he always returns to Kasserine after a few weeks or months. He will say bladak biDal bladak, roughly “your home always remains your home.”334 At the same time, he often feels constricted at home and expresses how stifling it can feel. When I ask him about his relationship to Kasserine, he responds with a story:

There was a bird that lived in a dry and inhospitable place. The other animals, that could not leave, asked the bird “What are you still doing in this place? Go to the mountains, go somewhere else.” “This is my home” the bird responded. In the same way, there may be better places yet even so this remains my country, where I was born, I cannot change it, good or bad. I can leave this country, but also, I cannot. I am and remain Tunisian. But more than that, I will always be from Kasserine.

For young men like Sari, despite an expressed idealization of independence,

332 As Schielke writes, “Such reliance on debt is essential towards the future-oriented and growth-driven process of capitalism, producing as it does both the financial means to invest in future growth and the necessity to realize that growth in order to pay back what one owes” (2015:110). 333 Such micro-credit schemes are most often targeted towards more “responsible” segments of the marginalized; particularly older women. 334 The Arabic word balad that Sari uses is ambiguous and has a host of connotations. It can mean country, nation, town or village as well as something that could be roughly translated to home-region. The fact that balad can also connote nation is important. Sari is distinguishing between the nation-state of Tunisia and his “home” of Kasserine. Similarly, another young man, Ahmed, says Dawlati Tounis, baladi Kasserine, “My state is Tunisia, my home/nation/ is Kasserine.”

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 207 of being “somewhere else” that is tied to a desire towards becoming modern, nonetheless the family, friends and neighborly networks in Kasserine act as powerful pulls that keep them coming back. If Sari's hand-to-mouth life is largely defined by an inability to make long- term plans, he still makes deliberate choices. He continues to develop his ar- tistic and practical skills, even if it only takes place in fits and starts and is severely constrained by circumstances. He is often traveling to the coastal city of Monastir to work as a mechanic for a few months at a time. In 2016, he saved up enough to get a driver’s license and quit smuggling. Despite not having a car, he started working occasionally as a driver, often simply driving friends to and from places. In 2017, he found a job as a driver for a rich businessman in Monastir and was dreaming of working as a truck driver, “Then I could travel across the country and Europe.”335 In 2018, he was back in Kas- serine, working as a part-time sales person for a phone company. In many ways, young men like Sari are paragons of neoliberal flexibility; adapting and surviving in the face of uncertainty, finding opportunities in the face of overwhelming odds, even if these opportunities are not always on the right side of the law. At the same time, there is a strong aspiration for something else – stability and security. This comes with a clear articulation of blame, “Smuggling is for many of us not a choice. It is what keeps things going here in the interior. In the coast they can live on the state, but here we live under its shadow. It accepts us only as long as we do not demand too much.” According to Sari, while the revolution allowed for increased freedom of expression, in many regards it has been a failure:

This was no real revolution, it just put corrupt people in power. We need a real change, a change in thought and mentality. Tunisia gives the appearance of a reformed and modern country, but if, for example, you as a person would be an atheist, a real atheist that does not believe in God, you would be in danger. In danger not from the police but from the people. We are still caught in the tension between the Mecca and Medina period of Islam, between the peaceful and the violent and we have not found a balance. The power knows that our blood is hot; the state keeps us down by keeping us ignorant.

While critical of the state, and expecting it to do more, Sari, like many young men, is also highly self-critical:

335 In many parts of the world, having a car or at the very least a driver’s license is an important part of “being a man.” See for example Andersson & Beckman 2018

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Sari: Everyone here carries with them sadness. The reasons may vary but the results are the same. Karim: What are yours? S: For me, it’s the backwardness of the Arab World, it’s that women are treated like mattresses, like baby factories, it’s that I have to hit my sister because she loves someone, it’s the mindless violence of the police, it’s the situation in Palestine, and Syria, and poverty of the many, and that we have all done it to ourselves, and keep doing it every day. K: What do you want? Expect from life? S: It’s not what I expect from life, I expect nothing, life gives neither sadness nor joy. It’s what I expect from society. I expect us to move away from backwardness, but we are walking further and further back. K: Is there nothing you want? S: I don’t want to smuggle or work on culture anymore. K: What then? S: I don’t know. Any Tunisian that says he knows what he wants is lying.

What I wish to show with this section is again to emphasize that waiting under the shadow of the state is never passive. It is a life defined by uncertainty, precarious employment and an inability to attain the normatively defined standards of adulthood. The world of the young men is a world without paternal authority. The state is both all-present and absent; many make a living out of its incomplete control, and yet desire something more. In their life in the margins, the young men are subjected to an atomizing logic of neoliberalism, but this also has the contradictory effects of creating strong social bonds between young men. Often on the wrong side of the law, receiving little help from the state, Sari nonetheless understands himself and many young men like him, as responsible for those around them. When we walk in the streets Sari would often give his last coins to beggars, even if he had not eaten all day. "We may live in the jungle, but that doesn't mean we have to live like animals."

SEARCHING FOR THE KEY Not all young men in the margins are waiting for the state. For a few, the search for certainty and stability takes the form of self-improvement and self- discipline. When I met Jamil for the first time in 2015, he was pursuing a Master’s degree in design in Kasserine. He had finished a degree in electrical

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 209 engineering in Tunis a few years before, but had been unable to find a job. He was also engaged in graffiti, basketball, and music. He had a “can-do” attitude and believed in initiative and hard work. His style of dress reflected this ethos. He was always well groomed, whether in wearing more “street” clothes or formal attire. Jamil lives in what is considered a middle-class area of Kasserine. His father is a retired director of Kasserine bus-terminal. He has a brother in England who works as a hairdresser.336 When we met, he was engaged in helping younger boys:

Sure, things are OK for me, but I want more, and not just for myself. I have a project with kids, it’s my own initiative to help the kids in my area. They love basketball and I try and support their aims, give them direction and discipline. There is a tendency here to blame others, not to take responsibility. I mostly help them via social media since I’m busy. I work with the youth that are open minded, that are looking towards the West; that don’t have a backward mentality. People here have a mentality problem: I want to help the young take responsibility.

Jamil sees himself as a role model where the emphasis is on positivity, belief in the self and discipline, "People here in Kasserine have opportunities but don’t use them. They get lots of help from NGOs and even government, but people should just look out for themselves." When I came back to Kasserine in 2016, Jamil had taken a more critical view of political art and his social projects, “You need to work on yourself, to change yourself before you can change others.” He had committed himself to opening up the first store in Kasserine that sold authentic sportswear. His brother who lives in England had provided the necessary capital. “Will such a relatively expensive shop work in Kasserine?” I asked, “Someone has to take the first step,” he responded. While Jamil may be typical in his aspirations of social advancement, of recognition and success, he is more clearly invested in an explicit vision of neoliberal subjectivity than many of the other youths I have met in Kasserine and Gafsa. In terms of his goals and his understanding of how to reach them, he is less interested in a stable government job and more interested in a kind of corporate-creative life. To reach these goals, he attempts to follow a crafting of the self that is increasingly familiar across the globe, as is the fear and suspicion that it will never be enough, that he will never be enough, that he is

336 Unlike Sari’s parents, Jamal’s have only been married once, and cleave more clearly to middle class notions of respectability.

210 | Chapter Seven not evolving, but merely standing in one place. This in many ways reflects what Connell and Wood (2005) see as the increasingly hegemonic masculinity of neoliberal globalization, and what they refer to as “business masculinities.” Here, the self is treated as a kind of entrepreneurial project, where success arises from constant self-improvement, control and mastery.337 In 2016, Jamil had also begun to watch religious speeches and begun to pray five times a day, “I am interested in all religions, but I think Islam is the best one, because it can help you concretely in your life; to make you a better and stronger individual.” That he should dabble in a form of disciplinary re- ligiosity is, I believe, revealing. 338 Schielke (2015) in his study of young men in Egypt, argues that there has been a reversal of sorts of Max Weber’s claim with regards to the connection between Protestantism and capitalism. For Weber, the opaque road to salvation in strict Calvinism led to a redoubling of efforts to secure material success within a capitalist system that was, to some extent, within the scope of human action. By contrast, in the neoliberal form of capitalism in Egypt, Schielke argues that the road to material success, despite decades of slogans around transparency is opaque and inscrutable. Suc- cess is less tied to individual effort of discipline and hard work and more to complex networks of privilege, nepotism and “who one knows.”339 This is contrasted with a Muslim, Salafist-inflected, religious discourse where “salvation emerges as accessible, transparent, to some degree even calculable” (2015:123). In Schielke’s view, religion becomes for the young men in Egypt a clear and calculable path to salvation in a context where disciplined action, religious or otherwise, is by itself insufficient for material success. Similar to Weber, Tocqueville speculated that the American capitalists drive for material stability was partly derived from the lack of political and

337 Although Jamil can be understood to embody a kind of neoliberal subjectivity, he also represents aspects of the pre-neoliberal “self-made man.” Christopher Lasch writes of such men, “He lived for the future, shunning self-indulgence in favor of patient, painstaking accumulation; and as long as the collective prospect looked on the whole so bright, he found in the deferral of gratification not only his principal gratification but an abundant source of profits” (1991:53). According to Lasch the problem for men like Jamil is that life in the margins does not allow for such sense of “painstaking accumulation.” In other words, the neoliberal processes of marginalization undermine neoliberal subjectivities of self-transformation. 338 I have said little to nothing about religion in this thesis, and the place of religion in the lives of the youth. The main reason for this is that it was rarely invoked or discussed by the young men I have spent my time with. This is not to say that their lack of openly religious discussions, especially with an outsider, means that religion in a broader sense is absent in their lives. I merely suggest that their internal spiritual views did not bear upon the issue of waiting and state-society relations, and were outside the scope of this work. 339 As Schielke writes, “Rather than being a transparent outcome of rational economic actions, profit has much affinity with the logic of nasib, or unpredictable strikes of destiny” (2015:122).

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 211 intellectual certainty that come with democracy:

When no authority exists in matters of religion, any more than in political matters, men soon become frightened in the face of unlimited independence. With everything in a perpetual state of agitation, they become anxious and fatigued. With the world of the intellect in universal flux, they want everything in the material realm, at least, to be firm and stable, and, unable to resume their former beliefs, they subject themselves to a master. (2018:503)

Jamil, like so many youths, struggles to find meaning in an environment in which negativity and disappointment are the dominating tropes and economic uncertainty the only certainty. For Jamil, religion is one of the few things that provides a clear guide on how to live. Here, like for Schielke’s young men, the inability to find material certainty leads to a search for spiritual stability. Unlike for the young men in Egypt that Schielke explores, however, for Jamil religion is not a replacement for seeking material success, instead it is a source of self-discipline in order to become successful:

I am part of a TV association and the rotary club, people say they don’t do anything, that it’s just people that help themselves, but I can live with complexity, I get something, get to meet people with ideas and opportunities. I’m still an ama- teur trying to make something of myself. But I won’t become rich by waiting. You need a key. I didn’t take the 200 dinars that the state provides, even when I was sick for months, it’s just a bribery. You need to go step by step and not jump. People here want to get rich quickly. And they are spoiled, they drink too much. Gambling and drink are a waste of time, you should develop yourself. Islam helps with that. 340

For Jamil, while he expresses an admiration for the discipline and strict regime of a religious life, his urge to improve himself, and above all to find “the key” to success, is the overriding drive. Jamil is more clearly invested in “secular” pursuits such as becoming a music DJ, and a designer. Faith is simply one tool among others. The attempt to find a path to success takes many forms:

I want to marry a Japanese girl. You know. I want someone disciplined and ordered. I want a life in which I know what will happen. Here you never know, you make plans but then you never know what will happen until it happens. I want

340 He also says that, “I don’t mind smugglers, they are entrepreneurs, they make something. Taeb Jabri and Ali Griri, they did something here, all the tall buildings here are from them. They did more than the state.”

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some certainty and stability.

The uncertainty and instability spoken of by Jamil is primarily tied to the inability to realize material goals and the difficulty of gaining recognition. Jamil can be seen as an illustration of the contradiction within the current neoliberal dispensation in its Tunisian iteration. The search for the keys, implies that there are such keys, that there are doors to be opened, and that the process of doing so is somehow transparent, that it can be learned and acquired if one is disciplined enough. Yet all of Jamil’s attempts at self-mastery, do not translate in any simply way to success. The salvation anxiety of Weber’s Calvinists is here transplanted into an anxiety of success in the realm of the material world. When I returned to Kasserine in the summer of 2017, Jamil was visibly stressed and struggling. He was no longer praying or focused on religion. And despite his considerable efforts to go against the grain, to make something of himself, to work on himself, after years of struggle he had come to the same conclusion as so many other youths:

I need to leave Tunisia. There is no future here. I have tried so hard to search for the keys that would let me live here but I didn’t find them. If I could do something here I would, but I can’t, and so I cannot live here anymore. It’s like living with a friend you no longer connect to, one of you has to move out. I can’t find the formula to keep staying here.

This is a departure from before, when he would often quote his father, “someone who can’t be a man in his own country can’t be it in another one”, as a way of claiming that one needs to succeed in Tunisia before thinking of moving somewhere else. For Jamil, the problem does not only lie within himself. What keeps him from “succeeding” is for him both internal and external, it is both his inability to find the right keys and the environment of depression, negativity and uncertainty that makes the task all the more difficult. He claims that the prevailing negativity has meant that he has had to distance himself from many of his friends, "People here have changed for the worse, my friends have changed, I can’t hang out with them anymore, they are just negative and think about money, drinks, drugs (zetla), sex. They live for the moment and

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 213 don’t work towards the future."341 Jamil’s rejection of what he sees as the dominant mode of masculinity around him is similar to Beverly Skeggs’s (1997) understanding of working-class men attempting to “disidentify” with other working-class men in order to aspire towards middle class respectability. For Jamil, like for many other Tunisian young men, the revolution and the democratic transition has made life worse – more difficult, more uncertain and more insecure. “Things were not great before, but at least we had some security. Now it’s just chaos and violence.” Jamil says. If Jamil is critical of his surroundings, he also confesses a certain jealousy towards those around him whom he considers lazy and full of short-comings. “I sometimes wish I could take out my things from my head and just live in the moment." Jamil may be in in a slightly better economic situation than other young men in Kasserine, with a father on government pension, and a brother in England, but like so many young men he has dreams that he feels unable to realize. Despite his efforts to fill his time, to turn waiting into something productive, he is acutely aware of the unpredictable nature of “fate.” The paradox of a life of self-crafting is particularly evident in contexts where it so rarely or clearly is translatable to visible success. To some extent, Jamil comes to stand as a reminder of the inability of the self to transform itself and its surroundings alone. His own goals out of reach, the present becomes more and more unbearable. When I come back in the summer of 2018, Jamil has become even more despondent, “I feel like I'm 50 years old,” he tells me when we meet again. The shop has closed after a quarrel with his brother. Yet, he continues to improve himself, continues to search for the keys to success. He goes for intern- ships in Sousse, he continues to train himself in design and music. He has opened a local Kasserine branch of Tunivision, a lifestyle magazine that offers leadership training programs across the country, but he continues to dream of leaving. While distinguishing himself from what he sees as his “unambitious and lazy peers”, he himself remains stuck in his own form of waiting; in this way he is just like the other young men.

341 Jamil’s friends represents the khubzist (live for the present) attitude that I discuss in chapter 10. This can be understood as a pre-captialist approach to life, undisciplined and unstructured. But it is best viewed, I argue, as a response to the unpredictable (neoliberal) life in the margins, where there is often little connection between effort and reward.

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WAITING TO ESCAPE Just as the desire for dignity is a shared political imaginary among the young men, so too is the desire to escape. This desire, at times vague, at times desperate, often futile, arises out of a sense of betrayal; by the state and society, and a feeling that life is happening somewhere else. Bilel is in his mid-20s, he lives with his mother, two sisters and a brother in one of the sha’abi areas of Kasserine. He has a training as a plumber, just like his father. Bilel could be considered one of the youths that Jamil finds frustrating, with no respect for their elders, lacking clear goals and often thinking of schemes to make money fast. Bilel too, however, contrasts himself with the café-frequenting young men of Kasserine. From the first time I met Bilel in 2015, he has always been busy with something. Always working on plans, from small to large, of how to come up with ways of improving his financial situation, “I hate sleep, I just like work. I need to work.” 342 Bilel does not speak in Jamil’s language of self-improvement. His lack of educational attainment, more difficult financial situation and not being able to receive economic support from his family means that he cannot afford a slower and more deliberate project of self-transformation. He takes whatever jobs he can get. He cultivates contacts among both young and old, but he also drinks frequently and lands himself in trouble.343 In 2016, he worked and lived in Tunis as a plumber together with his father but felt frustrated and constricted by sharing a room with his father, “I want independence. You can’t take a girl home to your father’s house.” He eventually found accommodation and rented an apartment in Tunis with three other young men. When he returned to Kasserine after a few months I asked him why, “I was often hanging out with my friends in the expensive part of town, in La-Marsa and Lac. I enjoyed it but I went bankrupt. So, I came back to my family. My mother and sisters needed me.”344 Despite Bilel’s often uneasy relationship towards authority, he bemoans the lack of it:

342 Despite calling other young café-going men lazy, Bilel does spend time in cafés. He considers it “work” however, a space to come up with plans, getting information and making connections. 343 In 2018 he had beaten up an off-duty police officer in a drunken brawl and was worried the man would come back for revenge. 344 Bilel has a younger brother with a severe medical condition that was triggered after being hit in the head in an accident. The medication is expensive, 120 dinars for tablets for two weeks. And the family have to take the brother to the one specialist in the country in Tunis every two months.

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Smuggling and drinks and drugs, if it wasn't illegal, people here wouldn't do it. We are rebellious kids and the state is our parents. That is why we need a strong state. Since the fall of Ben Ali, we have had Islamists and violence everywhere. Without fear, everyone just does what they want.345

Bilel returned to Tunis in 2017 after landing a job as a port-security guard. He resurfaced in Kasserine a year later:

I worked in the port in Tunis for six months. I got good pay, could go out and drink whenever I wanted. One day I got my friends into the port and we smuggled ourselves onto a cruiser boat and locked ourselves into a room. We managed to get off in Italy. But we didn’t get far before the police picked us up. I didn’t understand a word, but they got a lawyer to defend us that was Tunisian. They took us to a center, where we stayed for a month. It was a kind of prison but very nice and they took care of us. And I still have contact with a woman that works there. Finally, we got flown to Tunisia. My friends got 15 days in prison, which is the norm, but I received six months because I had worked in the ports. It was very hard, they put me in a cell with terrorists. It was tough, but I learned how to handle myself. When I got out, I returned to Kasserine.

When I asked Bilel why he had smuggled himself and his friends into the boat, he struggles to come up with an answer, “I don’t know. But all the time, all my friends told me Italy is paradise.” Bilel’s friend Majd often makes fun of Bilel and his desire to leave, “Young men here are impatient.” Majd himself was adamant in finishing his studies before considering leaving, and then only by legal means. But in 2016, Majd married a substantially older English woman he met online, in secret and against his family’s wishes. He then discontinued his studies and was waiting for his VISA to Britain. For almost all the young men I have encountered ideas of leaving Tunisia loom large.346 These wishes predate the democratization process. If migration increased after the revolution, in all likelihood it depended on the loosened security situation.347 For some, the wish to leave is an inarticulate and vague

345 The state-as-father is discussed in chapter 10. 346 Arab Barometer found that the number of young Tunisians thinking of emigrating has increased since 2011, “Tunisia risks losing its youth, with more than half (56 percent) of those ages 18-29 thinking about leaving their homeland. Additionally, those with higher levels of education are more likely to seek to move abroad” (Robbins 2019:11). 347 But Tunisians also returned back to the country following the revolution. An event that represented renewed hope, if only for a moment.

216 | Chapter Seven desire, for others clear and definite. Some have strategies and some only hopes. The sense that Europe can provide “dignity” is a common theme. Dignity can mean many things, but having access to work commensurate with one’s qualifications appears to be a central dimension of the motivation. Ali tries to explain:

What many want is public employment. In the private sector it’s still tough. There is no dignity, low pay and long hours, often 12 or 14-hour workdays. The companies know that people are desperate, and they take advantage of it. And yet the state doesn’t provide jobs, it even prevents us from creating jobs for ourselves, and so eventually people just give up and try and leave.

Dignity is also tied to a more diffuse desire to be valued. As Khaled puts it, “In Europe, even if you work as a waiter, or whatever you might do, you still have your dignity, not here. Here you are treated like nothing.”348 Yassine, a young man now living in Germany, has this to say about why the need to leave is so strong in the marginal regions, “We want to leave because we are not citizens here, not because we do not love our country. We do love it; we made a revolution for it. But we realized that we would always be second-class citizens here.” Yassine is expressing a double burden, as a youth and as someone from the margins. Yassine’s notion of citizenship is connected to a wider set of failures relating to inclusion of the interior regions into the state and nation-building process. There is, as Lauren Berlant suggests a “cruel optimism” attached to desire. “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (2011:24). It should perhaps come as no surprise that many individuals attempt to redirect their desire from that “problematic object”, the state, towards something else, another object, another place. Nonetheless, even those who have decided that the state is not worth waiting for still come to express their disappointment in the sense of “lacking citizenship.” The desire to leave is not limited to the interior regions. In one of my visits to Sousse, a medium-sized city on the coast, I meet Achraf, who has a house and car and works as a photographer, muses on his desire to leave the country. All his three sisters have left Tunisia, one to Canada, one to Belgium and one

348 Similarly, Busayna, a character in the Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, exclaims, “Even the sweeper in the street gets respect. That’s why I want to go abroad. I want to live there and work and become really respectable” (2004:200).

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 217 to France. So, have most of his close his friends.349 Even with a girlfriend and possessing relative wealth, he feels lonely and left behind. When I ask him why he wants to leave, he responds, “You will know. Once you stay here long enough. You will understand.” Without purporting to have “understood,” it seems like the waiting and general atmosphere of despondency comes to affect the youth across the country. It transcends region and class.350 It is a shared imaginary, even if the forms and possibilities of realizing it are highly uneven and the reasons for wanting to leave are numerous.351 What is shared is a sense that being in Tunisia is merely waiting, not life proper. Schweizer writes that the “person who waits is out of sync with time” (2005:779). Leaving reflects a desire to become properly synced with time again. An attempt at an escape from endless waiting, an attempt to reclaim a sense of lost agency.352 The international situation makes crossing into Europe legally difficult, or dangerous, for those that do it illegally. This adds to the sense of being stuck even when moving, “You feel like you live in a prison. Animals can cross borders, but we humans can’t,” says Bilel. Yet in one sense, leaving the country is just another step in a life that is already defined by incessant migration. Bilel, like the other young men in this chapter, is constantly on the move; between his town and various coastal cities, for work, for studies, or simply to get away for a moment. Theirs is a waiting that is very much defined by movement. Even if, as for Bilel, the dream of leaving is only one of many projects that he continually seeks to realize. Many possess an almost spiritual conviction that “life” is happening somewhere else and that the “modernity” they have waited for is present only in its absence.

349 Many of his friends have gone to the West to work or study, but a few also went to fight for Islamists in Syria. 350 As Schielke pointedly emphasizes, “Thus, the notion of cosmopolitanism, although properly speaking a privilege of intellectual and economic elites, is also useful in understanding what it means to have a horizon of expectations that are global but means of movements and advancement that are much more limited” (2015:154). 351 That Achraf says that I will understand the desire to leave only after living in Tunisia “long enough” suggests a kind of embodied knowledge that cannot primarily be communicated in words, but needs to be lived in order to be understood. 352 Ghassen Hage suggests that, “In a sense, we can say that people migrate because they are looking for a space that constitutes a suitable launching pad for their social and existential self. They are looking for a space and a life where they feel they are going somewhere as opposed to nowhere, or at least, a space where the quality of their ‘going-ness’ is better than what it is in the space they are leaving behind. More often than not, what is referred to as ‘voluntary’ migration, then is either an inability or an unwillingness to endure and ‘wait out’ a crisis of existential mobility” (2009:98).

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POLITICAL LABOR Waiting under the shadow of the state reflects the continuity between pre and post authoritarian Tunisia. In which light should we consider the new category of young political activists that have sprung up following the revolution? They too struggle with a sense of immobility and feeling “stuck.” In the introduction to chapter six I gave a brief description of Wadih and some of his activist friends in Gafsa. One of them is Yousef. He has studied in Gafsa but he is from a small village an hour from the city. Like many of his friends he came to politics via his family, his uncle was a clandestine member of the banned Workers' Party during the authoritarian period. Following the revolution, Yousef has helped mobilize support for the Workers' Party and the Popular Front more broadly. He is part of a new generation of students who began their studies after the revolution and have been able to openly organize and mobilize. He was the president of the leftist student union during his bachelor studies at Gafsa University. As a recent graduate, Yousef is training a new generation of leftists in student politics. He is one of a still relatively small, but growing, group of young people who now have hands-on experience of politics in the new spaces that opened up following the revolution. He is often busy with organizing and is always on the phone, giving advice to other young activists. He has travelled across the country, to protest or to receive training in the various civil society organizations he is involved with:

I worry about the younger generation. They did not go through the revolution. They don’t understand that what is at stake. For most activists today, it is primarily about identity, friends and belonging. Then later comes ideology, if at all. They could easily have been Salafists instead of leftists. It means that when things get tough, they give up.

In 2016, Yousef left Gafsa to continue his studies in law in Sfax, the economic center of the country, and sometimes referred to as “the Capital of the South.” It is a popular university city for many from the interior and the south. When I meet him in Sfax in May 2017, he is heavily involved in the Workers’ Party and its student union. He is living in a small rented house with other student activists from the interior regions, “Most of those involved in the leftist party are from interior regions or small towns from the coast. That’s where the real problems of this country are visible” he explains. The Faculty of Law is split between leftists and Ennahda supporters, and Yousef tells me that, unlike in

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 219 the more cordial atmosphere at Gafsa University, in his new university fist- fights are not unusual. He still travels across the country to participate in protests, particularly in Tunis. In the summer of 2017, he was badly beaten by the police and had to spend several days in the hospital. While happy in Sfax he decries what he considers a narrow regionalist mentality:

Sadly, we have communal thinking, even in the left. Leftists from Gafsa stick together, Kasserine etc. Each group supports their leader. Regionalism remains strong. Even in Sfax, even if he lives here for 20 years, all his friends will be from Gafsa or wherever. Even here in the university everyone is divided according to region. I am against it. I am Tunisian, and a member of the Workers' Party, but here everything becomes about where you are from. In the north they don’t know anything about the south and interior. One girl asked “Gafsa, is that next to the sea?” And they think that [Sidi] Bouzid and Kasserine are all violence and trouble.

Yousef worries that such divisions have been made stronger by the revolution:

Dictatorship has divided people against each other, we cannot act together anymore. I will give you an example, yesterday a young man told me “The one that makes a mistake dies.” That has become the law here, fear is engrained in us. We fought the revolution for dignity and social justice, and yet after revolution, there has been an explosion of private schools. We have become more divided. The rich becomes richer and the poor poorer. And there is nothing in-between in Tunisia anymore. They tell us that we are a middle-class country? Where is this middle- class? The next revolution will be a class war. I very much fear that soon violence will be the only answer.353

During the summers Yousef works in a hotel as a waiter in one of the top- hotels in the city. Even before his studies in Gafsa, Yousef would often go to Sousse, Monastir or other coastal towns and work in the hospitality industry.

Of course, it’s about money, but if I don’t work, then, I fall sick, I get depressed. So many young men, even among the leftists, just talk and talk. But work provides something else, it strengthens your personality. It’s better to work under capitalists than to sit at home and wait for the state. It also allows you to get a broader perspective on things. To meet people from all parts of the world. [Smiling:] to come face to face with the contradictions of capitalism. Yes, there are huge problems of unemployment for graduates in this country, but that is no excuse for not finding work, any work. When the hotels shut down in Sousse after the attacks in 2015, I

353 The importance of narratives of middle-class Tunisia is discussed in chapter 8 and 10.

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went to my village to work on my farm and picked olives.

In Sfax, even while working, he is perpetually on the phone. He talks to his large network of activist friends, but most often the calls are from students or other young people that ask for help. The help is not always directly political, but also involves questions about what subjects to study, or what dorms to stay in, or dealing with harassment from faculty. “It has become a full-time job” he says, “But it provides a sense of purpose. Some of their problems are simple. Often, they just need someone to talk to, or tell them the obvious.” He is also increasingly asked for help by the higher-up party members to mobilize support in his hometown, in Gafsa, and in Sfax. When I return to Sfax in 2018, he has discontinued his law studies and is working full time in the hotel, “I studied law because the party told me to. But the new generation doesn’t have trust in education. We see that it doesn’t lead anywhere. A PhD graduate will work as a waiter. Well, I have already worked as a waiter.” Similarly, his friend and fellow party member Younis quit his engineering degree to take a vocational training program in Tunis to become a mechanic, "Today if you study in university it is just a degree in unemployment.” Quitting his studies has given Yousef more time to focus on his political activism, despite a full-time job. He helped mobilize for leftist candidates in his home district, for the first municipal elections in May 2018. He has been offered to run on the Popular Front ballot but has declined, saying he is more comfortable behind the scenes, “I have no interest in becoming a politician. I am happier working in the hotel. I am more interested in everyday solutions, in being in touch with people.” He is increasingly doubting whether the Workers' Party rhetoric on state socialism is relevant for Tunisia:

We are a state, not a nation. Not yet citizens but subjects. The state is too central- ized and executive power is everything. A liberal regime with real divisions of power would be a huge step forward, we cannot just jump to socialism. I am an anti-capitalist; small change is not enough, we need a real revolution. But being a liberal here is a big step. There are no real liberals in Tunisia.

In the summer of 2018, there is a palpable sense of despondency and disappointment across the country, and many of Yousef’s friends have quit activism. Yousef too, often expresses a sense of hopelessness with the economic situation and the lack of opportunities for youth, although he continues to believe that change is possible, “What else is there to do? We got these freedoms through sacrifices; we cannot just let the country go back to the old

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 221 dictatorship.” One night I manage to bring some of his old friends from Gafsa together for some drinks. Rami and Ahmed are not leftists but used to be involved with Amnesty International together with Yousef. Khaled, is a former member of the Workers' Party. They have not seen Yousef in a while. Things get a bit heated after a few drinks:

Ahmed: There is too much hypocrisy among you leftists, you fight for some freedoms, drinking, and sexual freedom, but don’t stand up for the freedom to wear the veil. And you all take freedoms, but when the time comes for marriage, you will try and find a conservative girl. I have not yet met a real leftist; you just want women and feel revolutionary. Rami: You made the revolution. And look at the country now. We used to be rich. Developed. We had industry. Now it’s all gone down the drain. Yousef: What development? What industry? That industrialization was the biggest lie. It was a neoliberal conspiracy. We opened up our economy, but what did it mean? We gave European companies 10 years of subsidies to open their factories here, we paid them, and then they left. And during those 10 years they exploited us, paid women 300 dinars a month from our money to work in chemical factories that Europeans didn’t want in their own countries. Khaled: I will tell you [Yousef] why you are wrong to still be in Popular Front. They are not a real opposition. You sit and talk about Lenin and Stalin, but you don’t do anything for the lives of the poor. You talk about global revolution but have no plan for the country. Rami: And behind it, you are also interested in power. Yousef: Your problem is that you, all of you, are not happy in Tunisia. You want to escape. I am the only happy one. Rami: If you were really happy, you would not be here drinking with us.

By the summer of 2019, Yousef too is attempting to leave. He has tried repeatedly to get placements abroad in the hotel-chain he works for, “I am feeling suffocated here. The air is heavy and breathing is hard.” He got an offer to go to Doha and accepted it, “But the Ministry of Interior did not give me the approval. They claim I am a danger. If I really am a danger, why are they trying to keep me here?" Yousef represents a new development in post-revolutionary Tunisia, a dedicated political activist that has become a fixer of sorts. The state violence he is subjected to, both physically and through the denial of a permit to leave, is a stark reminder, however, of how things have not changed. He has not given up on Tunisia, he continues works tirelessly to make the dream of a better and more just Tunisian state a reality. Still, after eight years of struggling he,

222 | Chapter Seven too, dreams of leaving.

THE STRUGGLE FOR MEANING What happens for those lucky few that get what they want; a respectable and stable job? The example of Ali shows that it provides opportunities for a new way of talking about oneself and society, as well as new ways of thinking about the future, particularly in relation to marriage. This is followed by, perhaps not surprisingly, new challenges. Ali is a gentle and inquisitive young man with a degree in engineering. When I met Alifor the first in 2015, he had just started volunteering for an NGO in Gafsa that worked on documenting the abuses of the Ben Ali and Bourguiba regimes.

I graduated in 2012 as an engineer. From then until 2015 I went through a very dark period. It was the most difficult period of my life, I felt lost and didn’t know what path to walk. When I couldn’t find government employment, I tried to find other projects or to work in the private sector. I didn’t find anything and eventually gave up. For years I was depressed, I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I decided to take steps myself, so I sought out different NGOs, I said to myself that at least I am doing something. Moving forward.

Ali himself had participated in demonstrations against Ben Ali in Gafsa and was happy to see the end of the dictatorship. Despite this, the post-revolutionary period proved difficult for Ali, primarily due to his unemployment. Like many of the young men and women I meet that work or volunteer in various civil society organizations, or participate in training programs, Ali is happy to be doing “something” with his time, despite the fact that the work pays little or nothing at all. Ali gets to travel around the country and is often meeting other young men and women. While many youths are cynical about the ability of many of the post-revolutionary NGOs to make a real difference and live up to their stated goals, they nonetheless provide some relief from the boredom and despair of unemployed life. In August 2017, Ali eventually got a job working for the Ministry of En- vironment. He is one of the very few young men that I have followed who has succeeded in securing the highly sought-after goal of securing stable government employment that is commensurate with his education. When I meet Ali in 2018, after he has started his job, he looks back on his work for the NGO

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 223 and believes it to have been crucial in securing him a job:

That experience helped me tremendously. Civil society helped me above all in my personal development. Yes, it also helped my CV but, more than that, I learned how to talk and deal with people, how to present myself. I became more confident in my abilities. And this was the crucial means to success in both the examination and interview parts for my job. I could face the work-committee and do a good presentation. It also helps me in my work now.354

Ali’s state employment means that he has gone from being a burden on his family to now being an important source of material support for his siblings:

We are five siblings and I am the only one with a job. My brother despite getting married and having a son, doesn’t work. Just a bit farming, enough to get by for daily life, nothing more. But he decided he wanted to get married with a woman from Kasserine, who he had studied with at university. They live at home; the top building is for them. He has a master’s degree in manufacturing. My sister graduated as an agricultural engineer in 2007, and she has been unemployed ever since.

Getting a government job has had an added importance for Ali’s family, not just as a source of income but also in removing a lingering fear:

My father was arrested when I was four years old. The security service entered our house at night, didn’t leave anything untouched. They were very aggressive, and it was terrifying. My father worked in the post office, and the authorities got news that there was an Ennahda worker there and they just took anyone from there, they had no name or anything, no evidence. My father became very afraid for us, he became mentally disturbed from all the stress. He was afraid that his kids would never able to work. He was eventually allowed to work again, but wasn’t allowed to leave the country, although the charges were dropped. Yet he had a file, he was in their list of enemies of the state. The incident happened in the early 1990s and we didn’t speak about it until 2013, not even after the revolution in 2011. I prepared a file for him for the Truth and Dignity Commission, since I worked with it around Gafsa, but he didn’t want to hand it in, didn’t want to talk about it. Thankfully, the revolution happened, and we can leave behind those awful years.

354 Despite having most of his friends from the leftist civil society circles in Gafsa, Ali prays five times a day and does not drink. Unlike Jamil he rarely mentions his faith. Once he explained that “My faith also helped me in my dark period, the realization that everything is written (kol sha maktub) that it’s not all in my hands." Here, the theological concept that one’s fate or destiny (nasib) is already written, is not a call for passivity, but where the full weight for success does not lie in the self alone.

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But before I got this job, the fear persisted because of what happened to my father that they wouldn’t let our family work for the government. When I got a job, that tension disappeared and the scars of the past began to heal.

For Ali, it was only after he had secured a government job that the promise of the revolution was realized. Having a respectable and stable job has meant a profound change in numerous aspects of his life:

Ali: My life has turned around 180 degrees since I got a job. You feel like you exist in this life, you feel like you have value. For example, I recently got a wound in my jaw, if I didn’t have a job I might not have gone to the doctor, I might have been embarrassed to ask my father for help, financially, to ask for the 350 dinar it costs, I don’t think I would have been able to ask my father for that. Now I could manage by myself. Now I have financial freedom, even if I don’t earn enough, it’s some measure of independence, but above all I have my dignity. Truly of the “work, freedom and national dignity,” it is work that gives dignity. Not just government jobs. But any job that gives a sense of worth and dignity; that you can live on and be proud of. So many of the young here are depressed, they don’t listen to music, they barely get out of bed, they don’t dream. When your dreams die, you die. No wonder so many young men left for Syria, in war at least there is meaning, here they are dead inside. Islamists are the only ones that make them feel like they belong to the nation and the Ummah. That is why getting a job is so important. My whole way of thinking has changed since I was employed. 355 Karim: How so? Ali: The pessimism that I had has been removed. I suffered from a deep pessimism during a long period, during my unemployment, those were dark days. Since I started work, everything has become positive. Even when I have problems, like my health, I take it in my stride. That's the difference. Even the reactions of society changes, although I don’t put much weight in it. For example, the police, if they stop you and ask for your papers and ask where you work and you tell them Min- istry of Environment, their attitudes changes, they treat you with respect. Once a group of us from work were driving and we got stopped by the traffic police. The driver didn’t have his seatbelt on, for which there is a 40 dinar fine. But when we

355 Pankaj Mishra writes of today’s young Muslim extremists, “Most of them are not the poorest of the poor, or members of the peasantry and the urban underclass. They are educated youth, often unemployed, rural–urban migrants, or others from the lower middle class. They have abandoned the most traditional sectors of their societies, and have succumbed to the fantasies of consumerism without being able to satisfy them. They respond to their own loss and disorientation with a hatred of modernity’s supposed beneficiaries; they trumpet the merits of their indigenous culture or assert its superiority, even as they have been uprooted from this culture” (2017:75) This seems on the surface to include exactly the category of young men I have investigated in this thesis. The more interesting question to ask rather than why young men are radicalized, is perhaps; why are not more young men radicalized?

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said we worked for the Ministry of Environment the police let us off without paying. It’s not something good, I know that, but you can’t help but feel happy, feel important. "The blow that doesn’t kill makes you stronger.” Well, I can say that now, but before I felt I was dying a slow death.

Ali provides an illustration that a stable government job does indeed provide a sense of respect and recognition for individuals within the Tunisia context. Even with a relatively modest salary, working for the state, in a sense becoming the state, means immediate social recognition, a restoration of dignity. It has also meant more concrete transformations for Ali. Ali was able to leave his parents’ house and rent a room in Tunis that he shared with three other unmarried men. More importantly perhaps, having a job means thatAliis for the first time engaging in discussions about marriage. In general, talk of marriage is conspicuously absent in the discussions among young men; a distant possibility, out of reach for many. Ali’s job has given him the opportunity to consider marriage and think concretely about possible partners, but it has also raised concerns around economic worries and issues of compatibility. When we meet in early 2018, he tells me:

Ali: I think about marriage more now. But I’m only 30, I’m still too young to get married. Karim: So, you haven’t met a girl? Is there no one, even if it’s not serious? A: The issue might be my personality, my way of thinking, it might not be compatible with most Tunisian women. When I remember how I was, and how difficult it was, at least now, if I do something it’s from my own wallet. But when I think about what do to about getting a house and getting married, I get afraid. I am not sure what to do. Here the wedding party is all done for the people, not for the self. That goes against my principles. But it is very hard to live this way. Even if I meet a girl who thinks the same way it’s very hard, her family will demand that she gets a certain amount of gold for example. Although it’s strange that they should reduce the value of their daughter to gold. Here you get into debt for years just for a party for two hours. We live for people, not for ourselves.

Since starting work a new anxiety has arisen for Amer; a conflict between his own sense of self, and what he perceives to be the larger social values. This can be understood in terms of a clash between the more independent way that defined his life as unemployed and the responsibilities of adult life. When the young finally “get what they want,” it also necessitates a radical redefinition of themselves. This clash may have existed before, but, interestingly, Ali understands this clash between himself and society in terms of democratic values:

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We Tunisians don’t have conversations, or dialogue. We do not listen to other people, there is no give and take. We are stubborn despite the evidence that we are wrong, “It’s a goat even if it flies.” We don’t have a culture of disagreement. I believe that every person has their perspective, and even if I don’t feel relaxed with someone, I still have to have some basic respect for them. And I want the same respect. I try and respect difference of opinion. If I am with a woman, I want to know her opinion about things, like where we should go for coffee, so that we can discuss it and each have our voices heard. But they don’t like it. They are used to being told where to go, and the guy being the decider, and when I ask them their opinion they get upset and think I am weak of character. I am open to go to different places, but there are places I don’t like and don’t feel relaxed in, and we have to be able to talk about it. It must be the same for her. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. But not here, people either want to be dominated or to dominate. It seems we are still used to being oppressor and oppressed. I hope with time our mentality will change. The problem starts in the family. The father demands obedience and cannot abide disagreements. The state acts in the same way.

Ali is explicit about how the logic of dictatorship is reproduced in gender relations and vice-versa. Democratic social relations for Ali mean a move away from relationships of dependence. In many ways the more equal dynamic that Ali desires is analogous to the young men’s liminal communitas that has been explored in the previous chapters. In this way of framing it, the marginalized life of youth comes to prefigure more democratic social relations, but it is constrained by its gendered and liminal character. To become an adult is to leave behind that youthfulness and enter the hierarchy of adulthood, represented both by the state and marriage. For Ali, democracy means more than a change in political institutions; it means a more fundamental change in social and individual values. Lefort argues that democracy means a radical and continual questioning of old hierarchies and old truths, “at every level of social life” (1988:20). Ali also believes that the lack of democratic values is tied to larger economic dependencies, that political and cultural dependencies are tied up with socio-economic ones:

For Arabs, our dreams have become work, a car, and a house. But those are not dreams. Those are just the basics, and then you dream. Those are supposed to help you realize your dream. But for us, that is it. That’s all we are capable of dreaming about. My dream was just to get a government job. I knew that it would not solve everything, but that without it I could get nowhere. I was stuck. Now my life is different. I still have problems and have new problems. I want a car, for example,

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but it’s not possible. I worry and fear about the future, of having a house and wife. My principle is that I want to live today, but not at the expense of tomorrow, and to work for tomorrow not at the expensive of today. I try to be balanced in life. But it’s hard to live on principles in Tunisia.

Ali is clear in the way that precarity and authoritarian legacies limit people’s ability to dream and to become “democratic.” Removing Ben Ali was merely the first step, of removing fear, but Ali sees democracy as a much larger project of both beginning to dream, beyond the necessities of life, as well as more radical equality of social life itself. In my final visit to Tunisia in 2019, Ali had applied to return home to Gafsa. He finds life in the capital stressful and difficult. The last thing he says before we part is, "Now that I look back, I realize how free I was then, without a job, without responsibility. Then, if I had 20 dinars in my pocket, I was free, now it is never enough." In a modern media-landscape where we are told that youthfulness is valued above all else, it may appear strange that so much of the narratives of these young men has been about their desire and inability to leave the category of youth. I do not claim that all the young men wish for is responsibility and adulthood, only that it is the proscribed path that has become more and more out of reach. All may not want it, but few can reach it. And for those that do, new issues arise.

CONCUSIONS

Cruel Waiting What the final section with Ali conveys is the burden of getting what we desire. The waiting goes on, even when the object is attained. Achieving a goal merely gives rise to others, to new hurdles and difficulties. This indicates the limits of the concept of waiting. For waiting does not stop with a job or getting what we desire.356 We all wait. All desire, hope and expectations have, as Ber- lant explained, a dimension of cruelty to them. Yet are all objects of desire equally cruel? And is it possible to go beyond waiting? According to Schielke

356As Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires” (2004:40).

228 | Chapter Seven this may not be possible, as capitalism is fundamentally a future-oriented system, “It is a sensibility of living in a future tense, which exerts continuous pressure and anxiety for the present moment, and posits fulfillment always in the future, almost but not yet within reach” (2015:125). However, in many ways, what distinguishes current (late/post-modern) capitalism is exactly a kind of negation of the future. It is a powerful denial of waiting, an anti- utopian vision of the present, where all desires can be realized. But precisely because the sought for moment is, in theory, available to all, it also comes to induce a painful waiting for those that remain in the margins. Access to the present is unevenly distributed. In a time of globalized desires, the temporality of modernity still lingers; that old timeworn and familiar modernity which divides the world and nations into those that have arrived, and those that are travelers towards the promise of the future. As Graw writes, “globalization is by many people primarily experienced in its absence, in the form of the non- arrival of change, unfulfilled promises and aspirations rather than in an actual increase of mobility or flux of goods” (2012:32). The desires of those young that are waiting across the world, are deeply tied to what may broadly be termed the expectations of modernity, conditioned by local contexts and mediated through gender-dynamics, but broadly global in their scope. E.P Thompson, in his ‘Time-Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, discusses how industrial capitalism worked to compress and control time as a form of discipline of the working classes. A working class that this very com- pression helped create (1967).357 Today, however, that regimentation of time is a privilege suffered by few. Instead, the many make their living at the margins, in the informal economy, where time is discordant and life precarious.358 It constitutes a temporality that while imagined as linear is out of sync with the present. It is, as Schweizer puts it, the kind of waiting that “engenders a qualitative change in the harmony of that otherwise unconscious temporality which runs its course within us like a melody” (2005:781). We all wait, but theirs may be a different, crueler, more dissonant, sort of waiting.

The Trial In the famous parable at the end of Kafka’s The Trial, the man from the country waits in front of the gates to the Law. The door is open but the gatekeeper

357 As Schweizer writes, “For many historians the West’s adaptation to synchronized time offers itself as an explanation for the West’s economic – and therefore ‘moral’ – predominance in the world” (2005:779). 358 Whether they constitute the margins in any numerical sense is doubtful, for they are legion.

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 229 tells him he cannot enter. This is often understood as Kafka’s reflection on the nature of law and justice; the man waits for the moment of justice, for the promise of the law to be fulfilled, but it never arrives. Similarly, many “men from the countryside” have arrived at the threshold of modernity and manhood but cannot enter. Having accepted that disciplined time management and stable, gainful employment constitutes the price of masculinity and modernity, they willingly pay the price and obtain the ticket only to find a gatekeeper at the door. It is unclear in Kafka’s parable why the man cannot enter. Is the gatekeeper keeping him out? And who would be the gatekeeper at the door in the case of the young men? Many young men would perhaps answer that both the door- keeper and the door are symbols of the state. If the state, however defined, does not solely produce this imprecise yet powerful desire towards modernity, it remains understood as the central mechanism of reaching it and simultaneously what keeps one from reaching it. The cruelty of the disciplining state is that it comes to represent modernity and adulthood but is equally what comes to stand in its path. The citizen/subject is interpellated, removed from other social ties, called upon in a singular relationship, only to be left alone. This situation corresponds in many ways to what anthropologist Gregory Bateson termed the double bind. Schizophrenia, as understood by Bateson, arises out of the double bind, which has its origins in the family as the child is torn between two contradictory commands. The child cannot obey one command without disobeying the other (2000:221-225). Similarly, the young men in Tunisia are subjected to two contradictory commands; you must not fail to become an adult/modern and you cannot become an adult/modern.359 According to political theorist James Martel’s interpretation of the parable, by waiting for the Law the man from the country “is rendered an obedient subject, subordinate to and reﬂective of an absolute, sovereign authority in whose name he continues to wait” (2012:71). However, I argue that the young men’s waiting does not merely signal subordination. Waiting arises out of the tension of a system that is producing ever more surplus populations, and the expectations of a state delivering exactly what it no longer purports to be able to provide. It is as if in waiting for the state it is both being disembodied and rendered anew. The young men’s waiting comes in many ways to construct the state as a locus of power, comes to reinforce it as the central object of desire and despair. Waiting is a form of hope, a kind of promise. The waited

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230 | Chapter Seven for moment may never arrive. The hope of jobs, freedom and dignity may always remain out of reach, but for now, the state is caught in its imagination just as much as those waiting for it.

The Tragedy of Desire Psychologists have discussed the potentially productive dimensions of waiting at least since Freud’s Fort/Da game (2013). Freud discusses the child, Ernst, who while waiting for the return of his mother develops a game as a way of gaining a sense of control over a situation – the absence of his mother – where he is powerless. Similarly, I have argued that waiting for the promise of dignity, waiting for the state, is never wholly passive even if it is experienced as a lack. The young men are active, but aware that their activities are everywhere constricted. How then to understand the tensions in the agency of waiting? In his essay “The Tragic in Ancient Drama,” which is a part of his book Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard proposes that the meaning of tragedy has taken on a different resonance in the “modern” world. Kierkegaard suggests that one may even go so far as to say that it does not exist at all; at least in the way the ancients understood it. Tragedy has crumbled under the weight of modern notions of individual autonomy and responsibility, leaving no room for the truly tragic hero, who struggles and yet through forces not within his grasp, fails. There must, Kierkegaard claims, be something beyond the individual for the tragic to exist. In the modern world there exists nothing beyond the individual and therefore modern audiences cannot grasp the ancient understanding of tragedy, “We want to know nothing about the hero's past; we load his whole life upon his shoulders as his own deed, make him accountable for everything, but in so doing we also transform his esthetic guilt into ethical guilt” (1987:144). All failure is for moderns a failure of ethics and thus not truly tragic. Is this not a prescient explication of the plight of the much-vaunted neoliberal citizen who seeks to attain “success through self-reliant struggle” (Ong 1996:739). The Ancient Greeks, claims Kierkegaard, could view failure aesthetically, meaning without holding the hero solely responsible:

Even though the individual moved freely, he still depended on substantial categories, on state, family, and destiny[…]The hero’s downfall is therefore not the outcome simply of his own action, it is also a suffering, while in modern tragedy the downfall of the hero is really not suffering but action (1987:143).

This chapter, and the thesis as a whole, is about hope and disappointment, about attempting and failing; about “cruel optimism.” Yet my hope is that I

Entrepreneurs of Desperation | 231 have treated the faith and failure of my “heroes” aesthetically and not only ethically. Certainly, I do not wish, like Kierkegaard’s imagined modern audience, to only see their inability to reach their goals as a failure of character and action. Nor do I wish to go to the other (post-)modern extreme, to remove all sense of what Kierkegaard terms autonomy, and what academics term agency. Without agency, there too can be no tragedy. Tragedy demands an agency that can grasp its limits even as it strives to overcome them. If it is, as Kierkegaard says, that moderns are unable to understand the tragic, then I at least wish to show that the young men understand it in a fairly classical way. They still view their own lives and those of young men like them as tragic in Kierkegaard’s ancient aesthetical sense. Perhaps we can say instead that they treat the state ethically, rather than tragically, by demanding of the state to do its share, accepting no excuses, by believing in its autonomy and capacity to succeed in the face of overwhelming obstacles. Yet, they do not wait passively while the state fails in its ethical obligation, they do not treat their own lives as lacking in options. They struggle, in an aesthetically tragic way, all the while knowing that their success is not in their hands alone. By contrast, neoliberal subjects are those that are beyond the tragic, in Kierke- gaard’s sense of the moderns, in that they rarely doubt their own potential to be the directors of their own lives and are thus solely responsible for their own failures.360 By comparing the young men to Kierkegaard’s ancient Greeks, I do not wish to temporalize their difference and filter it via some modernist teleology. If anything, I believe the young men of interior Tunisia have a clarity of vision that is often more blurred in “modern” societies where it is clouded by notions of complete autonomy and the illusion of democratic certainty. The tragedy of life in the margins may lie precisely in the fact that it affords so few illusions.

360 This movement to view the self as self-creating, that leaves “the individual entirely to himself” I have conveniently called neoliberal, and yet that is a simplification and to some extent mystification of larger and more complex processes. That Kierkegaard, to some extent, described this process in 1843, is both a sign of his prescience as well as an indication that if there is something new in neoliberalism, it may be only its spread and speed.

8. Democratic Doubt

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world – W.B Yeats

We are all in shock. So much was hidden before. And now it's not – Ahmed

Alas! Alas! You have shattered the beautiful world with brazen fist; It falls, it is scattered! – Nietzsche

INTERLUDE 3: HUNGER

It’s Friday evening in Kasserine. I am out with Sari and Bilel. We are looking for a place to drink the two bottles of Tunisian wine that Sari has brought from the coastal, tourist town Monastir. We eventually settle for a park in Cité, a new middle-class neighborhood near the Arts College campus. The park is barren, with brown grass and a few stone benches. There are a few scattered groups of men sitting around us. On the other side of the park is a field packed with men drinking coffee and smoking water-pipes. I estimate there must be at least two hundred young men sitting there. “Is it always this packed in the evenings?” I ask. “Yes,” Bilel answers, “Always.” Sari goes to the café to bring three cups. We sit on an empty bench and in the dark open the wine bottle and pour them into the emptied coffee cups. Bilel is happy with the place, “I chose it because I know that we will be left alone here.” Sari is more concerned that we will be spotted drinking and get into trouble. “Is it illegal to drink in public?” I ask. Sari responds, “The police decide what is legal and what is not.” Bilel shrugs, “If the police come, I will deal with them.” I ask whether this worry over getting caught drinking by the police is recent. Bilel tells me,

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“It used to be better during Ben Ali. If you didn’t cause trouble the police left you alone. Most youths now, if they see the police they run away. Now they teach people to be afraid of the police. The state speaks only the language of violence. But I don’t run away. I know how to deal with them.” As we start drinking Bilel is discussing his latest money-making scheme, “High risks and high rewards” he says, but refuses to go into details. Sari is considering going to Algeria to look for work, “There is no future here. Kasserine is my home, but there is nothing for me here.” Sari takes the bottle of wine and hides it as a police car approaches. The car drives around the park. It stops on the main street, where there are several young men gathered around a few parked cars. “Those old men called the police on us,” Bilel says indicating a group sitting on a bench close by, “They told them that there were people drinking in the park. But the police misunderstood the situation and so they went to those guys with the cars instead of us.” Sari laughs, “Our police are stupid. That’s a good thing at least.” Bilel nods, “The government is stupid. Corrupt and stupid. To survive in Tunisia, you need to be able to talk, or to have contacts, or to be without fear. If you don’t have at least one of these three, then you are done for. I, for example don’t have connections, but I manage. I know how to handle anyone, I’m not afraid and I know what to say: when to lie and when to tell the truth. There is a saying in Tunisia, “Your tongue is your shield. If you betray it; it betrays you. If you protect it; it protects you.” Do you understand? I have been around this country. I have been in prison with Islamists and murderers. This is what I found, wherever I went. Everywhere the state is corrupt, the police violent, and the people have to lie to survive. And it has gotten much worse since the revolution.”361 “Why did the youth here rebel then?” I ask. Sari shakes his head “Ka- rim, be careful. Don’t think for a second that the youth here rose up because they were against the regime, or because they wanted freedom and justice. The young men made a revolution just so they could steal. Steal and destroy. We Tunisians have such things in our hearts. I know because

361 Similarly, in Hassouna Mosbahi’s book A Tunisian Tale, a character exclaims, “Lying is always useful in this country. People say that lying is some kind of monstrous act and that liars are going straight to hell without any mercy or pity, but everybody in this country lies, making an art form of it in a way that is unlike any other people in the world that I am aware of” (2011:18).

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I have it too. The protests started and chaos and stealing and smuggling erupted. During the time of Ben Ali, the youth of Tunisia did not know the meaning of politics, or government, or dictatorship or democracy, or any such thing. How could they have rebelled over politics? You don’t understand Tunisians, no matter how much we eat, we never stop being hungry.” Bilel is uncomfortable with the answer. “Don’t say such things Sari. Tunisians want to work, want dignity, but this revolution destroyed everything.”

INTRODUCTION This chapter attempts to do two things: to capture the quotidian experience of democratization in the margins and to bring out some “vernacular” understandings of democracy. I have attempted to show the persistent difficulty of turning Tunisia’s great advances, in terms of formal institutions, into a durable and inclusive democracy. The transition remains hampered by deep-seated societal ambivalence towards the state and frustration over the deteriorating economic situation. The largest and most widely cited surveys on Tunisian perceptions of democracy have been done by Arab Barometer and appear to show that a high percentage of people associate democracy with indecisive- ness, instability and poor economic performance, even as support for democracy has gone up marginally between 2011 and 2016 (Robbins 2016:1). This chapter argues that the rise of a free public discourse, by making the conflicts and tensions of society more visible, comes to produce an experience of confusion and uncertainty. “Speaking out” entails a recovery of dignity, but opens up for new indignities, by revealing the troubled state of affairs beyond the previous state-myths. The chapter shows that the clearest association with the current context of democratic transition is one of chaos, a sense of increased violence, uncertainty, and breakdown of social ties. The sense that violence comes from within the social body is a cause of anxiety and fear. What is feared, even more than a repressive state, is a “weak” state that cannot provide. I suggest that under the conditions of precarity, the general uncertainty of democratic transitions has been amplified and experienced as a large-

236 | Chapter Eight scale epistemological crisis, on an individual as well as a social level.362 This epistemological crisis entails a radical destabilizing of interpretive frameworks and leads to a search for stable political imaginaries. The second part of the chapter looks at quotidian understandings of democracy as expressed by the young men. Democracy, for many young men, is associated with a system where they are heard. This implies a state that can provide bread and dignity. Dignity connotes the ability to speak truth to power, but also a responsive state beyond political representation. “What they want” then is a strong state capable of redistributive policies rather than democracy only in a narrow sense of political representation and free and fair elections. The fact that many understand the democratic transition as having intensified a (neoliberal) logic of precarity rather than provided security, comes to weigh heavily against the transition process and amplifies their epistemological uncertainty. I do not claim that such understanding of democracy holds true across the country or in other social groups. Yet, in order to begin to think about the importance that expectations and experiences play in democratic transitions, we need to understand what democratization and democracy means for people in an everyday context. I seek to show the complex ways that democracy and democratic transitions are interpreted and understood locally. I do not merely attempt to provide a catalogue of different ways the term democracy is defined by the young but seek to understand it in the context it is used, and particularly I attempt to capture how it is experienced in the everyday as well as on the level of political imagination.

OPENING OF TRANSCRIPTS This first section investigates what happens when a free public space begins to emerge. It seeks to show how a degree of interpretive uncertainty is intrinsi- cally tied to the capacity to “speak out”, even if this comes to be amplified by other political and socio-economic factors.

362 The term is borrowed from MacIntyre’s article Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narratives and the Philosophy of Science (1977). The essay is focused on scientific change and MacIntyre argues against Kuhn and the idea of paradigm shifts. Instead he stresses continuity as well as discontinuity within ‘traditions’, be they scientific or not. I take no position as to the validity of his claims in relation to philosophy of science, only that the term as useful in understanding democratization

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The Sheep and the Minister It is late evening at the house of Fares, a young electrician. Fares lives with his grandmother in Talaboth, a small town in the Kasserine district, close to the border to Algeria. It is a town known for its smuggling and as Fares himself says, “In one way or another, everyone here is in the smuggling business.” We are having a discussion on the democratization process and Fares is attempting to explain the shift that has happened from the time of dictatorship:

During Ben Ali, when a minister came to Talaboth we killed sheep in his honor. When he saw the sheep, the minister thought that everything was fine and that everyone was happy. But we only did it because the mo’tamed (the local official) told us to do it. We did it out of both fear and to curry favor with the mo’tamed. And the mo’tamed did it so that the minister would be happy and say, “this is a good mo’tamed.” When the people here rose up and demonstrated against Ben Ali, the minister was taken by surprised and said “I was there last week, they killed 10 sheep in my honor. How could this happen?”

Fares, with his story of the minister, is articulating a version of what Timur Kuran (1998) referred to as the “preference falsification” problem of dictatorships. Kuran writes that “every Arab country exhibits an expressive equilibrium in which individuals refrain from speaking honestly for fear that the vast majority of their fellow citizens will stay loyal to the status quo” (1998:114). In contexts such as Ben Ali’s Tunisia, where people are accustomed to lying in public, this may lead to situations where, as in the case of the minister, every act of disobedience comes as a surprise. It also corresponds to the distinction between what James C. Scott (1989) terms public and hidden transcripts. The minister only has access to the public transcripts and so is ignorant of what is happening behind the officially sanctioned acts of reverence. In Fares’s narrative, the minister lets himself be fooled into believing that the slaughtering of sheep in his honor is a sign that people are content. This is not, however, to say, that agents of the state are always so quick to believe their own transcripts reflected back onto them. But the very fact that they, and the power of the state that they represent, are able to get the people to put up the appearance of happiness, is itself a sign of popular acquiescence. At the same time, this acquiescence means that agents of the state cannot know for sure what goes on behind their own rhetoric and rituals.

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As Fares explains it, part of the motivation for preference falsification was fear. Another part was to be on the good side of the authorities.363 During Ben Ali’s time, there were things about the state that were not said and done in public. There were rituals that needed to be followed, even if all involved knew them as empty. This, Fares suggests, is no longer the case in Tunisia. When I ask Fares about the situation now. He answers “Now? No one is surprised. Not the mo’tamed, not the minister, not the president. Everyone knows that no one is happy. And when we demonstrate now, no one listens.” When I ask how his own life has changed, he explains:

Before, to be employed in the administration you had to be part of the ruling RCD party. Now, you don’t have to be part of any party. It might help, but it might also hurt you. In 2008, I had to write an appeal for Ben Ali to be a candidate for the next presidential elections. The authorities gave me a paper and told me to sign it. Why? So that they could give me the document that showed that I had been present in school. They would not give me the document if I did not write the appeal to Ben Ali. Now, I don’t have to do anything like that. But sometimes they don’t pay us for six months. Now you don’t know when the next paycheck comes.

Fares claims that the old pressures for preference falsification are gone. What has replaced it is something altogether more ambiguous and uncertain.

Caged Birds Authoritarian rule means that, outside of the official transcripts, there is great uncertainty over what anyone believes, whether it be ones’ neighbor or even family members, because the pressures for dissimulation are so great. As Scott writes, “Each participant will be familiar with the public transcript and the hidden transcript of his or her [inner] circle, but not with the hidden transcript of the other” (1990:15). In dictatorships there are few, if any, places where “subordinates may gather outside the intimidating gaze of power” (1990:18). As Kuran emphasizes, the lack of information is not only from bottom to top, but also, and this is crucial, laterally between citizens. People may suspect that others do not mean what they say, but they cannot be sure. Sami says of the time of Ben Ali, “Before we couldn’t talk. We couldn’t think. There were only whispers.” Or as Hamma put it, “Before you were afraid of

363 It is also, I claim, because they may want to believe.

Democratic Doubt | 239 your brother, that he would talk against you.” As young man in Gafsa explained:

Before the revolution, if someone went anywhere and said, “I am from the Leila Ben Ali family”, he would eat for free, he would sleep for free, he would do what he wanted for free, and if anyone spoke out against it, they would put him in prison. Before, the one that closed the road to go on strike was taken to prison or killed. Back then there were no terrorists. There were no protests. But we were all, in a phrase, like caged birds. Quiet and we didn’t sing.364

The authoritarian state of Ben Ali severely limited the ability of people to communicate to each other their own positions, even relating to basic facts that may be inconvenient for the myths of the regime and induced a constant preference falsification. I do not mean to ascribe coherence and stability to the term authoritarian state/regime, nor to suggest that Tunisia under Ben Ali was completely depo- liticized and that people never spoke up. While society as a whole was characterized by a lack of political activity in the traditional sense, underground activities existed, as well as more quotidian forms of dissent. As Wedeen writes, “Depoliticization […]is never total in any regime” (1999:147). Au- thoritarian “as if” power does not preclude various forms of subversions of the signs of obedience, including jokes and innuendoes directed at the rulers. In the Arab World prior to the Arab Spring, there were widespread surveillance networks of the state that kept track of any serious expressions of dissent. At the same time, everyday occurrences of venting of frustrations, in both public and private, never disappeared.365 While a certain amount of what Bayat terms “public nagging” was tolerated, the state limited what could be expressed in public and thus there existed no public space in Claude Lefort’s sense of where speech “belongs to no one.”

364 As Naguib Mahfouz writes in his novel Café Karnak (1974) citizens of Arab states became “suspicious of everything, even the walls and tables” (quoted in Koerber 2017:15). 365 Bayat writes, “The practice of “public nagging” or venting and voicing grievances in public places remains a salient feature of public culture in the Middle East [...]the collective sentiments, shared feelings, and public opinions of ordinary people in their day-to-day speech, sar- casm, and acts that are usually expressed casually in urban public spaces, in taxis, buses, shops, main streets, backstreets, or deliberately in mass demonstrations [...]But given the regimes’ vast intelligence operations, it was likely that the elites and authorities could hear them but dismissed them as the commoners’ “usual bickering” or a cultural trait of the pitiable but “cunning poor” that had little to do with politics” (2017:137).

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Recovered Dignity The Tunisian revolution revealed the obvious: that the lack of information between citizens and between citizens and the regime is no guarantee of stability. If Wedeen (1999), Hibou (2011), and Havel (1985) emphasize the power of the regime to make populations complicit in their own repression, then Scott’s (1990) focus on “transcripts” brings out the fragile nature of this kind of as if power. As Scott writes, “It is one of the ironies of power relations that the performances required of subordinates can become, in the hands of subordinates, a nearly solid wall making the autonomous life of the powerless opaque to elites” (1990:132). It is also a barrier to its emissaries to truly know what is going on. While to some extend the revolution retroactively “proves” that the people were unhappy with the dictatorship, there would be no way of knowing before it happened.366 The outbreak of the revolution can be read, in the words of Scott, as the hidden transcript that “leapt onto the stage to declare itself openly” (1990:16).367 Habib, a man in his early 30s, remarks on the situation before the revolution:

Before the revolution we only got pieces of information from Facebook about the conditions of the poor and about the anger and frustration. Like the songs of El General, where he sings “I want another revolution.” I showed my father the song and he told me, “Close it down.” He was afraid. Now, we all watch what we like, we sing what we like, we say what we like.

Scott discusses the moment when previously hidden narratives are first expressed and “the enormous impact it typically has on the person (or persons) who makes the declaration and, often, on the audience witnessing it” (1990:207). Part of the force of the revolutionary moment was the way it opened up a space for expressing previous indignities. It is then no coincidence that the revolution is often referred to in Tunisia as the dignity revolution. Scott quotes historian Timothy Garton Ash, who wrote about the Polish revolution against communism, “Being able to speak the truth in public was part of that sense of recovered dignity” (1983:28, in Scott 1990:212). The authoritarian regime was fragile in the face of such exclamations of opinions,

366 The point is simply that it is not possible to ask questions of legitimacy under conditions of widespread preference falsification. 367 That is why the WikiLeaks document that revealed the extent of the corruption of the Ben Ali regime had such impact on Tunisian society: it revealed what everyone suspected but could not express.

Democratic Doubt | 241 or even basic facts, which were not necessarily in themselves political. As Ha- vel writes of the person that refuses to keep up the lie, “he rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete signiﬁcance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth” (1985:39 italics in original). What may be the consequence of this movement, from what Havel calls lies to truth, and what Scott terms a movement from hidden to open transcripts? If this and the other chapters of this thesis claim anything, it is that the most grievous situations of public dissimulation no longer prevail in Tu- nisia.368 My claim is that at least some of the transcripts are no longer hidden, particularly those connected to the state. And if the differences between the public and hidden transcripts have not completely dissolved, then at least they have become blurred. Some people may lie in public, may dissimulate, but it is no longer the central rock upon which politics stands. Such dissimulation is no longer mandated. I rarely needed to ask my interlocutors to share their frustrations in regard to the state, they volunteered them. The need for “con- fession” is almost a compulsion in which the previously held secrets come pouring out. Perhaps there is a delight in sharing what was before a transgression against the political order. Clearly, “speaking out” is part of living a more “dignified” life. Tunisians are no longer living like “caged birds.” Yet now, years after the revolution, these narratives lack the particular power of when they were first spoken out loud. Perhaps some of the disappointments in the revolution are part of that return to a “new normal” that no longer carries with it the sense of novelty and dignity. This in no way diminishes the gains made, the fact that many barriers have been broken. These gains still matter; yet as grievances, past and present, become openly discussed they take on a

368 Despite the sense expressed by many that “we say what we like” I do not claim that there are no more forms of domination and/or hidden transcripts in Tunisia. Only that the particular kind of subterfuge typical of authoritarian states, that of everyday dissimulation, is no longer at play. This does not mean that there are no longer public lies by the government or dissimulation by the population. As we heard from Bilel in the introduction, lies may still have a place in post-revolutionary Tunisia. But of a different variety perhaps. As an example, it is common to hear “those that join Nidaa Tounis or Ennahada are just doing it for jobs. They do not actually believe in the cause.” Here it is a voluntary act of dissimulation, of doing politics with explicit aim of economic compensation or patronage. This of course is not new. Membership in a political party was, if not enforced, often a necessary way to succeed. However, there is no direct fear of punishment for speaking out in public. And with regards to politicians lying, as Arendt writes “Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade” (2006:223). Nevertheless, the important difference is that the government’s claims, whether “true or false”, are now often and continuously challenged in the public. The very ability to express the opinion that the government is lying is a novel development in Tunisia, and a sign of a freer public.

242 | Chapter Eight life of their own. They become part of the larger social narratives that can often be profoundly unsettling to both society and the state. If during dictatorships speaking out threatens political order, in periods of democratization, so too can speaking out destabilize, albeit in very different ways.

CHAOS AND UNCERTAINTY Talking to Hamma, a few days before the first municipal elections in May 2018, he tells me:

Last night we went around town. There was a big crowd of Ennahda supporters, and on the other street just a few Nidaa Tunis supporters, maybe five or six of them. But, maybe Nidaa Tunis will win the elections. Who knows? Before, elections were won by 99 percent. Now they win by a few percent, and no one knows before the elections who will win. These are strange times in Tunisia; you cannot be quite certain what’s going on or what to believe.

Hamma’s reflections on the new uncertainty of electoral outcomes, are strikingly similar to the understanding of democracy by Przeworski as “contested elections with uncertain outcomes” (1991:10). This reflects a new kind of experience for Tunisians, where elections are now “free and fair” and the outcome is no longer given. Yet, for Hamma, the uncertainty of elections appears to signal larger uncertainties about a world turned on its head, where “you don’t know what is going on.” Where old truths no longer hold true. Elections are part of a more diffuse process, tied to questions of who rules, where power lies and even about the nature of social reality itself. Wassim, a young artist, puts it this way; “You see, before the revolution the relationship between the people and the government, between the society and the state, was clear. It was vertical. There was a president and there were the people. The one was above the other. Now, It’s complicated.” The image of verticality has not completely disappeared, but it is “complicated”, the distance between people and state remains, but is blurred. Who hears whom? Who is afraid of whom? Who controls whom? For many the answer remains unclear, and forms part of the confusion of the transition. It reflects an uncertainty of where power lies, both symbolically and materially.

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A Stranger in a Strange Land “I don’t know my country anymore,” a young doctor in Tunis says, “where did all this chaos come from?” What chaos does he refer to? There is no simple answer. The term transition (intiqal) itself conveys the ambiguity of a discontinuity and continuity between past, present and future. Like the revolution, intiqal, is a time where time itself is in flux.369 The frustration and disappointment that fueled the revolution, and now the disappointment in the revolution, cannot be divided from the disappointment in the transition period. Yet, if the revolution is felt through its absence, the democratic transition, while vague, is perhaps more visible. If the revolution represents failed promises then, for many, the transition and democracy represent chaos and crisis. As a young man from Kasserine said:

The revolution, I hate it. Hate it. And this whole democratic transition, it has some good effects, yes, but if you compare the good and the bad you will see clearly that it was a failure. We lost our personal security and we lost our economic standard of living. There is violence and poverty everywhere now.

At the most concrete level, the post-revolutionary periods is experienced as one of terrorism, increasing economic insecurity, fear of crime, and increased garbage on the streets. It is not surprising therefore, that the democratization process is associated with these. If such experiences are rooted in the lived world, they are also manifestations of new symbolic boundaries and political imaginaries. I am talking to Hammoudi, who runs his own NGO that helps farmers invest in sustainable farming in Sidi Bouzid:

Hammoudi: Everyone goes on strike, in the name of democracy. Now it’s the teacher’s union. People have understood that you only get your rights if you strike. Today it’s the teachers, next day another group. Karim: Isn’t that a good thing? That they get their voices heard. H: Yes, maybe in a normal context, but not now. We have massive security problems. So many ISIS combatants that went to Syria have come back. Yesterday, or the day before, they found a terrorist hideout in Kasserine. They were locals from Kasserine, but had been to Syria. And the teachers and state employees are going on strike. They have a good salary, in relative terms. Even phosphate workers in

369 The intiqal term is used in all the Arab Spring states to cover the regimes which followed the ousting of the former dictatorships. Its universal choice, in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, conveyed a sense that a better permanent order would arrive after a transition process.

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Gafsa, they go on strike, the ones that are already employed. They make good money compared to the hungry, starving, and unemployed. And they demand that the phosphate money go to them and their region. Should the oil money only go to the village where it is? How can people think like this? It should be spread equally. K: But at least they have a voice now. H: Democracy here has become a slogan or a mantra, but without implementation. It’s like America that talks about democracy and invades Iraq, or now in Syria. Where is that democracy? Or Israel? 70 years of occupation and the world looks on and talks about democracy, but it doesn’t give Palestinians any rights to their own land. It’s the same here, everyone goes out and talks about democracy, but really, it’s just a slogan, and behind it is anarchy and violence.370

For Hammoudi, the democratic process in Tunisia has led to a breakdown of the social ties that bind Tunisians together. National solidarity has been replaced with individual, communal or interest group ties. Behind their divisive rhetoric lies “anarchy and violence.” For Lefort, democracy means “the freedom to express conflict throughout society” (1988:29). What the young men show is that these expressions of conflict are experienced as threatening. For many, the ability to “speak out” is understood to have undermined the fabric of society. However, it is not merely words that are understood as threatening.

Transgressions The young men who experience the chaos of transition as threatening, are themselves often portrayed as representing this societal chaos, both in media and everyday conversations. The most extreme manifestation of this breakdown of the social fabric is the high number of young Tunisian men that went to fight for ISIS following the revolution.371 For many Tunisians, the young men that join ISIS and other violent and radical groups, signals that the violence within society can no longer be contained. Yet this gendered and generational view of chaos can also take other forms. Sofien, a young man from Kasserine, tells me:

Democracy here is not done right. Women, they are free here, and have rights, which is good. But it’s gone out of control. They do things here that they would

370 I discuss the comparative dimensions of many narratives more in chapter nine and the contentious relationship to the West in chapter ten. 371 Between 3000 to 7000 Tunisians, mostly young men, went to Syria to fight for ISIS (Mac- donald, & Waggoner 2018). Per capita this may be the highest number of any country.

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never do it Europe. I am not against women being able to go out and have a cigarette or drink coffee. But here it has gone too far. That’s not even the worst. It’s extremism too. We have had hundreds of Tunisian women who have joined ISIS. Yes, they are few and in a minority. But have any women gone from Algeria? Maybe one, at the most. Or Egypt? Which is so poor. None.

Here the fact that women’s freedom has “gotten out of control” and simultaneously that women have joined a violent jihadist organization is seen as another sign of boundaries being transgressed, of a crisis between people and within society. Ali, a young man from Gafsa, whose father suffered abuse during the Ben Ali regime and is extremely thankful for the revolution, nevertheless expresses concern over the transition:

Now, I don’t know what happens. Every day you hear about sons that beat up their fathers, fathers that rape their daughters, sons who rape their mothers. You hear things that the mind doesn’t believe, but it’s happening. I can’t read the news anymore.

Stories of incest and rape circulate in the media, and are often repeated by Tunisians as evidence that society is coming apart. For Freud, and thinkers influenced by him, the incest taboo is the first Law, it is the precondition for Law itself. Psychoanalytically inflected scholars would claim that concerns over the breakdown of the most fundamental moral taboos arises out of the passing of paternal authority. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo (2013), it is the brothers that come together and murder the father who has monopolized all power, that triggers the return of paternal authority, in the guise of the deified murdered father. The incest taboo arises out of the fear that the brothers will devour each other, and the prohibition becomes sanctified by the totem/dead father.372 French literary scholar and anthropologist Rene Girard argues that the popular emergence of themes of incest and patricide are the clearest signals of a social crisis. Incest represents the ultimate sign of a breakdown in the “natural order”, of Law in the broader sense, and comes to be associated with both a loss of, and abuse by, (paternal) authority (1979:76). The concern over

372 Freud writes “The new organization would have collapsed in a struggle of all against all, for none of them was of such overmastering strength as to be able to take on his father's part with success. Thus the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together, but—not, perhaps, until they had passed through many dangerous crises—to institute the law against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for dispatching their father” (2013:144).

246 | Chapter Eight incest that the young men report reflects a fear over the brewing conflict within society: between the victorious brothers. Many feel less safe, feel that crime has increased, that the fabric of society is fraying and that society is turning on itself, that violence lurks within.373 Certainly, the connection between revolution, democracy and chaos is an old one. Arab leaders have long equated the word revolution (thawra) with chaos (fawda). As Hasso & Salime write, “Leaders who used such language in fact enunciated, even promised, that revolution would translate into negative chaos: destruction and a terrifying loss of predictability and control in daily life” (2016:15). Is the crisis of transition then a counter-revolutionary product of the old regime and its cronies? Or were they simply correct in their understanding of the societies they ruled? As I discuss below, neither answer is sat- isfactory.

Manufacturing Chaos The narratives of chaos and conflict are shared among people at homes, in cafés, at jobs. A main source of information, however, remains the media, both old and new. I will not dwell on the complex topic of the media’s influence, but merely raise the issue of who or what are understood to be “behind” these narratives, since the young themselves discuss it. If many youths in Kasserine and Gafsa agree that the current situation is chaotic, there is less agreement on who or what is to blame. Following the revolution, and particularly during the first presidential elections, there was a strong push from the newly formed Nidaa Tounis, and many of the large television channels and printed media –with connections to the old regime— to lay the blame for the “chaos” of the transition at the feet of Ennahda and Islamists more broadly. They propagated for a return of the “dignity of the state.” This narrative is also heard among young men. Bilal sees Ennahda as the culprit, “It’s a terrorist party. When it got into power, Tunisia become a terrorist state. After the revolution, a terrorist tree was planted in Tunisia and that grew roots in the state and now it controls everything. Now chaos and

373 The moral and gendered elements of transgression are important, but should be treated with caution too. The narrative of moral crisis is one that Islamist groups have pushed for decades to attack westernization, secularization and modernization (Schielke 2015:7). Yet, for most young men I have spoken to it is not the return to an imagined Islamic order that is understood as the solution. What the young men ask for is not a restoration of religious authority, but of (paternal) state authority. I explore this gendered narrative more, and the degree to which the revolution can be understood as a kind of patricide, in chapter ten

Democratic Doubt | 247 corruption are everywhere.” However, among leftist activists and Ennahda supporters, groups otherwise at odds with one another, there is more often an agreement that the media and segments of the old regime, “the deep state”, are exaggerating and even creating the conditions they claim to be able to solve. Fares says, “The deep state is fermenting a situation of fear.” I do not dismiss the claim that sections of the media and their connections with the old regime may have a vested interest in producing and heightening the sense of insecurity. The uncertainty over whether the media is simply reporting on, or reinforcing and “producing”, the sense of insecurity and confusion is itself part of the experience of transition. I do not believe, however, that the sense of uncertainty can only be reduced to elite, or deep state, manipulation. This is particularly clear in social media, where it is the young themselves that write and share stories about the “chaos.”374 Democratization as a process of revelation, the opening of hidden transcripts, is central I argue for understanding the sense of crisis and uncertainty, even if certain groups may have an interest in emphasizing the difficulties of the transition. Malek who works for a civil society organization in Tataouine puts it clearly:

It’s wrong to think that things were better before. It’s because now we can see and talk about it. All the things that happened before, the murders and theft and crime and violence that the state didn’t want anyone to know about. There was a lid on everything. And now we see it. It’s also the case that certain segments of the media are exaggerating the negative. Now, every day in the news you read about the problems. They want to create an image of chaos, they have their own interests, they want a return to the old regime.

Malek suggests here that the dictatorship kept the lid on things before, that things were not better but only more hidden and that the media is exaggerating things now in order to pave the way for a return to dictatorship. Malek also claims that it is not only an issue of the media and the deep state, but also that Tunisians have not understood the proper meaning of freedom and democracy. He says that, “Freedom is understood wrong. We were put under pressure for so long that there was an explosion and we were confused between freedom and chaos. Now there is no freedom and democracy and even nation, anymore.” As Saif, a young rapper from Kasserine, told me, “Everything they

374 Similar to the way Velikonja writes about nostalgia for socialism as both an “industry of nostalgia” as well as a more bottom-up nostalgia. It cannot be reduced to only manipulation. (2009)

248 | Chapter Eight say about us young men from Kasserine is true, but if you keep a dog caged for 23 years and then let him out, he will be a monster.”375 The violence and chaos of democratization is understood in terms of a “deep state” creating chaos to produce its return, but also as coming from below. There is, for some, a keen sense that the democratic transition cannot erase the violent past of the dictatorship. That decades of authoritarian rule continues to shape the way society and the youth engage with the world. As Khaled, a young poet tells, me, “The problem is that people here have taken freedom, but without responsibility. Before, we were allowed nothing. Now, we think freedom means doing what you want.” The physical manifestation of the current chaos is the constant mention of the increased garbage on the street. As a young man in a café put it, “The streets were clean before the revolution. Now look at it.” I interject, “But at least there is freedom of expression now.” He responds “What does that do? Only trouble. The people are no longer afraid; that is true. But people here need fear. Otherwise we do anything. Freedom here means doing what you want.”376 Understanding that the authoritarian past lingers, is I argue, important. It entails seeing some of the ambiguities of the transition as an on-going dialogue about the meaning of freedom and democracy. It reflects a concern that without top-down restrictions, there is no mitigating force on the potentially destructive aspects of freedom; that such a society comes to devour itself. It conveys a strong wish for more responsibility both from the state and the youth themselves.

Fear not the People As I have attempted to show, a common theme in everyday discussions is that the transition has let loose forces that society and the state can no longer control. Order, in its descriptive sense of continuity, is destabilized as former hierarchies and dimensions of control are changed and there is a profound uncertainty over where power now lies. Many understand the democratic reforms themselves as unleashing chaos. Jihed and Ahmed are two young men who just finished a graduate degree in interior design in Kasserine. They plan to continue straightaway to do a master’s degree in the same institute, “What else is there to do? We cannot get jobs commensurate with our education” ⁠ Ahmed tells me. They mostly hang out by themselves and drink coffee and

375 23 years is the length of time Ben Ali was in power. 376 The claim that freedom tends to run amok if not unchecked has echoes of Plato’s Republic.

Democratic Doubt | 249 beers, play video games and sometimes go to the tourist towns of Hammamet or Sousse for a few days. As their fathers have government employment, they are somewhat better off than many others in Kasserine. While they, like many young men, do not consider themselves political, they feel they know what is wrong:

Ahmed: Ben Ali was afraid of the people here, he felt forced to help and invest, not out of love but fear. Now the politicians do nothing. Karim: You mean the government no longer fears the people? Jihed: Yes. They can ignore us now. And terrorism lets them get away with everything. They can say, “we don’t need to invest in Kasserine because of terrorism.” Well, before the revolution there were no terrorists here.377

Significantly, the worst impulses of the state, Jihed and Ahmed claim, were kept in line during Ben Ali, through its fear of the people. This suggests an interesting reversal to the narrative that the Arab Spring removed the people’s “barrier of fear.” Yes, the people in post-revolutionary Tunisia may no longer fear the state, but the young men suggest that the state now no longer fears the people. The “democratic state” remains external but is now freed from restraint and is thus more dangerous for its marginal populations. In this understanding of democratization, public acts of dissent no longer carry the same threat to the order and can thus more easily be ignored by the state. Seemingly paradoxically, the ability to express oneself and to dissent has meant a sense of disempowerment. Fear appears to cut both ways. The citizens previously feared the government, but the government feared the people too. If one narrative claims that following the democratic transition the Tuni- sian state has become less responsive due to its lack of fear of its unruly population, another narrative on a similar theme is that the democratic transition has undermined the state itself, that “it” too has been enveloped by chaos. As a young man put it, “The lack of fear is no good. The administration doesn't work more than five minutes now. They just spend their time in cafés drinking coffee. There is no responsibility. Next election we need a dictator. The people don't know their own good. They need pressure.”378 Here the young

377 While the number of terrorist attacks in and around Kasserine has increased following the transition, there were groups of terrorist cells in and around the Algerian border prior to the revolution. 378 There may certainly be an element of resentment here, against those who have the kinds of secure government jobs that so many young men desire. In what can appear an almost gro- tesque act of mimicking, the government workers choose to spend their times in cafés filled with the unemployed.

250 | Chapter Eight unemployed men experience the lack of state-efficacy as a kind of affront to the dignity of the state. The state cannot get its own administrators to work without fear, let alone anyone else. The breakdown of fear has undermined both the state’s willingness and ability to act. This could be understood as the manifestation of power that is primarily articulated through force or the threat of force. There is a fear that without fear the state’s ability to repress may also mean an inability to provide. The state is no longer Ben Ali, it has become disembodied, has become more “democratic”, this is experienced not only as a form of empowerment but also fundamentally threatening. The notion that Tunisians need fear to be ruled is a key theme that I return to in chapter ten. It signals that the sense of crisis is one of authority and power. The experience of chaos reflects many things; a decline in security and the economic situation, an ability to speak about social ills, a media that may amplify this further for its own interests. But on a fundamental level it reflects the opening of the democratic “empty space of power.” It signals an anxiety over where power now lies. Power is here both more symbolic and more practical than the question of representative institutions. It appears to signal a diffuse space of social discipline and the concrete violence of the state. The fact that the previous neoliberal authoritarian model did not in the end “work”, that the revolution was a reaction to this very “rule by fear” appears to make little difference when faced with the chaos of the present. The very ability to openly ask questions such as: “What has happened to my country?” “Where did all this violence come from?” “Who rules?” instantiates a desperate search for answers.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS Rather than suggest simply that democratization creates crisis, I argue that the depth of the crisis cannot be divorced from the uncertainty of the margins and the floundering expectations of a decent life. I suggest that if the old symbolic order threatens to reassert itself, this is partly due to the fact that the experience of democratization and the expectations of it are so far apart. I argue that the uncertainty inherent in any transition, together with the precarity of the margins, has given rise to an epistemological crisis. I understand an epistemological crisis as an extreme form of uncertainty, where the symbolic order begins to come undone. As MacIntyre writes, “The agent who is plunged into an epistemological crisis knows something very important: that

Democratic Doubt | 251 a schema of interpretation which he has trusted so far has broken down irre- mediably” (1977:458). Things that were certain are now not, and a common question is, “What is going on here?” (MacIntyre 1977:454). Importantly, the transition appears to instantiate a process of interpretative crisis, and uncertainty surrounding not only what is happening but what things mean. There are both practical and more diffuse dimensions involved. It is a crisis in political imaginaries, as previous truths come to dissolve. It is a crisis of speech itself, as the opening of the public space increases uncertainty over the nature of people and power, and it is a crisis of social relationships, as fears are raised over the transgression of taboos and violence within society. These difficult and often uncomfortable questions that are raised by the opening of public space become all the more pressing for the young men when everyday life is dominated by the “race for the khubza.” The challenges of effectively navi- gating social life, and leverage what little resources they have, makes life all the more precarious and the crises more threatning.379 This precarious state of being contains dimensions of liminality, what Thomassen refers to as “the loss of taken-for-granted structures” (2014:114).380 Liminal periods are periods of potential, defined by new forms of patterns of thought and behavior, as well as periods of risk and danger (Turner 1988). Liminality involves, as Girard points out, a loss of difference, a breakdown of distinctions; a fundamentally unsettling and disorienting experience (1979:285). The longer this period of uncertainty continues the greater the risk for those involved. Thomassen writes about being in states of liminality, “We may refresh our ethics; but in liminality the very moral foundation of sociability can also be broken down, and with devastating consequences” (2014:84). However, unlike the liminal experiences describe by Van Gennep and his disciples, in an epistemological crisis there is no obvious way to return to a state of normalcy.381

379 I speculate that for coastal middle classes the cause of the crisis appears clearer: it is the marginalized and “dangerous” young men who are threatening the transition. Furthermore, relative economic stability of this group may render such questions less pressing. For the young men it may be a good deal more unclear who or what is to be blamed, and what is to be done. And a good deal more urgent to resolve. 380 As I have written elsewhere, I hesitate to call democratic transitions liminal and I reserve the term liminal for a process of moving or being between two known states. Yet there are many convergences between democratic transitions, epistemological crisis and liminality. 381 In the liminality of youth discussed in previous chapters, there is at least a sense of what leaving liminality would men: adulthood, and who is responsible for realizing it: the state. In an epistemological crisis no such certainties exist.

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McIntyre suggests that in the face of an epistemological crises one needs to become “epistemologically self-conscious” which requires reflection on the basis of our beliefs. If a new and stable narrative is to emerge it needs to both explain and modify the past beliefs and their breakdown. It needs a future- oriented narrative and needs to make sense of the past:

When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them. The narrative in terms of which he or she at first understood and ordered experiences is itself made into the subject of an enlarged narrative. (1977:455)

This collective reinterpretation and reintegration of the past, would then explain both the current crisis by way of history, and show the path forward. Such an interpretive process can, however, just as easily undermine the transition as bolster it.382 For some young Tunisians it is clear that “what went wrong” is that chaos was let loose by removing force and fear, even if that chaos was produced externally. Sami, an actor from Kasserine that tours the country doing children’s plays reacts when I mention Saif’s comment about Ben Ali’s regime as “living in cages,”

The bomb that is called the Arab Spring was exploded and set the Arab world on fire. There were foreign elements involved. If you ask people and look for the truth, you will find it. You said some youth told you we used to live in a cage. It is not true that we lived in a cage before. We had culture, we had respect and responsibility. We had people working in the offices, following the law. Yes, there was corruption at the top, but now it’s everywhere. Our culture has become less cultured, just watch TV today and you will be shocked.

For Sami, democratization has meant anarchy and a society that is less cultured. The perceived chaos of the transition can act as justification for a return to a more authoritarian form, even if this chaos is understood to come from “the outside.” Maher is a young and talented man from Kasserine who has won a prestigious scholarship to study abroad:

382 Since MacIntyre’s investigation concerns knowledge-systems, his conceptualization is agnostic over whether this would be a democratic or authoritarian solution.

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We are not ready yet for democracy. Democracy here in Tunisia is exclusionary. ‘We are a democracy’ they say ‘but we will exclude you, because of your sexual orientation or something else’. Bourguiba forced through some progressive ideas that most people were against. In a dictatorship, you can have some very progressive things together with some very bad things, but I don’t want this generation to be sacrificed to [have merely] reached democracy.

Here are clear echoes of the language of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, as well as other “secular” regimes in the region that “have historically constituted themselves as protectors of women and ethnic and religious minorities, and thus better than the spectral alternative” (Hasso & Salime 2016:15). Given the considerable rights afforded women and minorities in the new constitution, such fears may appear overblown. However, the fact that such sentiments persist reflects an anxiety of the open and “empty space of power.” An uncertainty over who will come to occupy its nebulous center.383 A conversation with Ali, a young engineer, shows how the transition has raised uncomfortable questions, “Everyone in this town, perhaps in every town in Tunisia, knows someone that went to fight for ISIS” Ali tells me, and I ask, “Why do you think so many went from Tunisia?” After a long silence Ali responds, “People say that it was because of money. But I am not so sure. We have violence in us. Something in our society has gotten wrong. We all have some Daesh within us.” Here the democratic transition is a kind of moment of revelation, as a young man said “We are all in shock. So much was hidden before. And now it's not.” MacIntyre writes that, “An epistemological crisis is always a crisis in human relationships” (1977:455). The realization of the violence and corruption inherent in society itself becomes the justification for dictatorship. In such a view, violence “from above” is necessary to avoid it “from below.” The repressive state is necessary to protect society from itself. Only a Leviathan can suppress the destructive impulses of society.384 The brief period of democratic anarchy becomes little more than a reminder and rein- vigoration of why the authoritarian state is needed.

383 As the old adage goes, “Better the devil you know”: 384 In psychoanalytical terms one could say that it represents a fear of the self, a fear that one is not “ready”, a fear of adulthood and the loss of the superego. A fear of the unconscious and the process of discovery, and so a pull towards familiar paternal authority. A sense of loss of power as well as a fear of it.

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Even for those less certain about the causes or reasons of the crisis, epistemological self-consciousness is proving difficult because the crisis makes distinctions unclear and a wish to return to the past is tempting.385 Cause and effect become difficult to tell apart. This brings to mind Žižek’s discussion on symptoms:

Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively – the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. (1995:57)

The process of analysis continually produces the symptoms of conflict and chaos. Here, the process of analysis is democracy, and the patient is unable to distinguish between the symptoms and the process that brought them into view. As Ali put it, “There is water coming in through the holes in the roof, and we blame the rain.” Yet this should not be read as meaning that young Tunisians are under a sort of false consciousness. The degree to which the opening of hidden transcripts creates or merely expresses dormant differences has no clear answer. There is no way of knowing the extent of the dysfunc- tionalities, of the conflicts, hidden under the public transcripts in authoritarian contexts. In a very real sense, the democratic transition has, by rendering problems visible, created the conditions of confusion. And even if many “know” that these issues are not produced solely by the democratization, they may still desire a return to authoritarian “certainty.” Even those that sense that the corruption and violence is a product of decades of dictatorship may decide that the price of epistemological self-consciousness is too high, that the empty place of power needs to be filled and the indeterminacy that is inscribed in democracy is simply too threatening. At the very least, while many of the current problems were inherited from the old regime, the inability to solve these perceived problems still weighs against the transition. In fact, many know all too well that these problems preceded democracy, but they may still prefer a context in which the problems cannot be expressed and are thus less

385 Whether this should be properly called nostalgia is contentious; since much of the focus on socialist nostalgia emphasizes the fact that socialism cannot return, “Nostalgia is in a way an impossible wish, a wish broken in itself, a wish that cannot be realized—and precisely because of that reason it is so strong, so present, so convincing” (Velikonja 2009:546). Rather, the point, in the Tunisian context, is exactly that the desire for authoritarianism is a wish that can potentially be realized.

Democratic Doubt | 255 visible or one in which the normal citizen does not have to grapple with them.386 An epistemological crisis is an unstable condition that while opening up for a process of self-examination, simultaneously reaches for its resolution. If one follows McIntyre’s reading of an epistemological crisis, the solution entails introspection into why the old world crumbled. The young men are heavily involved in a process of sense-making; of re-interpreting the crisis in ways that are intelligible to them. One consequence of this this that the old symbolic order threatens to reinsert itself, but this time from “below”, via the young men’s attempts to make their crisis understandable. Yet, I argue that an epistemological crisis is not merely an intellectual or interpretive exercise and its resolution requires more than finding plausible narratives. Firstly, even if for some young men the crisis is understood to arise out of a democratic condition, this does not automatically provide a solution (Can we go back? Should we go back? Were we the problem all along?) Sec- ondly, and more importantly, the crisis experienced by the young men amplifies an already precarious existence. For them, questions of power and responsibility, and their interpretations, cannot be divorced from the young men’s quotidian struggles and needs.387 Thus, whatever “solutions” that will arise will have to provide more than mere myths.388 This is not to say that most young men desire an authoritarian revival. As I discuss below, the preferred resolution for many young men may very well be a democratic order that provides “bread and dignity.” But in the absence of such a dispensation, the authoritarian shadow looms large.

VERNACULAR DEMOCRACY While we may categorize the current Tunisian experience of the last few years as a democratization process or a transition, it is in Lefortian terms already

386 Elias Canetti makes the interesting observation that “The doubt people feel toward all freer forms of government—a loathing, as if such governments were unable to function with any seriousness —is connected to their lack of mystery” (Quoted in Theweleit 1989:109). This could be tied to the control of information of authoritarianism; where “not knowing” provides a sort of comforting illusion. Only the invisible is “real.” 387 As Harold Wydra writes “it is one of the fundamental anthropological conditions of power that situations of authority vacuum are marked by the need for orientation, for yardsticks and markers of certainty” (2008:119). Such yardsticks may be more important for the precarious than for the comfortable classes. 388 Pace McIntyre, we could say that it is precisely because their crisis is not merely intellectual, but lived, that it threats their very ability to act, that it is experienced as a crisis at all.

256 | Chapter Eight democratic, even if not all participants see it as such. Uncertainty, argues Lefort, is part of the democratic experience itself; even if, as I suggest, it may be more pronounced in periods of transition and economic hardship. There is no escape from this breakdown of certainty, but at best a slow habituation. The uncertainty can be institutionalized but cannot be removed. Lefort is clear in that democracy is destabilizing and the desire towards certainty is ever- present. The very attempt to escape uncertainty is the democratic condition and crisis is the permanent condition of the democratic subject, “He is doomed to be tormented by a secret uncertainty” (Lefort 1988:180). In transitions, this uncertainty may be less secret and more clearly embodied in everyday life.389 If a Lefortian perspective makes us keenly aware of the difficulties of democratization and democracy more broadly, this is not to say that some of the problems associated with the transition are not real or are particular to Tuni- sia, and cannot or should not be solved. In order to get a fuller sense of the lived experience of transition, I believe it is necessary to go beyond looking at democracy as uncertainty, but also engage with the ways in which young men at the margins understand democracy. It should be stressed that this is done not in order to attempt a coherent definition of how democracy is understood, but to better understand some of the tensions of the transition, and above all to capture the expectations of democracy against which the current crisis is experienced and perhaps exacerbated. Survey research by the Arab Barometer has found that many Tunisians do not see their country as democratic:

First, most Tunisians believe that their country is far from being fully democratic. When asked to place the level of democracy in Tunisia on a scale of zero to 10, with zero being a complete autocracy and 10 a complete democracy, the average score was 5.0. This rating represents a marginal increase since 2013 (4.3), but underscores that Tunisians believe that their country has a long way to go to becoming fully democratic. (Robbins 2016:2)

389 Lefort in his own discussions after all remains ambiguous to the degree to which participants themselves are aware of the uncertainty. By contrast, among my interlocutors there is no such confusion over their confusion. They know that they do not know. Does established democracy then entail forgetting of ignorance? Perhaps democratization affords a sort of Socratic wisdom that threatens to give rise to Platonic certainty.

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Yet, how democracy is understood and what they mean by “fully democratic” remains unclear. I argue that in the context of Tunisia and youth in the interior, a recurring and important theme among the young men is that to the degree that democracy is desired by the young men in interior Tunisia, it is understood to be associated with more than elections or freedom of expression. “Real” democracy is understood in terms of a responsive state with welfare provisions, a strong middle-class and increased equality.

To Be Heard There exists a lively scholarly debate regarding the ways in which democracy is understood by populations. Some large-scale survey studies claim that democracy tends to be understood in terms of civil liberties, primarily freedom of speech, across contexts; western and non-western alike (Dalton, Sin & Jou 2007). Others appear to show major differences across and within countries (Baviskar & Malone 2004). While the arguments tend to focus on formalist versus substantive understandings of democracy, those that have used ethnographic methods tend to dispute such cross-cultural claims and argue that the meaning of terms like democracy and freedom of speech are not the same across contexts (Karlström 1996, Khanani 2014, Schaffer 2014,).390 Among the young men in interior Tunisia when the question of freedom of speech comes up, it is sometimes disparaged because it has not been followed by any positive results. Thus, a young man exclaims, “We have freedom of expression, but nothing to eat.” Freedom of speech here appears to connote speaking out, “saying what we want.” However, like in Schaffer’s study of the meaning of democracy in the Philippines, for some, freedom of expression is understood as meaningful “only when followed by tangible results—not only low prices or easy bank loans, but also jobs, secure housing, health care, anti- drug programs, or the like” (2014:312). Here speaking out is understood in terms of airing grievances towards a state that provides “freedom of expression as a means for securing social benefits” (Schaffer 2014:313). Others see it as connected with the uncertainty of democratic transition; that democracy, often understood as the ability to express one’s opinion, is inherently chaotic. As Khaled says, “We have democracy but the economy is a real and deep problem. We vote and can speak our minds but before you had some economic rights. If someone stole, you could go to authorities. Now

390 As Khanani asks, “But does everyone who says they value democracy mean the same thing? (2014:4)

258 | Chapter Eight you can’t, it's anarchy.” Democracy here means the ability to vote and speak freely, but has concomitantly also been experienced as less economic security and less rule of law. This represents concerns over the previously discussed stability of the state and its ability to enforce rule of law, and the symbolic tension in where power lies, and who has authority. What Fares’s story, at the beginning of the chapter, indicates is that while citizens can now converse openly and the government can now hear what people are saying, the state has shut its ears, “When we demonstrate now, no one listens.” As another young man puts it, “Do we have democracy? I don’t know. All I know is that today the people do what they want and the government does what it wants.” Here the previous preference falsification has been replaced with something else – a disinterest by the state. The young men suggest that their ability to speak openly has been followed by state apathy. In Fares’s account of his RCD membership, the previous link between loyalty and reward has been severed, and enforced patronage replaced with state neglect. If people are no longer complicit in their own oppression in the same way, neither is the state responsive to their demands. A process of “enforced dissimulation”, where membership in the party regime and pretense of loyalty to the ruler was mandatory, has been replaced with an increased sense of insecurity. Much of the ambiguity towards freedom of speech can be understood as tied to a sense of having a voice without visibility or recognition – without a receiver. There is a general acknowledgment that one can now speak freely without fear of reprisal, but that “no one listens”; or more specifically, that the state does not listen. In Karlström’s study of how democracy is understood in Baganda, freedom of expression is tied to the extent to which speaking out leads to change, or at the very least being recognized, even if not as an equal. Karlström writes on Baganda that:

One of the most consistent characteristics of these equations of democracy with the freedom of speech is the implied orientation of that speech. It is not speech directed toward a general audience of equals, but rather the speech of subjects directed toward their ruler. (1996:487)

Karlström emphasizes the hierarchical aspect and dependence, in this understanding of freedom of speech in Baganda. This may appear paradoxical and antithetical to a “proper” understanding of freedom of speech. It seems that for some young men in the Tunisian margins, democratization has formalized

Democratic Doubt | 259 their rights to express themselves, but has not emphasized the need for the state to be responsive, to listen. Here democratization is understood as the transition from a state that simultaneously listened closely and yet induced silence through control and violence, to a state that no longer attempts either. This understanding represents, I argue, a fear among the young, less of being silenced, but more of not being heard. Part of this fear can be tied to Lefort’s insistence that in a democracy power is located in the People, at the same time as the People is an absence. This search for “the missing People” opens up for an uncertainty over where power lies. Paradoxically, the process of power shifting towards the people can be experienced as disempowering by rendering it invisible. In the context of young men in Tunisia, this reflects a worry that the state can now ignore the people, but also that the people ignore the state. One tension here is that this diffusion of power also begs the question: who is responsible? The answer “I am” is both a partial and an uncomfortable one for the young men in the margins. Uncomfortable in that it may easily come to reinforce a neoliberal governance where subjects are responsible for their own well-being. It is partial in that every day the young men experience their powerlessness as a brute fact, even if it is not complete. As I understand it, this “fear of not being heard” in this context represents a fundamental anxiety about being “beyond the state” and becoming part of a surplus population. This fear that they are superfluous is reinforced in their everyday lives and is tied to a neoliberal logic at its most visible in the margins, Li terms this “the politics of letting die” (2009:68). State violence remains a common fixture in many young men’s lives, exacerbated by an increased economic insecurity, but crucially, its absence is just as threatening as its presence. Dependence, even an authoritarian and violent one, is where the state acknowledges some semblance of responsibility. What this suggests is that while the transition can be understood as the movement towards a democratic understanding of the self, where in Agam- ben’s words “man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political power” (1998:11), it can also be experienced as exactly the opposite. One may intimate that perhaps in dictatorship the subject exists, because he is the object of political power. He is made to submit, but in a Hegelian twist the Master becomes tied to the Slave, the Slave whose existence is affirmed through being dominated, through his yielding of power. What the democratic transition has brought out is the fear that if the young are neither objects (worthy) of oppression nor subjects that can be heard, they

260 | Chapter Eight are nothing at all.391 It is an indication of the degree to which citizenship, and even subjecthood, is tied to a responsive rather than representative state. The young men’s understanding of being citizens is intimately tied to “being heard”, but the opposite of being heard is not a state of violent repression but one where the state has renounced responsibility, where the young become neither subjects nor citizens but simply superfluous. It also shows the ways in which the open space of democracy can easily elide into the invisiblizing space of neoliberal power.

A State for the Rich I am sitting in a café with three men in their thirties. Adel is an optician and owns a shop that sells glasses. He is married and has two kids. He is remem- bering the revolution:

After Bouazizi set himself on fire we started having fourteen and fifteen-year-old kids out to demonstrate here in Kasserine. This too we found out from Facebook. One third of these youths didn’t know the center of Kasserine before, the police didn’t allow them there. The first youth that got killed here was just some fifteen year old kid. The police didn’t let the ambulances through. I put a youth in my car to get him to the hospital, but he died on the way. And what did we get from this revolution except freedom of expression? Only the rich and the Sahel gained. The state continued, nothing changed. No real revolution, no real democracy. For a period, there was real [i.e. direct] state-citizen relations, without police, without violence. But then terrorism destroyed it and we return to the old ways, except worse. They work less in the administration than before the revolution. Now they do nothing. And they demonstrate to get more.

Adel expresses discontent at a state that has not changed its basic logic, it is still what he considers a state of, and for, the rich. Freedom of expression and voting is not enough to make it a “real” democracy. There is an understanding that the state represents the interests of the rich; that the interior regions and the lower classes more broadly remain excluded and unequal citizens.392 Tarek, a young graffiti artist in Kasserine, says, “Democracy means that no one is above the law. Here the rich and the connected are above it. They do what they want. So, what we have is not democracy.” Here democracy is associated

391 This adds a dark twist to the old philosophical question: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? 392 As a character from Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany’s novel the Yacoubian Building exclaims, “This country doesn’t belong to us, Taha. It belongs to the people who have money” (2004:59).

Democratic Doubt | 261 with equality before the law, but even more than that, a state that is not only for the rich. In fact, some suggest that the rich are now freer to exploit. Fares wonders, “What kind of democracy is this? They say it's democracy, but it’s all about money. I see the parties buying votes in Hai al Nour (a poor neighborhood in Kasserine) in front of my eyes. They give money to vote and they call it democracy.” Continuing on the earlier conversation with Jihed and Ahmed:

Jihed: Tunisia took the politics, the constitution, the political parties from the West. It’s all just a cheap import, but it doesn’t work properly here. It’s nothing more than window dressing. Ahmed: Yes, here the political parties just represent their little circles, first one comes to power and undermines the other, and then the other comes to power and does the same. Nothing really changes except their little group gets rich every time they get power. J: And for every small improvement, one centimeter, the next government will start again from scratch. One group will support its group, one region demands, then another. There is no unified plan of action. A: Things were better before, life was cheaper, inflation has made life impossible. Today even a million dinars isn't enough, if you don't have a house and car and family. Before the revolution it was, but not today. I need to go to Europe. Even if I’m personally OK, but I need to leave. This is not true democracy, just poverty. Karim: You would leave even if you got a good job? A: Yes, if I get the choice between Europe and a good job here, I will still choose Europe. K: Why? A: In Europe the state gives to the people, here the people give to the state. Before the revolution we had three classes: rich, middle class and poor. Now we only have rich and poor, like Egypt. If you can’t be rich, you will become poor.

The conversation highlights a number of critical, if at times contradictory, views. That democratic institutions are ill suited for Tunisia because they are “imported.” That they have undermined strong and coherent government action, increased competition, rent seeking and thus corruption among political groups. Interestingly, despite the implementation of formal institutions of

262 | Chapter Eight democratic Europe, the two young men suggest that Tunisia has become less like Europe.393 What makes Tunisia less like Europe and not a “real” democracy, according to the young men, is the lack of opportunities. Part of the allure of Europe and democracy is that it provides opportunities; it provides a semblance of equality and is not merely a “state for the rich.” Despite implementing the formal institutions of democratic Europe, Tunisia has become more like Egypt, here understood as a country with no middle class. This comment regarding the disappearing middle class is revealing and common. Taher another young man expressed it similarly:

Things were better before the revolution, we had rich and middle class and poor. Now we just have the rich and poor, and a shrinking middle class, which are people that have the basics but not more. Now many can’t eat enough, let alone meat. The rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer.

This reference to a disappearance of the middle class is particularly damning to the transitional context, given the historical and current association between middle class aspiration and modernity. As Samuli Schielke writes when looking at young Egyptians:

The “middle” of the middle class denotes aspirations for inclusion in the nation and the world, grounded in the awareness that there are others whose inclusion is more perfect and marked by attempts to distinguish oneself from the poor and ignorant. “Middle” as a reality is forever elusive. But as a direction, and imagined site of the “good” social normality (Fehervary 2013, Yeh 2009), it is very powerful. (2014:112)

The normative place of the middle class, as representative of a central aspiration that marks a person as both “successful” and “modern” is important. The assertion that the revolution and the democratic transition has undermined the middle-class character of Tunisia is, therefore, a serious one. It signals a society that is adrift, both concretely and normatively, and has lost it direction. It reinforces the sense of crisis and precarity and the belief that the transition has amplified these. It appears to intimate that the democratization

393 This observation by Jihed and Ahmed is in line with studies that claim that democratization can increase corruption (discussed in the next chapter).

Democratic Doubt | 263 process is understood as reinforcing the larger neoliberal crisis that has done much to undermine the hopes of a respectable middle-class life. Ahmed used the term to understand the Tunisian state as one that “takes but does not give.” This is strikingly similar to the term used by villagers in lowland Laos, studied by High. She writes, "In the complaints levelled against the state in Don Khiwau, the state is depicted in parasitic terms: as that which eats, but does not return" (2014:41). In both Laos and for young men like Ahmed and Jihed there is an assumption that this is wrong, an expectation that the state should be more than violent and parasitic. In the case of the young men, Europe represents a land where "the state gives to the people", where the state does what it should do. What this highlight is the way that the state is couched in moral terminology and how these moral understanding come to affect the view of democracy. High, building on David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, argues that “States operate not only through a monopoly on force, but also through their utopian promises, the appeal of which persists and sometimes even becomes stronger the more they fail to be realized” (High 2014:108). Although the Tunisia state is now more “democratic,” it has for some lost its utopian promise, and for many young men the combination of corruption and the rising cost of living has made escape all the more enticing. It should be noted that it is not necessarily democracy itself that is rejected, as much as its subversion by the rich and, what I discuss in the next chapter, a logic of corruption. A conversation with a young man from Gafsa emphasizes that this state of affairs is by many not seen as truly democratic:

Marwen: What we have is not democracy. Karim: Why? M: Because it is so corrupt. We have gotten poorer; life is harder now. K: If it is not democracy what is it? M: It’s the pretense of democracy. K: What do you mean? M: It’s a theatre. We have two main parties, but they are in the same bed. We have elections, but nothing has changed.

Aziz and Helmi are two young men from Tunis heavily involved in the political scene in the capital. They have helped organize several large-scale demonstrations against corruption and economic policy. They are highly critical of the way democracy has come to be understood and implemented in Tunisia:

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Helmi: The revolution died when it reached Tunis. It was hijacked by civil society and lawyers. Basically, the bourgeoisie. It lost its dimension of justice and equality. Now there is no social justice, no jobs. Is there dignity for the Tunisian people? No, now it’s just laws, constitutions and elections; not a real revolution or democracy. Karim: But aren’t laws and constitutions and elections part of democracy? H: That is just political democracy. Democracy is the everyday justice and dignity, not voting every four years for parties that all have the same policies. How can you have democracy if you are starving? K: What about India. It has poverty but it’s still a democracy isn’t it? Aziz: Well, if that is democracy then we don’t want it. I am against it. That is a neoliberal idea that democracy is in politics only. And I reject it.

If democratization literature, building on formalist definitions of democracy, also emphasizes the importance of social goods in order for democratic transitions to be successful, they do not define them as part of democracy itself, but rather as conditions of democracy. Yet, clearly, for many young men of interior Tunisia social justice, jobs and dignity are understood not as important in order to produce democracy, but rather as essentially part of democracy. The young men’s views may very well reflect their marginal status. In Schaffer’s study on the meaning of democracy in Senegal, he finds that lower-class Sen- egalese understand democracy primarily as “equality” while elites and the well-to-do see it in institutional terms (2000). Khanani finds much the same in his study of how Islamists in Morocco understand democracy, “I have argued that Moroccan islāmiyūn routinely articulate substantive outcomes as constitutive of democracy” (2014:180). Even if Khanani also finds that they stress the importance of institutional aspects. Similarly, Schaffer’s fish vendor, who when asked if he thinks there is democracy in the Philippines today responds, “I don’t think so. The prices of commodities are getting higher. Peo- ple can only afford half a kilo of fish today” (2014:311).394 I am aware that what people may mean when they say that democracy demands “dignity”, or even opportunities, is contested and rarely straightforward. I believe it signals that many understand democracy as indistinguishable from a sense of improvement of life. 395 I argue that it is too limiting to regard

394 As Khanini is told by his interlocutor “there’s no meaning to democracy if the economic and social conditions of citizens don’t change” (2014:146) and “You know what democracy is? Democracy is bread [khobz]” (2014:142). 395 And it be should be remembered that the connection between democracy and equality (understood in various ways) is an old one. As Bilakovics writes “For Tocqueville, the generative

Democratic Doubt | 265 the frustration with the democratic transition as only a failure to “provide.” What the continual stress on substantive dimensions highlights is that the lingering expectations of the state to provide come to impact the way that democracy is understood. The young men’s understanding of democracy appears conditioned both by previous political imaginaries of citizenship as well as associations between Europe, modernity and democracy. They do not distinguish between the welfare dimensions of European states and their political systems. Rather than saying that such substantive understandings of democracy are “wrong”, or inconsistent, it indicates that the experience of democratic transition is predicated on certain understandings of what democracy entails.

More than Minimal That there exists disagreement among the young over what democracy means should not come as a surprise; understandings of terms like democracy are not divorced from the lived experience.396 In their quotidian use of the term democracy, it is contextual and evaluative. Talking of democracy means commenting on the situation in Tunisia. For many, it is clear that Tunisia is not yet democratic. There is belief that it is the formal dimensions of democracy that are being “imported” from Europe. Though not unimportant, this is not what is primarily desired. These findings appear to be in line with Schaffer’s claims that, when it comes to understandings of democracy “local communities assimilate imported ideas selectively and transform them to fit their own life conditions” (2000:146). While emphasizing local, or vernacular understandings of democracy, I have also attempted to show the many commonalities between the way young men in Tunisia and the way Islamists in Morocco or marginalized groups in Senegal and the Philippines understand democracy via their understanding of what a proper state should provide its citizens. Furthermore, rather than argue that there exists no clear or coherent understanding of democracy among the young, or that cross-cultural understandings are necessarily distinct, it is more fruitful to emphasize as Gutmann

principle of the modern democratic form of human association – the principle by which power transcends itself and attains the status of legitimate authority – is equality” (2013:137). And although Schaffer highlights the contextual aspects of democracy he also claims that, “Basic to both American and Wolof concepts, it appears, is some notion of equality”(200?:43) 396 That there should be confusion over what democracy entails and its consequences is not strange considering the conceptual confusion over the term among academics.

266 | Chapter Eight does in the following. “The elusiveness of the term democracy is symptomatic both of the range of aspirations wrapped within its multiple meanings and, ultimately, of its imprecision” (2002: xviii). These aspirations include deep- ened need for social responsibility, equality before the law, economic opportunities often expressed as dignity; they represent the unfulfilled expectations of the state, now translated into expectations of democracy.397 This goes some way in explaining the sense of frustration over the transition. This desire for democracy to be something more, is expressed well by Amer, a young engineer from Gafsa:

The politicians in Tunisia didn’t give us any hope. If you give Tunisians hope, real hope, things will work out. But there is no hope here today; Ennahda, Nida Tounes, the opposition parties, they don’t give you hope of life. They just get their people into this or that ministry or administration, that’s all they do. There are no national parties, no one working for the country. After the election what happens? They just put their people in power, and don’t take any responsibility.

A democratic dispensation that cannot give space for something else, for utopian aspirations, appears to be at a loss. It also suggests the limits of only focusing on democratic uncertainty, in the sense of Lefort.398 In the essay Philosophy and the ‘death of communism’, Alain Badiou wonders regarding the post-communist citizens, “Elections and property owners, politicians and racketeers: is that all they want?” (2003:134). Cleary, with regards to the young men in post-authoritarian Tunisia, the answer is no. It is not all they want. In a context of neoliberal restructuring and a fear of becoming superfluous, for many young men democracy is disruptive and even dangerous without a vision of a better tomorrow. For them democracy demands a state that is responsive, not just representative in an electoral sense. For them, the term democracy is frequently used to mean a kind of liberal capitalist state, which has aspects of socialism enshrined in a democratic, constitutional, and rule of law framework. That democracy is understood as more than elections

397 As Sartori maintains, “What democracy is cannot be separated from what democracy should be” (1962:4, italics in original). 398 It should be added that Lefort himself always grounded his analysis in the historical and contextual. In Tunisia of today that may very well have included what I hesitantly call neoliberalism.

Democratic Doubt | 267 does not entail that people see no value in the formal institutions.399 We could say, like Wedeen that, “People seem to embrace the principles of democratic citizenship even if many do not have access to or are cynical about their fulfillment” (1999:155). Yet, at best that means that people do not outright reject democracy although there is anger over the lack of its realization. If the claim is often made that social rights without civil and political rights are null, then the above discussion suggests that that civil and political rights without a sense of “being heard” outside of voting and protesting, may also be understood as disempowering. Above all, it suggests that the way the young understand the state, even when it is at its most violent and dysfunctional, is a deeply moral one. The “empty space of power” does not mean that expectations and desires directed at the state disappear. If anything, they can now be articulated and voiced much more clearly and loudly, and such articulations come to directly affect how the young experience the democratic transition.

CONCLUSIONS. In this chapter I have attempted to conveyed that the path of democratization is not an easy one. Democratization is experienced as simultaneously a restoration of dignity and as threatening to the possibilities of a dignified life. Caught between democratic uncertainty and the unravelling rituals of dissim- ulating dictatorships, the youth of interior Tunisia struggle with a host of challenges, political, social and individual in nature. When democratization and democratic transition are spoken of, not in the abstract but rather as totems within which to encapsulate the speaker’s perspective on the situation in Tunisia, a common theme emerges: chaos and anarchy. My argument is that the experience of confusion about the state of political matters is itself a dimension of democratization processes. This is not surprising, for transitions are by their nature periods of change and instability. The Tunisian transition has been hampered by violence and economic dete- rioration. But I argue that the sense of uncertainty is also tied to changes in the political imaginary in a Lefortian sense. Some of these dynamics are immanent to the democratization process itself, as power becomes disembodied, and arises out of an opening of previously hidden narratives. It is amplified

399 As mentioned in the methods section, much of these discussions with my interlocutors happened between 2015 and 2018, when the constitution had been passed, when multiple elections had been held. A de-emphasis of the importance of formal institutions may thus be understandable.

268 | Chapter Eight by the nature of public speech in non-repressive contexts, which as Lefort claims, entails an uncertainty over the nature of power and who wields it. Democratization is in this sense not just opportunities and freedom from oppression, but also inherently a profoundly unsettling experience; old truths are dissolved and new are in the process of emerging. Experiences of democratization are also tied to unfulfilled expectations of state and democracy. It would appear that the neoliberal crisis that has engulfed the young men has not abated with democratization but rather increased in scope. The uncertainty of the transition, together with this older crisis, has created the conditions for an epistemological crisis. It is expressed through narratives of crisis and confusion, repeated again and again in everyday interactions; in cafés as well as in media. Things that were certain are now not, and a common question is “What is going on here?” (MacIntyre 1977:454). If the focus on experiences captures the sense of confusion, it is also argued that these experiences need to be put in relation to expectations of democracy. While there is no consensus among the young men on what the term democracy is or refers to, nor whether Tunisia is democratic or not, or whether it ought to be, I suggest that this conceptual and literal confusion is itself significant. As Lefort puts it, “The democratic process has more than one meaning” (1988:35). Yet, many understand democracy as an ideal despite the proliferation of meanings; as a political system that can provide opportunities, dignity and recognition. As it stands, the democratic transition has meant that the young are no longer complicit in the system in the same way as under authoritarianism. They are not forced to public dissimulation, they can speak up but now, no one listens, the place of power is uncertain, the responsibilities of the state are felt to be under threat. For some young Tunisian men in the margins, democratization has summoned up the specter of a state that questions their right to be seen and heard, a state under no obligation to its precarious citizens. As James Ferguson writes in the context of the poor in South Africa, “it is not dependence but its absence that is really terrifying – the severing of the thread, and the fall into the social void” (2013:232). It is partly this fear of the social void that accentuates the pull of authoritarian dependence. Should then democratization be understood as separate from the unmet expectations, the lack of security and the economic difficulties and corruption experienced by the young? It cannot and it should not. Democratization as a

Democratic Doubt | 269 lived fact, as a quotidian reality, is experienced as confusing, chaotic and crises-ridden, and the lines between internal and external processes are continuously blurred. The next chapters continue to look at the ways in which these the epistemological crisis of democracy and the crisis of masculinity intersect and are playing themselves out among young men.

9. Governing through Corruption

This is not state corruption; this is a state of corruption – Rami

In Tunisia our happiness becomes our sadness, because we cannot live on what we love – Amine

You don’t understand because you’re well-off. When you’ve stood for two hours at the bus stop or taken three different buses and had to go through hell every day just to get home, when your house has collapsed and the government has left you sitting with your children in a tent on the street, when the police ofﬁcer has insulted you and beaten you just because you’re on a minibus at night, when you’ve spent the whole day going around the shops looking for work and there isn’t any, when you’re a ﬁne sturdy young man with an education and all you have in your pockets is a pound, or sometimes nothing at all, then you’ll know why we hate Egypt – Alaa Al Aswany

INTERLUDE 4: THE MEANING OF COUNTRY

It's midday on Monday, May 2nd 2018. I am sitting in an outdoor café in central Kasserine with four young, unemployed men; Aymen, Firas, Slim and Saif. We are next to the central park, and all around the park are other young men sitting in clusters, drinking coffee and chatting. We are discussing public life before the revolution. “So, before the revolution there was no unemployment, and no young men sitting in cafés?” I ask skeptically, repeating Slim's claim. Slim is clear “There were no cafés. Not like this.” I remain unconvinced “Really? No young people just hanging out?” Slim responds “There were people just sitting around before the revolution, but not to this degree. Before, there was order and structure, people were working, people were walking the straight and narrow path.

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Now corruption is everywhere.” Saif is less certain “It was bad before, and it’s bad now. Nothing has changed.” Slim shakes his head in frustration and tries to explain, “Let me give you an example. Before the revolution I worked for ten dinars a day and spent one or two dinars a day. Now I work for fifteen dinars and spend twenty” Slim picks up Saif’s cigarettes lying on the table. “Here, look at this cigarette package. It’s not made in Tunisia, it’s smuggled from Algeria. Now it costs two dinars, before the revolution it was half a dinar. When I lived in Tunis, I used to smoke a Tunisian brand, which is better quality than the Algerian. I bought a pack for one and a half dinars. After the revolution it sold for four. And the price has just gone up since then. Now only the rich afford it, and respectable work is not enough to survive on.” “What’s the reason for this?” I ask. Aymen is quick to respond: “It’s these new parties. Ben Ali was not a thief. Yes, his wife and her Trabelsi family were thieves. But he didn’t know that she was stealing. Now everyone is a thief. And they call it democracy.” Saif disagrees: “It’s not the parties, it’s all of us. Give us power and we abuse it. Tunisia did not have a revolution, it had the appearance of an uprising. We had a change in name of the authority only. Before we had Trabelsis in power, now Tunisia is caught between two rights: the religious right and the secular right.” Firas explains: “Things are much harder now after the revolution. Before, people were living (al sha’ab ai’sh). They sometimes ate meat, sometimes fish, not every day but sometimes. Now, most days’ people cannot even eat vegetables. They cannot afford meat even on Fridays.” Slim continues, “During Ben Ali, the Trabilsis controlled the economy. They imported meat or bananas or whatever. And they didn’t give anything to the treasury, they didn’t pay anything to the government. So, it was stealing. It was corruption. But they sold the bananas cheaply in the market and the citizens could afford it.” Aymen interrupts him “Excuse me, if the Trabilsis brought the bananas and I, as a citizen, also imported bananas, would they let me work with them? As a trader?” “Sure, if you bought the bananas from them” Slim answers him. “And if I want to buy from outside?” Aymen asks. “Then no” responds Slim. “So that meant they took all the profits. There was no benefit to the country. The work they did, a thousand citizens could do” Aymen insists. “But they sold it cheaply” Slim replies. Firas enters the discussion “They were a threat to the privileged classes, but they left the people (al sha’ab) alone.” Slim again: “Exactly, they didn’t bother me.” Aymen insists: “Even the

Governing through Corruption | 273 sellers are people.” Firas responds: “Yes, you are right. But most could afford a daily life, therefore the citizens were quiet. And now you say what you want and do what you want, but can’t afford to eat.” Saif speaks up: “In Europe, if you are good at something anything then the state will support you to become better. Here nothing, they leave you alone unless you are a threat, then they punish you.” “Karim, you might be thinking we don’t have pride in our country. We are saying all these things.” Slim expresses. “But let me tell you. Every- thing here in this café is smuggled from Algeria. The coffee, the cigarettes, the table. Everything. So, what does Tunisia mean for us?” As I am leaving the café with Firas and Slim, Firas points to a building just ahead. It’s the only building over three stories high in the area “Look at that building, it’s the tallest one in town. The biggest smuggler in Kas- serine owns it. It’s a dorm for female students. It’s a way to laundry money. Everyone knows it. Nothing is done.” Across from us a police squad is parked next to the highway. Slim shakes his head, “See the police, asleep in their cars. If they get bored or want some money, they will stop some old car, not a nice car or smugglers. But some poor guy with a broken light and demand ten or twenty dinar. The smugglers go free. Take from the poor and give to the rich. That is our country. They talk of fighting corruption. How can the corrupt fight corruption?”

INTRODUCTION This chapter approaches the experience of democratization and the political imaginaries that inform it, through an investigation into the young men’s narratives on corruption. It lays out the way that narratives about corruption, which had previously been hidden or less overtly expressed, begin to inform the quotidian understanding of state, citizenship and the democratic transition. There are a number of reasons for looking at young men’s narratives of corruption. Firstly, using an ethnographically driven method, the chapter tries to capture the issues confronting youth in the margins. Corruption is the single most common topic of discussion among the youth that I have studied. Secondly, these narratives form part of the developing public space. Corrup- tion, whether in democratic contexts or not, is by its nature opaque or half-

274 | Chapter Nine hidden, yet discussions surrounding it are not and, I argue, become particularly salient in contexts of increasingly free public space. Narratives on corruption are therefore particularly revealing ways of understanding political imaginaries. I follow political anthropologist Akhil Gupta’s assumption that narratives of corruption enable “people to construct the state symbolically and to define themselves as citizens” (1995:389). Understanding these narratives is central in order to grasp the way that state-citizen dynamics are lived and experienced. Thirdly, while democratization scholars often maintain that a sense of increased corruption is common in transitions, they do not attempt to unravel what is meant by corruption. If it is discussed in the literature, corruption is often understood as the dominance of informal institutions over formal, and the weakness of the rule of law (Carothers 2018, Johnston 2014). In relation to non-western societies this is often tied to notions of patronage and clientelism that are understood to be inimical to democracy and modern citizenship (Morris 2009). This is, I argue, a limiting perspective. What I wish to explore is how the young understand and navigate the boundaries between state and society as well as between formality and informality. Starting with the assumption that the democratic transition has opened up for a re-evaluation of the state-society dynamics, I attempt to understand how perceptions of corruption of the state are tied to notions of citizenship. I claim that corruption is understood as informal and threatening and that democratization is seen as increasing this threatening informality of corruption. Against Gupta’s claim that it is through narratives on corruption that state and society become understood as distinct, I argue that these narratives often work to undermine the state-society distinction, even as the young men experience this breakdown as fundamentally threatening. I also claim that the narratives of corruption express a refusal to let the state, and increasingly society itself, off the hook. By naming and discussing corruption they take the state seriously and at the same time articulate other ways of seeing the state and being citizens. I argue that young men’s narratives of corruption articulate a keen understanding of the Tunisian state as “governing through corruption”, even as the young men reject it, and express a hope for a different kind of state. To call the state corrupt is to hold it to account and to articulate a counter-vision. Quotidian discussions on corruption reinforce both continuities and discontinuities in the experiences of the state among young men. The chapter shows how through narratives of corruption the state is understood

Governing through Corruption | 275 in essentially negative terms, as an “empty” state that is reduced to pure coercion. Furthermore, in its perceived corruption and failures, the state also comes to stand for the failure of the nation.

SYMBOLS AND STORIES In social science literature, corruption is generally understood as the abuse of public power and authority for personal gain (Johnston 1996). As such, it is associated with a host of social, political and economic evils, and studies on corruption typically attempt to understand the causes behind corruption and ways to mitigate them. Those approaches, while vital, do not exhaust the importance of studying corruption as a phenomenon. Chapter four discussed the radical expansion of the Tunisian state following independence. The state has continued to dictate and impact people’s lives directly despite recent neoliberal trends. Quotidian interactions between citizens and bureaucrats, or people in positions of state power, continue to be an important part of Tunisian’s life. Corruption is in Tunisia, as in many parts of the world, part of these interactions between citizens and their state. It can be a way of getting things done quickly in what is often cumbersome, difficult and byzantine state administration. It comes to personalize the “faceless” bureaucracy, embedding it in social relations even as it comes to obscure lines of responsibilities and undermines legal procedures.400 Corruption is also understood to privilege those with either economic or social capital.401 Corruption is also something else; the way it is discussed and understood forms part of larger political imaginaries around the state and its citizens. This chapter looks at narratives surrounding corruption, arguing that these narratives are forms of storytelling, and as stories they are retold again and again, circulating and come to take near-mythic forms (Gupta 2005).402 As Michael Jackson (2002) explains, story-telling involves intersubjective processes that unite private and public meaning-making. They are forms of political imaginaries that signal expectations and shared understanding.

400 Tunisians make a distinction between petty bribes (rashwa), having access to connections (khtaf) and corruption (fasad). Corruption connotes a larger structural problem. See Annika Rabo (2005:149) for a similar logic in Syria. 401 As previously discussed, scholarly literature has emphasized the ways in which various neoliberal privatization programs in the global South have often led to increase in corruption. 402 Gupta writes “The experience of corruption on the part of all parties involved occurs in a ﬁeld overdetermined by stories about such acts, stories whose reiterability enables the participants in that particular social drama to make sense of their actions” (2005:6).

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I argue that the ubiquity of references to corruption among Tunisians is a signal that the state has not lived up to the ethical standards and expectations of the population. As Gupta writes, “Any discussion of corruption necessarily assumes a standard of morally appropriate behavior against which ‘corrupt’ actions are measured” (2005:7). Implicit in any narratives of corruption are notions of what the state ought to be and ought to do:

The discourse of corruption is central to our understanding of the relationship between the state and social groups precisely because it plays this dual role of enabling people to construct the state symbolically and to define themselves as citizens. For it is through such representations, and through the public practices of various government agencies, that the state comes to be marked and delineated from other organizations and institutions in social life. (Gupta 1995:389)

It is precisely this symbolic contract between the state and its citizens that this chapter will explore through discussions of corruption; how young men come to conceptualize the state through their narratives of corruption, and consequently also their own citizenship. The anger and frustration over corruption is not new, it has been described as one of the main drivers behind of the revolution (Zayani 2015:85, Meijer 2014:628). As Tsourapas points out, “The extent of state corruption was known long before 2011 and constituted the règle du jeu in everyday societal interactions” (2013: 38). Narratives of corruptions have existed in the boundaries between public and private transcripts, suppressed by the state but experienced by many. And yet such narratives come to have a different role during the transition; what was once suspected is now affirmed again and again. Nar- ratives of corruption, now through the opening of public space, take on a stronger resonance and begin to inform the very understanding of state, society and citizenship.

CORRUPTING STATES

Two Forms of Patriarchal States In the secret diplomatic dispatches of the American Ambassador to Tunisia made public by WikiLeaks in December of 2010 one can read "Corruption is the elephant in the room; it is the problem everyone knows about, but no one can publicly acknowledge.” Following the revolution, corruption has instead

Governing through Corruption | 277 become the problem everyone knows about, and talks about, in public. It is a constant theme in conversations and news stories that highlight the corrupt practices of officials and politicians; these stories are widely shared in cafés and across social media. This appears to be true across generations, social groups and places.403 Corruption, however, may be particularly pressing for the young in the margins. They lack the connections and resources required for navi- gating in a system where both are essential. It should not, perhaps, be surprising then that corruption is the most common reason given for the palpable disappointment over the transition process among the young men I speak to. Often my very presence, even without mentioning my research or background, is enough to turn the conversation to topics of struggle, desperation and disappointment often centered on the problem of corruption. The script is ready. Below is a longer excerpt from a conversation I had in a café with two men in Gafsa. Radhouane, who is in his mid-twenties, is an unemployed engineer and lives at home. Mehdi is thirty and married with kids and works in the military. Both are politically conscious and curious if not particularly active. Our conversation initially centered around everyday life in Gafsa, but the two quickly turned to discussing state corruption:

Radhouane: Our corrupt state is against the smart, hardworking and creative. This is the case in North Africa in general but it’s especially bad here in Tunisia. I will give you an example. After graduation I wanted to develop a new machine for more efficient refinement of phosphate, but those in charge were against it. They would lose money and support, even if it would be more efficient. I could do nothing. A lot of young men are like that. They have a lot of good ideas that they cannot realize. So, they drink. Mehdi: Even to go to Hajj you need to bribe officials. R: A student wanted to do a PhD here in Tunisia, but they told him, “Your topic is bad, uninteresting.” He went to France to do it and got top marks there. And then they say we have no bright young people here.404 M: A cousin of mine works as a pilot in Tunisia Air. When flying to Paris there was a serious malfunction, yet he managed to land and save everyone’s life. There were a lot of French people on that flight and in France he was treated like a hero.

403 The Arab Barometer surveys have consistently found corruption to be among the top concerns for Tunisians. “Concerns about corruption continue unabated with nine-in-ten saying that there is corruption in government institutions to a great or medium extent. The level is unchanged since 2016, but is 21 points greater than at the time of the 2011 uprising (2019:5). 404 I have heard this same story from several people who claim it was in the news around 2015. Such stories appear to circulate widely in both news media and among the general population.

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Here in Tunisia he was suspended for 6 months. As if the malfunction was his fault. A few months back there was a man in Kasserine that was very smart and that build a rocket all by himself, and he was put in jail. If he did that in France, they would give him a medal and a job. R: The new law that doesn't let people under 35 leave the country, it’s made just to keep us here. Karim: But why? Isn’t it to keep youth from going to Syria? R: (laugh) There are a hundred ways to go to Syria, law or no law. It’s just to keep us here, under their thumb. We used to live in a small cage. Now we live in a slightly larger one. M: The youth are lost R: We feel, in these areas, that we are Algerians. Not Tunisians. In Algeria, the government helps youth start businesses, pays them a salary even if they don't have jobs. They have oil and industry. In Tunisia we have the police. We like Bouteflika not Bourguiba.405

Whether all the stories of Mehdi and Radhouane are accurate or not is less significant than the image of the state they convey and the symbolic understanding of state-citizen dynamic that they imply. From the conversation it is clear that corruption for the young men, while partly understood as involving bribery, is also more than misuse of public authority. Corruption is put in connection to the state’s unwillingness or incapacity to help its citizens to realize their ambitions, particularly the young. The young are understood to be full of initiative but are made passive by the state, which is understood as a constraining force. France, in the young men’s minds, rewards heroism and initiative, while the Tunisian state punishes it. Algeria provides material support for unemployed youth, while Tunisia criminalizes the young. In other words, a state should help its citizens financially as well as provide opportunities for them to develop their ideas, dreams and goals. Instead, the Tunisian state restricts the young, both in time and space. Not even Hajj, a religious duty, is exempt from this logic of penalizing and profiteering and represents a state in which even the sacred has been turned into profit. They compare Tunisia to Algeria, the neighboring country, and France. France as the former colonizer can be understood as a projection of promised modernity. Since the regime of Ben Ali invested heavily in portraying Tunisia as relatively better than its neighbors, by comparing it less favorably to Algeria, the young men are undermining such nation-state myths.

405 Bouteflika was the then president of Algeria.

Governing through Corruption | 279

In a border town like Kasserine with long and complex ties to Algeria, the rejection of the label Tunisian in favor of Algerian may be less surprising. Interestingly, however, even in Gafsa, far from Algeria, a similar trend is noticeable. Neither Radhouane nor Mehdi have been to or have family in Alge- ria: but they identify with the model that it is supposed to represent. “In Algeria the government helps youth to start businesses, pays them a salary even if they don't have jobs. They have oil and industry. In Tunisia we have the police. We like Bouteflika not Bourguiba.” Both Bourguiba and Boute- flika here represent two kinds of father figures, two kinds of masculine, non- democratic states. Bouteflika, the Algerian president, a “positive” one in which the father provides for his “sons”; Bourguiba, one in which only pure force remains. While both figures represent authoritarian forms of power, the Tunisian kind of paternalism is understood as unable to provide anything other than restrictions and to function only through force. Mehdi and Radhouane see themselves and youth more generally as full of initiative that is deactivated by the corruption of the state. What is this “state” that the young men simultaneously invoke and condemn?

Image or Practice? In his State-in-Society approach (2001) Migdal proposes a distinction between image and practices of the state:

The state is a ﬁeld of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by (1) the image of a coherent, controlling organization in a territory, which is a representation of the people bounded by that territory, and (2) the actual practices of its multiple parts. (2001:16, italics in original)

Practices are “the routine performance of state actors and agencies” (2001:18). According to Migdal, the image of the state is cultivated from within the state apparatus. The image reinforces the notion that the state is a coherent unity; practices, however, often undermine this unity, “Practices are often pitted against image” (2001:19). Migdal's conceptualization of the state as both image and practice is analytically useful, in the way that he draws attention to the contradictory practices of the state and their tendencies to undermine the coherent image of the state. Yet, I question the assumption that the image is coherent and that practices are fractured, and the notion that it is the state that is the source of this image. The conversation with Radhouane and Mehdi can be understood in terms of the corrupt practices of the state that undermine its image; it “acts

280 | Chapter Nine against itself.” However, it is far from clear where this “image” of the state comes from. Nor is it only the image of the state that becomes undermined. It appears that since the state has been portrayed as the sole representative of “the nation”, disappointment of state practices may create wholesale rejection of not just the state as an image but also the nation itself. Tied to this, disappointment in the nation becomes a further motivator for dreams of leaving. Hamdi, a young man from Gafsa, expresses the connection between the corruption, political apathy and the urge to leave clearly:

Here there is at least 50% unemployment among the young. That’s the biggest problem, that and corruption. Our only hope is to leave the country. There is no future hear. Corruption is so rampant that you have to pay to get jobs. There are so few private companies and so few government jobs. No political parties focus on these issues. They just want to get power and they are just interested in personal benefits. I never got politically involved, they are all corrupt.

For Hamdi, the effects of corruption are immediate and personal. The common assertion that in many instances one has to pay in order to get a job means that for those like Hamdi, with limited means, escape is understood as the best option. The political leaders that focus on their own benefits rather than society as a whole are also part of these corrupt practices. These situations signal that things have, after all not changed, and that formal politics is a dead end. Here again, the corrupt state becomes an illegitimate country. Such sentiments are not restricted to young men, Hanan a young woman from Kasserine says, “I think Tunisia is the worst country in the world, although I have never been anywhere else. You spend all your time studying for the baccalaureate and then university and you get nothing for your efforts. If you don’t have connections and can’t pay for a job, you have nothing.” Hanan had to interrupt her studies at the age 15 and work, when her older brother died in a car accident. She wants to someday finish her baccalaureate, and study law. Above all, she dreams of moving to France or Canada. The complicated connection between expectations, state and nationhood is brought out by Amine, 32-year-old shop-owner in Kasserine:

In Tunisia our happiness becomes our sadness, because we cannot live on what we love. My friend Mohammed is a musician. He studied at the Musical Conserva- tory in Tunis, and wants to preserve Tunisian traditional music, but he can’t live on it. For 50,000 rich people it’s their country and they do what they want. Not the rest of us 12 million. We are nothing.

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Tunisia is understood by many in the interior as a country for the rich, it provides neither symbolic meaning nor material support for the rest of the population. In such instances, reimagining one’s place through symbolically exiting the nation by claiming, “We are Algerians. Not Tunisians”, or seeking to escape Tunisia, appear as reasonable strategies for the young. This is not to say that such exclamations and dissociative claims do not have elements of theatricality to them. For example, while rejecting “Tunisia”, Radhouane is at the same time an avid supporter of the national football team and will fanati- cally follow all of Tunisia’s games. I do not mean that the youth reject “being Tunisian”, but rather that the meaning associated with Tunisia in these contexts is present in its absence. It signals a sense of exclusion as much as rejection, a failure of a politics from above, and ultimately of citizenship and the democratization process. At the same time, narratives of corruption also point towards other ways of doing and being a citizen.

Activating Struggles If for some disappointment and frustration over the corruption of state and the nation act as an impetus towards political acquiescence and a desire to leave, for others, it functions as fuel for political action. As the case of Ali, the owner of the counter-public café Andes in Kasserine, described in chapter six. He says:

If eight out of ten people are corrupt in the state, it is a corrupt state, a failed state. Where is Tunisia, where is the country? This is not my country anymore. I am not Tunisian anymore. If government cars use smuggled petrol, what kind of a state is it? They, the state, build statues of leaders but not roads. A few years ago, we had 100,000 refugees here crossing the border. The state did nothing, but we the people, this poor people of Kasserine helped.

For Ali, like for the others, the widespread corruption has reached such mag- nitude that it has undermined not simply the legitimacy of the state but the nation as a whole. Jingoistic attempts at nationalism by politicians by building statues of Bourguiba fall on deaf ears. By failing to live up to its moral obligation to its citizens, not just through profiteering but also through misguided policy and neglect, the state has lost its moral authority. Yet for Ali this disappointment in both the state and the nation has not led to political apathy or a wish to escape. While it has led to a reorientation of identity, a rejection

282 | Chapter Nine of the label Tunisian, it is above all a rejection of a failed “politics from above.” Ali has instead come to emphasize a “politics from below.” Ali is actively involved in creating a new, vibrant and politically charged youth culture in Kas- serine. He and his wife have created an alternative space, “one of positivity among all the negativity.” He opened his cafe catering exclusively to active youth and is a great supporter of Moncif Marzouki, the human rights de- fender and political outsider that served as president of Tunisia during the transition, losing the election in 2014 to Essibsi. ⁠ Ali is older at 35, has worked as a journalist, is married and is better situated to leverage his frustration into political action. Yet he is far from alone in being spurred to activism by disappointment and anger. All the young men I talk to view corruption as a central sin of post-Ben Ali Tunisia, and yet many continue their struggles to improve the state of affairs. In other words, if narratives of corruption are part of the larger sense of disappointment in the revolution and the state of things more generally, disappointment is not always directly connected to apathy. As Deborah Gould (2012) reminds us, there are rarely straightforward connections between emotions and actions.406

A Killer of Dreams If the young treat corruption as a defining problem, it is also the case that in places like Kasserine and Gafsa many young men make a living on this economy of corruption. This does not necessarily mean that they are not highly critical of these corrupt practices. Rami, from Gafsa, is a hardworking and ambitious young man, with an engineering degree from Sfax, who is involved in the smuggling business.407 For many years he and his brother have smuggled all kinds of goods from Algeria to Tunisia.408 For Rami, smuggling is normalized, he does not attempt to justify it and his “occupation” is no secret. He is also a member of a leftist party and he constantly talks about and shares news

406 Gould writes, “Universalizing claims like ‘hope is necessary for movements’, ‘despair is de- politicizing’, and ‘anger leads people to the streets’ may be useful in providing direction to inquiries about the role of emotion in contentious politics, but the particulars of any given situation often require pushing up against such claims in order to see how relationships between feelings and action work in practice” (2012:96). 407 He has smuggled mostly cigarettes and cosmetics. Never any drugs or arms, “that is controlled by the police and the big families” he says. As Santini writes, “The backbone of informality is represented by the smuggling of tobacco, petrol, clothes, and electronics from either Libya or Algeria” (2018:68). 408 Since moving to Sfax he no longer smuggles very often. Yet, when tight on money, he will return to Gafsa and engage in smuggling.

Governing through Corruption | 283 on social media related to corruption. He is always more than willing to share the latest stories:

The police and the security services are all involved in the smuggling business. Everyone gets a cut. The security apparatus is part of the weapons smuggling. In Kairouan, last month, the biggest smuggler threw a wedding party, in which all the local notables, politicians and bureaucrats attended. The other day, the media showed pictures of the police using cars for personal use, to carry sheep and food for Ramadan. An ambulance and its driver were missing from Gafsa Hospital for four days. When the driver came back and they asked where he was, he just answered, ‘I was in Algeria smuggling’. He was not punished. This is a state of corruption, not state corruption (dawlat al fasad, mish fasad al dawla). I had dreams before, to start a company, to become something. Yet Tunisia is the killer of dreams.409

Whether or not this anger at corruption is a way to legitimize an illegal business is less important than the fact that such stories concerning corruption circulate widely. True or not, these stories reflect the fact that after years of democratic transition many still experience the state as something essentially negative. When Rami talks about a corrupt state, rather than just corruption as isolated practices, he is articulating an image of a state that is corrupt through and through, that its very logic is one that is incapable of doing otherwise. Likewise, Sari, another young man that has worked as a smuggler between Kasserine and Algeria says of young smugglers like himself:

We live in the border not because we have no other choice, but because we want what the government doesn’t want to give. We steal, but we do it because the state has made thieves of us all. If there was no corruption, we would be richer than Sweden. We are the other side of the state, outside it and yet part of it. They steal, we steal. But we are honest about our thievery, they are not.

The dual and mimetic connection between the smuggling that Sari and others like him do, and the actions of the state, are clear in his mind. The smugglers are "the other side of the state.” Their illegal activities are both enabled by the failure of the state and are a continuation of its own corrupt logic. The state

409 I had some difficulty in translating the expression dawlat el fasad. I settled on state of corruption after some consultations, including with Rami himself. When I asked him about the term at a later stage he said, “I don’t remember what I meant exactly by that. The main thing is that it is not just individuals that are corrupt but the state itself. It corrupts everything it touches.” This is what I refer to below as governing through corruption.

284 | Chapter Nine does not want to give them what they want, and at the same time the corruption has made the state unable to. While normalized, smuggling it is not experienced as something positive for those like Rami and Sari. As Rami puts it, “We who smuggle do it to survive. Without it there would be nothing here. So much of the basic goods here are smuggled. But we all wanted to do something else. The state has corrupted us too.” The state of corruption is corrosive not just in its inability to provide basic social goods, but also in the way that even its “victims” become implicated in its corruptive logic. While this form of governing through corruption is the basis for livelihoods such as Rami’s, it is deeply alienating. Despite an experience of a state that is the “killer of dreams”, Rami, like so many other youths in the interior, articulates a desire for another form of state, another form of governing; one where the state provides access to livelihoods commensurate with the qualifications and expectations of the young. As I have discussed, prior to the revolution, the size of the informal economy was substantial and had come to incorporate large segments of the young and marginalized. Ample evidence indicates that it has grown following the revolution (Ayadi et al. 2013; Meddeb 2016). When discussing the informal economy, it is important to avoid thinking that informality means being “outside of the state.” As Jason Roitman writes about informal economic behav- iors:

These economic activities cannot be described or understood as marking out a realm distinct from state power, either in terms of their organization or their functioning[…]To the contrary, such activities are fundamentally linked to the state and are even essential to the very recomposition of state power in present conditions of extreme austerity (2004:192).

During the Ben Ali regime, smuggling was to some extent tolerated and even involved actors with ties to Ben Ali’s close entourage. According to Santini, the Tunisian state “considered smuggling as a safety valve given the systematic politics of social and economic marginalization” (2018:71). Following the revolution, the ability of the state to control these flows of border smuggling has decreased. And yet, clearly the young men understand their activities as intimately tied to the state. They understand their smuggling as a reproduction of a state logic. The projected image of the state has been undermined by its practices and has led to a crisis of legitimacy, but it has also reconceptual- ized how the state is understood. Rather than the practices undermining the

Governing through Corruption | 285 image of the state, as something beyond its administrative actions, it is corruption that comes to constitute the Tunisian state as something more than merely a set of practices. The practices have in a sense become the image. There is no longer any clear distinction between the informal and the formal dimensions of the state, between practices and images. This state of corruption is experienced as a mode of governing; the central logic of the state is corruption, a logic that is imposed on anything it touches. This process of governing through corruption is contagious, in the direction of its citizens as well as across whatever boundary may have existed between the state and the nation. It is not just the state but Tunisia as a nation that is the killer of dreams.

A Hurried Note on the Nation Traditionally states are discussed in material terms, and nations in terms of Anderson’s “imagined communities” (2004). Following non-realist studies on the imaginative and symbolic aspects of states, this study has attempted to blur such a distinction.410 I have argued that the state is often understood as more than mere political institutions and that the state too carries with it a range of symbolic as well as emotive dimensions. The question may then be asked; if the state is such an embodiment of collective desires and belongings, what is left of the nation? Scholars that have looked at post-colonial contexts have sometimes argued that state and nation-building processes took place in tandem. Discussing the Arab World, Hinnebusch & Rifai write that:

State building processes are, therefore, paralleled by nation-building. State build- ers normally try to bring state and identity (nation) into congruence because of the greater domestic legitimation and international power that this affords, promoted with tools at their disposal such as the media, state employment, conscription, and national school systems. (2017:105)

This process may be more or less successful, and there may be counter-articulations of national identity at odds with the state. In Tunisia, regarded by many observers as the Arab country least riddled by conflicts over nationhood

410 Despite this, even a non-realist scholar like Lisa Wedeen writes, “By ‘state’ I mean a set of common political institutions capable of monopolizing violence and of distributing some goods and services within a demarcated territory. By ‘nation’ I refer to people's shared, socially constructed sense of “groupness,” their sense of belonging to a community and of deriving their identity, at least in part, from membership in the group” (1999:15).

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(i.e questions of who belongs to the nation), the state is often articulated as both the embodiment of as well as protector of the nation. Thus, many young men I talk to may interchangeably use the terms for state (dawla), regime/system (nizam), authority (sulta; can also refer to the police and security forces), nation (watan) and homeland (balad). This suggests that there are only murky distinctions among the young men of the various guises of the state, including between its violent and non-violent aspects and between the state and nation. The conflation between state and nation may give the state and its symbols more legitimacy and yet this success can also lead to a delegitimization of both state and nation when the state is not able to live up to its expectations. The exact analytical and practical distinctions between the two concepts remain unclear. But it is interesting to ponder some of the sentiments that the young men have discussed. Slim, for example, who said, “Everything here in this café is smuggled from Algeria. The coffee, the cigarettes, the table. Everything. So, what does Tunisia mean for us?” Here, the quotidian materiality of Slim’s surroundings become metonyms of sorts for the failures of the nation. They become visible manifestations of a state/nation that cannot control its borders, but also one that forces its citizen to transgress its boundaries for everyday life to be maintained. If the state is more symbolic than is often acknowledged, so too is the nation more embedded in quotidian materialities.

The Patrimonial State The skepticism directed towards the state has reached such levels that almost any government policy is automatically rejected as a farce by the young. Shortly after the revolution, the government instituted a policy that provided a stipend for unemployed with a university degree.411 While an important source of income for many young, the scheme has been derided and many young men see it as simply a way to attempt to buy the silence of the youth. Samir says, “Why did they start the program of giving people 200 dinars a month? That’s only enough to drink and smoke: and that’s what the young do. They want people here to just drink and not think, not act, not change things. It’s just money to keep us quiet.” His friend Nasrallah adds, “On the day the money comes every drug dealer in town is rich.” Mongi, an activist that was involved in the bloody demonstrations in Kasserine, gives his analysis on the logic behind the stipend:

411 Similar schemes had been implemented during Ben Ali.

Governing through Corruption | 287

After the revolution, the first transitional government got dream loans from the World Bank and from the Gulf. What happened to this money? They went to a compensation fund, to the ones that before had been against the government and now had formed part of it, and it was distributed to their sympathizers. They got billions, instead of using it to improve the country. The second government, after the Kasba demonstrations, said the state is bankrupt and cannot do anything, that we need to reduce expenditure and wait for foreign investment. The youth here started getting agitated. Demonstrations started again. When the government finally got loans, they started a project to give 200 dinars per month to those unemployed graduates, the program went on for years and the government spent billions of Euro and didn’t solve anything. It was just bakshish to keep people down.

Mongi has a clear understanding about how the Tunisian state functions. It is rent-seeking, and the loans it receives from external actors is distributed to loyalists and used to pacify the people. It is in other words, the prototypical neo-patrimonial state. Yet the stipend has produced anger rather than loyalty, and is seen as another aspect of the governing through corruption. Tarek, a young student, says “The 200 dinars a month, if they spent it in Kasserine instead, made something, invested in the future, it would help everyone, help us become something.” Another recent policy initiative that is treated with cynicism or indifference is the government campaign of “war against corruption” launched in the summer of 2017 by then Prime Minister, Youssef Chahed. Most youth I talked to understood it as another farce. Jihed says, “this war on corruption is a political lie, kizb siasi, it’s just to pretend to do something.” Ahmed, who works for a civil society organization, understands it as way for Chahed to position himself, “He is preparing for the next election.” This skepticism should be put in a context in which Tunisia under Ben Ali and Bourguiba, like many authoritarian countries, has a tradition of campaigns against corruption. These are often nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt at removing political rivals (Hibou 2017:33). Scholarship on the state in the developing world has often described the ways in which informal institutions dominate formal, particularly by looking at patronage networks. If formal institutions are taken to be the codified and legal rules and procedures that guide political behavior and decision-making (Hall & Taylor 1996) then informal institutions are “socially shared rules and procedures that[..]are created, communicated, and enforced outside officially

288 | Chapter Nine sanctioned channels” (Helmke & Levitsky: 2006:5). Various forms of patronage, via both formal and informal channels, are often assumed to be the driving logic of states in Africa (Bayart 1993) and Latin America (Pierce 2010). Participation in politics and the capture of the state is understood as having little to do with ideology or the content of political programs, but is essentially, in Bayart’s words “a politics of the belly.” It is about getting “a piece of the pie” (Ramirez 2015:49). Meijer & Butenschøn argue that patronage limits the spread of democratic culture by enabling “dependence, inequality, and under-development” (2017:29). They go so far as to say that it undermines the possibility of democracy as well as real citizenship:

One of the most damaging and most ingrained factors is clientelism and patronage relations. Nowhere else do vertical relations of dependence have such disastrous effects on notions of citizenship and horizontal solidarity as in the Arab region. (Meijer & Butenschøn 2017:12)

The frustration and the anger of the young men in regard to a state dominated by clientelistic networks can be read as rejection of a patrimonial model of state and perhaps as a call for more horizontal citizenship. For some scholars, however, patronage and informality are not only harm- ful. Hibou, for example, points to clientelism as important and ultimately legitimate in the eyes of many. Although based on hierarchy and dependence, it is also “a system of mutual obligations and forms of personalization of social relations” (2017:28). It is a kind of politics of everyday life, of making do, in the face of a state that cannot fully provide. According to Hibou, patronage networks are often “the best channels of transmission and response to demands, including material demands, made by the population" (ibid). Thus smuggling, activities that may be called corrupt, are tacitly accepted in a context where a regime is unable to act out its official vision. Hibou writes that, “the political economy of the gift symbolizes the convergence of clientelism and the mechanisms of domination” (2017:26). Gifts signals dependence. Does the young men’s anger at the 200 dinars, their “rejecting the gift” of the state, mean a rejection of dependence? Not necessarily. Clearly, the “gift” of 200 dinars did not earn the loyalty of the young men. The problem may not only be that the state attempts to, as many young see it, buy their loyalty, but that politicians think that they can do it so cheaply. It can be understood as anger at a failed clientalism. Ferguson writes on the rejection by marginalized men of a basic social income scheme in South Africa, which he terms asocial assistance, “an unconditional ‘transfer’ of cash may seem dangerously empty –

Governing through Corruption | 289 a way of preventing the worst, in material terms, but without the granting of any sort of meaningful personhood or social belonging” (2013:235). Viewed in this way, what the young call for rather than a transfer of cash is respectable work, and thus to be included in the circuit of social belonging. The difference between clientelism and citizenship here is one of degrees. The failure to deliver is a major source of anger, and paltry attempts at patronage are rejected. One way to frame it is to say that the young men regard state support not as a reward, but as a right. Nevertheless, while it is undoubtedly true that corruption and clientelism occur in the intersection between the quotidian and expectations of the state, it would be misleading to say that corruption is desired even if it is expected. On the one hand, the young have a clear understanding of how the Tunisian state operates; it is clientelistic and rent-seeking, exploitative and violent. On the other hand, the continual disappointment, frustration and anger directed at the state hides a hope; that it should do and be something else. A state that neither foists corruption on its population nor forces them to reproduce its corrupt logic. A state that provides support, rewards initiatives and delivers jobs.

Non-Governmental Organizations Quotidian narratives on corruption tend to focus on the state, as well as reinforce a sense of marginalization of the interior regions. There is also another target of scorn: that of corrupt civil society organizations. Since the revolution there has been an explosion of civil society organizations, more specifically of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).412 NGOs are less established in the interior regions than in Tunis and the coast, nonetheless many of the young men I have talked to, in both Gafsa and Kasserine, have participated in various NGO training programs. Even so, there is widespread skepticism towards their presence. One reason for this skepticism is that some NGOs are associated with political parties. A young political activist had this to say, “Po- litical parties are getting into the civil society business, every party has so many NGOs now. It’s just to launder money, or to get political support.” There are

412 By NGOs, I mean, “self-governing, private, not-for-profit organizations that are geared to improving the quality of life for disadvantaged people” (Vakil 1997: 2060). This includes large international ones like Amnesty International, as well as smaller, local ones. By the time I arrived in 2015, NGOs had already become criticized publicly. In the 2014 presidential and parliamentary elections the question of foreign funded NGOs was a hot topic and new laws had been passed and implemented to reduce their presence.

290 | Chapter Nine other reasons, for their distrust. Hassan, a young rap artist, explains how NGOs operate in Kasserine, “After the revolution lots of civil societies opened here, but most were only on paper. The ones that did something were corrupt. A director opens an office here, gets money, gets in his family to be part of the organization. Of the half a million he was supposed to spend on building a youth center he spends one fifth and keeps the rest.” Similar stories are repeated again and again. Amine, the owner of Metropolis, says, “NGOs do not help people, they just help themselves. We have hundreds of registered civil society organizations here. Where are they? What have they done? The most gain by the Tunisian revolution has been the Hotel Jogarta, where every week they stage civil society events.”413 Ibrahim a young man from Kasserine, “NGO is a like a dirty word. They are just self-serving, getting connections for themselves to help themselves. They should work for change instead.” NGOs are understood to function according to the same self-serving, nep- otistic and at least partially clientelistic logic as the state. In some cases, it might simply be an extension of the state, where political parties leverage help in exchange for support. In many others, civil societies are run like the state itself. Again, the logic of corruption subsumes all. 414 Saif, from Kasserine, explains:

At first, the NGO goes to the government and asks for money. The state says, "Do it first and we will pay later", because they know their people, know how they think and work. So instead, the NGO goes to foreign aid organizations and get lots of money that mostly goes to them and their families.

Despite their frustration, many see that NGOs are fulfilling some social functions by both giving a small groups access to networks and funds, and by training youth and providing them relief from their everyday boredom. As Khaled puts it, “We know that NGOs don’t do much. Maybe it’s just to en- rich themselves. But we still go for training programs. What else is there to

413 Hotel Jogarta is a fancy hotel complex outside of Gafsa, which is popular for civil society events across the interior and southern regions. 414 Studies in other contexts have shown that civil society is not immune to corruption. Porio (2017) for example shows in the Philippines how democratization and decentralization has increased the importance of NGOs and citizenship participation, but also corruption. Above all, it is powerful local actors who are in a position to leverage their influence and expand their clientelistic networks through the discourse of democracy and NGOs. There is then, no necessary contradiction between increased local and civil society activism and corruption. Porio writes “Ironically, these clientelistic practices are legitimized within a discourse emphasizing the importance of civil society and democracy in crafting development trajectories” 2017:33.

Governing through Corruption | 291 do?” The frustration of the young towards civil society may also be a sign that these NGOs cannot change or provide fundamental alternatives for the young despite their many promises. The association between corruption and NGOs among the young has led some to take matters into their own hands, and refuse to be associated with the state or international organizations. Houssam is a former head of the Kas- serine Cultural Center, and part of the group of local notables that elected the first municipal government, after the fall of Ben Ali. He helps the youth organize plays and movie screenings that show Tunisian and local films, yet is wary of receiving money or aid from the state or foreign donors. “I don’t want to take money, because it makes you dependent and open for corruption. I prefer to do things on my own.” Houssam, like Ali and his activist café, clearly understands that in order to be regarded as legitimate in the eyes of many youth in Kasserine it is best to have as little connection to the state and other international actors. Some activists are thus pushed towards further informality in order to disassociate themselves from the state. NGOs become a reminder of the corrupting logic of the state. It is also a sign that the transition has, in the minds of many young men, not been able to stem the tide of state corruption, but rather come to accelerate it. Much of the narratives on corruption underline the distance between state and the young men, between state and society. NGOs appear to both reinforce that divide, by becoming part of the state logic, and undermined it, by extending the corrupting bounds of the state. This boundary is further destabilized when the youth talk of the democratization process, and compare the past and present. The section below looks further into the connection between democratization and corruption.

DEMOCRACY AND CORRUPTION

Brighter Pasts Many dimensions of the narratives of corruption reinforce continuities between the post and pre-revolutionary Tunisian state and the sense that the revolution and democratization processes have changed little. It points to the challenges for democratizing states that Grugel & Bishop discuss; of providing for the citizens in times of crisis as well as attempting to change established

292 | Chapter Nine patterns of corruption (2014:129). This difficulty is undoubtedly apparent in the case of Tunisia. Scholars have also made the point that democratization can increase corruption. Carothers (2018) suggests that corruption can become more imbedded in everyday life as new opportunities arise in a more inclusive arena and where the heavy hand of the state is lessened.415 Certainly, among the youth there is a widespread perception that things were less corrupt before the revolution. Discussions of corruption are also narratives of ruptures. Radhouane and Mehdi both express a common sentiment regarding the effects of the revolution:

Radhouane: Inflation has undermined everything. No one has enough and corruption has gone out of control. Mehdi: During Ben Ali’s time I made 315 dinar a month. That was enough. Be- fore, you could buy food for a week for your whole family for 10 dinars. Now that will get you nothing, and 1000 dinars a month is not enough. M: Tunisians misunderstand democracy: there is no order or safety. Everyone just does what they want. R: Before the revolution there were a few big families that stole but kept the money in Tunisia and it got circulated. Now people are afraid and they keep their money in Switzerland. M: During Ben Ali the big families controlled the top, but the bottom could work and live in peace without hassle or corruption. Before, the Trabelsi clan were corrupt, now we are all Trabelsis.

The rising inflation and increase in corruption come up again and again in conversation with Tunisians of all ages. This is true even among many who are critical of the Ben Ali regime. Ines is a young radio journalist in Gafsa and a member of the Workers' Party. Ines’s father was imprisoned during Ben Ali and she is dedicated to the democratic transition process. Yet even Ines acknowledges that things have not been unproblematic:

Before, we had stability, it was easier for everyone on one level, and easier for businesses, because everyone knew what would happen. There was predictability.

415 Carothers writes that in transitions previous forms of corruption at very top “is replaced by many new politicians who have opportunities for corruption and political parties that now need financing if they are going to compete with one another, which tends to lead to corruption. In addition, there is less fear in some cases of the heavy hand by officials at different levels. Some- times new forms of corruption simply spring up due to a lack of central control and more freelancing at different levels of the system” (2018:2).

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You got paid every month and you knew when and how much you would get. Now, no one knows anything. It’s harder for small businesses, larger ones dominate them now. Before, the big corrupt families ate each other, now everyone is eating everyone. Before, the people managed to get by, but now…

Similarly, Fares, an actor from Kasserine, has become critical of the democratization process, “It's gotten worse. Now it's all bribes and connections. You can’t even take a louage without it. Soon you will have to bribe someone just to get bread.”416 Instead of the hoped-for freedom from corruption, there is a sense that corruption has now engulfed everything and everyone. Ines conceptualized pre-revolutionary Tunisia as one where “the big corrupt families ate each other”, yet now that parasitic logic has spread “now everyone is eating everyone.”

Blurred Boundaries Many close observers of Ben Ali’s Tunisia have shown that a small group, particularly the Trabelsis, controlled large and key parts of both the formal and informal economy and engaged in mafia-like extortion practices (Hibou 2011, Meddeb 2011). In fact, the anger at the Trabelsi clan was one of the driving forces behind the uprising in 2010. This anger can be understood in part as a reaction to the threatening informality of the state. Leila Ben Ali and her clan treated the Tunisian state as their personal estate. The family of the president undermined the very notion of rule of law and blurred the distinction between public and private. The implication of “we are all Trabelsis” is that all of society is now caught up in this undermining of the difference between formal and informal, between public and private. All of Tunisia has become a family, but it is a highly dysfunctional one. An activist in Kasserine put it even more starkly, “We wanted equality, and we got it. Now everyone is corrupt.” As scholars have shown, even before the revolution, in Tunisia and across the Arab World, neoliberal policies had placed corruption as a central everyday practice (Guazzone 2009). As Schielke writes in the context of Egypt, “Egypt during the Mubarak era was not simply divided into oppressors and oppressed [….] everybody was involved. The system of governing Egypt in the Mubarak era relied on the complicity of its subject, even when they were struggling against it” (2015:177). Similarly, Hibou demonstrates how the

416 Louage is a mini-bus used to travel between towns and cities.

294 | Chapter Nine breakdown of the line between public and private was part of the modus op- erandi of the Ben Ali regime. She writes that “abritrariness and fluidity of distinctions – for example between legal and illegal, public and private – constitute a mode of governing in themselves” (2004:13). Corruption then func- tioned to blur the lines between state and society, between perpetrator and victims. If the revolution was in part driven by an attempt at removing this informalization of the state, and reverse its governing through corruption, it is understood to have had exactly the opposite effects. In the minds of many it is no longer just the state, or segments of the ruling elite, that are corrupt, there has been a spillover; a spread of corruption, both vertically and horizon- tally. It is equalizing in its alienation and competitive in its logic “everyone is eating everyone.” This democratization of corruption can be understood as a shift in the political imaginaries; from a heavily regulated market monopoly in which a small and corrupt group controlled the higher levers of the economy, to a “purer” market economy with all the competition and uncertainties that it entails. To some extent this can be read as an important conceptual shift; corruption, like the state itself, is no longer understood only as something external to society but very much part of it, even as it is seen as threatening. This governing through corruption has been democratized, and corruption comes to represents not just images or practices of the state, but of society itself. The political and social have fused and while the state remains the major target of both anger and desire, both hope and despair, its dangerous dynamics have also been turned downwards and inwards. Unlike Hibou’s description of Ben Ali’s Tunisia, where the middle classes were complicit in the corruption but simultaneously shielded from it (2011), corruption now is no longer seen to function in a closed system, but one in which everyone is visibly complicit. It is not just that “now everyone is corrupt”, but that the corruption can no longer be made invisible, and that the degree to which everyone participates in its perpetuation is made clear. As in the previous chapter, there is a strong connection made between the post-authoritarian context and uncertainty. By all accounts, inflation has risen drastically over the last few years, but has corruption increased or simply become more visible? It is hard, if not impossible, to disentangle this perception of increased corruption and instability from the long legacy of authoritarian rule but also from the perhaps unrealistic expectations of post-revolutionary democratic transition and a new context in which such problems are for the

Governing through Corruption | 295 first time openly discussed.417 As was shown in the previous chapter, the narratives that are emerging in post-authoritarian Tunisia can be understood as part of an emerging public discourse. This has meant that corruption can now be reported more readily. However, on a symbolic level, narratives of broken- down boundaries and a state that consumes, are dimensions of the epistemological crisis of uncertainty over where power and responsibility lies.

Empowering or Endangering? Narratives of corruption are forms of storytelling, about the state, about society, about oneself. The constant narrative of corruption at once reinforces the importance and impotence of the state. The state remains the central entity onto which neglected groups pin their hopes, it is furthermore their main source of disappointment. This state is present and visible through the corrupt practices of its agents, but also absent in its unwillingness or inability to provide positive support. Gupta argues that it is through narratives concerning corruption that “the state comes to be marked and delineated from other organizations and institutions in social life” (1995:389). By contrast, it appears that, in the context of a democratic transition, it is through these narratives that the vision of the state as delineated from society is broken down, and that this breakdown is understood as threatening. Many consider that democratization has foisted the predatory practices of corruption on society itself, and everyone is now seen as an active participant in its dominating rationality. Neither society nor the nation are spared the disintegrating influence of corruption. According to Jackson, storytelling is the crossing of the public and private. It is:

[A]n empowering act that helps one move us from being the world's mere 'matter' to an artificer of the world […]of experiencing oneself not as a creature of circumstance but as someone who has some claim, some creative say, over how those circumstances maybe grasped, borne, and even forgiven. [..]This empowering aspect of storytelling is inextricably linked to the sharing and integration of one's experiences with that of others. In recounting one's own story, one salvages and

417 I make no claims as to whether corruption has increased or not. It is, however, reasonable to assume that for people living in the margins, the precariousness of their position means that their claims should be taken seriously. When they say that that they can no longer afford meat, that they have to bribe more, this cannot only be reduced to a nostalgia for the past. At the same time, I do suggest that it also reflects the dynamics of an opening of public transcripts.

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reaffirms, in the face of dispersal, defeat, and death, the social bonds that bind one to a community of kindred souls. (2002:132-133)

Can we say, then, that these narratives of corruption are “empowering?” If narratives of corruption are understood to be tied to the state and its corrosive influence, they are also stories of the corruption of society and the complicity of everyone. Furthermore, if this widespread sense of disappointment, frustration and anger with a state widely seen as corrupt is the general atmosphere, particularly among the young, it is connected both to political apathy and resistance. Citizenship in this study is understood not as a legal concept but as “dispositions and practices” (Zayani 2015:18), meaning a set of quotidian relations between citizens and the state, tied to the expectations that people have of the state and themselves. Bryan S. Turner, in his influential work on citizenship, distinguishes between active and passive citizenship, and argues that it is important to discuss “whether citizens are portrayed as merely a subordinated person or as an active political actor” (Turner 1990:209). The understanding of what it means to be a citizen that is articulated by the young appears to be primarily in terms of receiving state support, stability and security. A state that “gives the people”, not necessarily a state that represents the people. This can be understood as Turner’s passive citizenship, which dominates over active citizenship. Yet such distinctions are not always clear. The young express a desire for a state that would let the young realize their ambitions; this can thus be regarded as a call for a more active role for both the state and its citizens. Furthermore, corruption is itself discussed as an activating force, even if a negative one. It is also the case that the demand for social citizenship is itself often activating, in a more positive sense. If the sense of disappointment is particularly acute among the young in these regions, then so is defiance. The anger at the state of corruption comes again and again to activate the young. It is in the marginalized regions, and among marginal groups, that various forms of activism are most clearly seen. It is here that protests and demonstrations, particularly through social movements and informal politics, come to play themselves out. Much of their demands can be understood as arising from the desire for another state.

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CONCLUSIONS This chapter has shown that part of the experience of democratization is one of increased corruption. This is understood by the young to arise from the logic of the state and has been amplified by the transition processes. The chapter has also claimed that when the young talk of corruption, they understand it not just as isolated practices of individuals, local officials, or political parties that misuse public authority. Rather they see it as a reflection and evaluation of a larger logic, one that could be termed governing through corruption, where the internal logic of the state is one of dominance and failed patronage. This governing through corruption is not understood as new, but with the democratic ability to speak out, emerging narratives of corruption take on new dimensions. Many find that the revolution and democratization have amplified their frustrations, partly perhaps through disappointment, partly through a sense that the corrupt logic of the state has now engulfed all. Thus, it can be understood as a continuation of both the neoliberal crisis of opportunities as well as the epistemological uncertainty of democracy. Whether corruption has increased or not, the new-found ability to speak of corruption has amplified the sense that it occurs everywhere. In these narratives on corruption, the state remains an external entity, but the frustration is intensified by an increasingly blurred boundary between society and the state; between its formal and informal dynamics that appear to engulf and implicate everyone. According to Timothy Mitchell, the state effect; the distinction between society and the state, is produced by the state (1999). Similarly, for Migdal, the image of the state as a unity is pushed by the state (2001). By contrast, I have argued that ideas of distinction and disintegration as well as normative ideals of the state are also produced, or at the very least, reproduced by society, i.e. the young men. They appear to understand the potential breakdown of boundaries between society and the state as threatening, as driven by a predatory market logic that has been amplified by the democratization process. If the state is often expressed in negative terms by the young men, it is also experienced as “a cluster of promises” (Berlant 2006). The constant narrative of corruption at once reinforces the importance and impotence of the state. The state remains the central entity onto which neglected groups pin their hopes, as well as the main source of their disappointment. This state is present and visible through the corrupt practices of its agents, but also absent in its

298 | Chapter Nine unwillingness or inability to provide positive support. The image of the state that emerges is a dual one: corrupting and desired. The chapter has also shown that much of the narratives on corruption that are described by the young men are in line with the literature on clientelistic and predatory practices of states, often assumed to be the driving logic of states in the developing world. Even NGOs are understood in these terms. On the other hand, “clientelism and patronage are very much part of the political cultures in many parts of the world today” (Robins, Cornwall & Lieres 2008:1075), but it is important to see that this is not normatively valued. While there may be powerful incentives for continuing and even expanding clientelistic politics in the democratization process of Tunisia, and participating in it: the young also understand it as a major problem facing Tunisia. This, I argue, is important. While studies have long described the clientelist logic of the developing state, an ethnographically informed perspective shows that it is not enough to define the state as corrupt. Unlike the literature that attempts to “rehabilitate” clientelist practices from the “normative discourse on liberal democracy”, the young men’s narratives of corruption also point beyond a patrimonial state. The fact that they term much state and individual behavior as corrupt, it is itself a condemnation and a rejection of that mode of being. They may be pessimistic about the ability of the state and society itself to change, but they take the “problem of corruption” seriously and articulate counter-visions. Their narratives, both explicit and implicit, reveal a wish for another kind of state and another kind of citizenship. In their discussions, there are expectations of a state in which formal rules are followed, by those in power and citizens alike, and where citizens, at the very minimum, have access to stable and “dignified” jobs. More than that, the young articulate an expectation that the state ought to provide positive support for its citizens, to reward initiative and hard work, instead of punishing it. They also articulate visions of social relations where people do not “eat each other”, and are not implicated in the parasitic logic of corruption at the expense of one another. This can be read as a demand for those very distinctions between informality and formality, between the private and public, between state and society, that some scholars treat as only relevant for Western countries.

10. No Country for Young Men

The Truth Shall Set You Free! – John 8:32

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow – Ecclesiastes 1:18

There is a sadness here that is so commonplace that you don’t feel it – Sari

Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable – Mark Lilla

INTERLUDE 5: OF SCORPIONS AND FLIES

It’s late August, 2017, around noon. I am having a conversation with Was- sim and his friends in the half-finished café he is building in central Kas- serine. He is putting glue on the walls and plastering old newspapers on the ceiling. The café will be called Cafe journal, and is imagined by Was- sim as a cultural space for the young. “It reminds me of Metropolis in Gafsa.” I say. “My café is unique, there will be no other one like it.” Was- sim responds, “Besides I’ve not been to Gafsa in years. I don’t leave Kas- serine anymore.” When I ask him why, he explains, “Look at Arabs, across space, and history, since the last 200 years we are a dependent and subordinate people; economically, culturally, everything. I say this as someone who has traveled, not someone that has never left Tunisia. I have worked for years in Doha, and I have friends from every Arab country. I stayed in Egypt. I was in prison there, they thought we were there for the revolution. Anyway, when you go to any Arab country you will find things that you want to change, but when you try and change them you notice

299 300 | Chapter Ten that the things you want to change only grow stronger. We are a dependent people that don’t want to be independent. For example, Syria you have beautiful nature, a great history, a wonderful culture, but who destroyed it? You, its people destroyed it. The same thing happened in Egypt and Yemen, and is happening more slowly here. We are destroying Tunisia. We are responsible. I don’t want to leave Kasserine, for some other place in Tunisia, for Sousse or Monastir or Gafsa or the Arab world. It’s all the same. There is nothing special about them. The same mentality, the same people. In Lebanon, you have sectarianism, between Sunni and Shia, and between different Christians. Same mentality, just different guises. Arabs, it’s all copy/paste. We go to see different things and try and bring them here, but don’t create our own stuff. It’s the difference between internal and external change. Why are we created in this world? We are created to create not to copy, and yet Arabs only take things from outside.” I ask Wassim: “But you are making a new kind of place here, and you are part of a new local political party. You are trying to change things. There must be opportunities for change right?” He shakes his head, “First of all, we are not a political party, we are an independent youth list. That means it’s independent from the whole political party system, which is broken. And, anyway I don’t think it will make much of a difference. I tried politics, it failed. But it’s always better to do something rather than nothing. If you want to do something, you have to do it in your own place. But to really change you need to cut away the old, root and stem, and plant something new. But in this soil, nothing can grow. It will just become de- formed. Don’t expect flowers that are beautiful and smell nice if you try and grow them in bad soil. Don’t listen to those that say, ‘we did all these great things in the past, and now we are improving’. That’s nonsense; we did nothing and are doing nothing. Even the clothes we wear are not our own.” At this point one of his friends, who has been growing agitated, interrupts him, “But we are not Arabs, we are Amazigh. And the Arab ideology is not the same as Islam. The Arabs have perverted Islam.”418 Was- sim answers his friend, “Yes, yes, of course. But like it or hate it, Tunisia is registered as part of the Arab World. Like it or hate it. Yes, I am Amazigh

418 Amazigh is another name for Berber.

No Country for Young Men | 301 if we go back generations, but that’s my origin. In my culture and way of life I am Arab.” I ask: “Has nothing improved since the revolution?” Wassim looks at me before responding with a question of his own, “You are talking about the democratic transition, right?” I respond with a yes. He continues: “Ok, then I want to ask you something. Have you had a personal democratic transition?” Taken a back, I struggle to come up with an answer. “Proba- bly not” I answer hesitantly. He pushes on, “Then how can you ask me about it? How can you try and understand something you have not experienced or done yourself?” I attempt to answer him: “I am actually writing about the relationship between society and state” Wassim is having none of it, “OK, but that is another way of saying the same thing. But back to my question. Have you done a democratic transition in your personal life?” This time Wassim does not wait for my answer but goes on to explain his point, “A lot of great film-makers in the world, if you look at their movies you will notice the same problem is being articulated. What is the problem?” Again, I am not given any time to respond. He continues, “They show that a person lived a certain way when he was young, and then when he grew older and learned things there was a problem, when he tried to reach his goal he realized that he was himself the impediment, the obsta- cle. He turns or switches between himself and his goals, and sees himself as the barrier. If you want to reach your goal without problems, you need to see things about yourself, that you get bored easily, that you are not that clever, that you get easily distracted. Before a person can reach his goals, get what he wants from politics, from the state, from this or that, he needs to make peace with himself. He needs his own personal democratic transition. Imam al-Shāfiʿī wrote ‘He points out the flies in front of another, but inside him there are scorpions.’ It’s as if someone sees a fly in front of another person, does this” Wassim holds up his hand and swats it in front of me, “And forgets that there are scorpions under his own t-shirt attack- ing him.”419

419 Imam al-Shāfiʿī was the founder of one of the four schools of Fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence, and a poet, among other things.

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INTRODUCTION This chapter continues to explore democratization as a form of crisis, a crisis that is both productive and deconstructive. As I have attempted to show in previous chapters, one consequence of the democratic transition has been the opportunity to discuss the failure of the democratization process and the state. It is by no means the case that the young only externalize their critical gaze, for they also turn it inwards, and come to discuss the failures of society, and of themselves. Expressions of self-critique coexist with anger at the state and a widely noted and prevalent longing for Bourguiba, even Ben Ali, and “strong-man” leaders more generally. This chapter attempts to show how these seemingly contradictory tendencies coincide, and how they feed each other. The first part of the chapter looks at various forms of cultural intimacies (Herzfeld 2016) where young men use terms like khubzist and schizophrenic to talk about themselves. It treats such expressions as ways to make sense of everyday life as well as reflecting contested dynamics between themselves and the state. The second part of the chapter looks at the paternalist dimension of young men’s desire for the state, arguing that the young men understand their call for a “return to the father-figure” to signal responsibility on the part of the state, even as it also entails violence and discipline. The third part of the chapter delves into the tensions of paternalistic desires, in relation to both the uncertainty of democratization as well as a crisis of masculinity. Rather than understanding cultural intimacies as merely a cynical response or a “safety valve”, it is argued that the young men’s attempt at deconstructing the destructive practices of the state and its nation-state myths, is a refusal to let the state relegate its responsibility. It is also a process of revealing the darker sides of society that can come to intensify the desire for a return to authoritarianism.

CULTURAL INTIMACIES Over the course of the many months that I spent among the young men, much of their time has been spent engaging in friendly mockery with one another, often at the expense of themselves, society and the nation. While not directly political, such displays nonetheless come to perform and articulate a sense of “us.” This is what Herzfeld refers to as cultural intimacies: “These are

No Country for Young Men | 303 the self-stereotypes that insiders express ostensibly at their own collective expense” (2016:7). Cultural intimacies, argues Herzfeld, can be understood only in relation to dominant national myths perpetuated by the state. In contexts of clear state domination, cultural intimacies may take on particular resonances through, for example, jokes at the expense of both the president and the people (Wedeen 1999). Yet, according to Herzfeld, cultural intimacies are not limited to authoritarian contexts. They are the “knowledge that is required to make sense of what would otherwise look like nonsensical situations” (2016:24). Cultural intimacies are, at least in part, an attempt to stave off a potentially chaotic social reality, “an attempt to project familiar social experience onto unknown and often potentially threatening contexts” (2016:11). They both reveal and bridge the gaps between the “official” national narratives and lived experience. For example, it is not uncommon across Tunisia to hear the term “Green Tunisia” (Tunis al khudra) the national phrase, evoked. “How is life in the Green Tunisia?” one may shout to a friend or acquaintance, “Where is the greenery?” the other responds. Such comments make sense only in relation to a shared understanding of “who we are”, and of a dissonance between an official narrative and an imperfect reality. “Offi- cially” Tunisia is “green”; bountiful and rich, but the lived experienced is different. Cultural intimacies are “those aspects of an officially shared identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality” (2016:7). Cultural intimacies are both reactions to, and part of, political imaginaries. They are interpretive endeavors that reveal the “truth” behind the state-imposed façade. They reveal a shared understanding of everyday life and perform a sort of community, by producing an “us” that understand what is “really going on.”420 These forms of expressions have been variously understood as “safety valves” that reproduce the system (Herzfeld 2016), as expressions of “cynicism” (Navaro-Yashin 2002) or as subtle forms of “resistance” (Scott 1990). Many forms of cultural intimacies in contemporary Tunisia, like the narratives on corruption discussed in the previous chapter, are ways of interpreting and providing familiarity with the challenges of everyday life. They articulate disappointment in the state of things and the distance between nation-state myths and experienced reality. Understood in this way they are correctives to nation-state myths that do not express the lived experiences of many, perhaps

420 Herzfeld writes, “They are not solely personal feelings, but describe the collective representation of intimacy” (2016:11).

304 | Chapter Ten most, Tunisians. Many of the cultural intimacies have undoubtedly been shaped by the nature of transcripts in situations of domination during the Ben Ali era. The opening of public space has given new force to old and previously hidden narratives. Even in contexts of a more open public space, there persists a multitude of cultural intimacies that signal that old myths still carry force and old frustrations still live on. I argue that in post-revolutionary Tunisia, cultural intimacies reveal expectations and desires of young men. By maintaining the state as the locus of power and responsibility, they also come to articulate a critique of the state, by demanding their due.

Khubzist The first time I drove across the country with Sari, he decided to tell me what I have misunderstood about young Tunisian men in my research:

Sari: The young people you talk to, they tell you things but it is all nonsense. Really, they don’t know or care about politics. You are getting the wrong image of Tunisians. I want to tell you the truth. Karim: What do you mean? S: I mean that you are getting the wrong idea about us. We, young Tunisians, don’t care or know about anything that you ask us about. K: You mean that because I am asking them about politics, I am getting answers about politics, but they don’t care about politics. S: Exactly. I will tell you the truth. All we care about is women, and drinking and having a good time. That's who we are. We are khubzists.

A common phrase that young men use when talking of themselves, and about others, is that they are khubzist.421 Khubzist is “a pragmatist without morals” or “someone that will stab you in the back for a dinar.” Being a khubzist is tied to a make-do attitude, but also tied to a life driven primarily by consumption and waiting, as Wassim says:

Tunisians are khubzists: we just want to live for today and not think about the future. Drink and smoke. Life is all about consumption here. The only new things in Kasserine are the cafés and pizzas. New decor but same thing. That’s all that changes: the decor. The young man wakes up and starts smoking and drinking coffee, you’d think he’d get ready to do something great. But that is all he does for the whole day. Drink coffee and smoke.

421 Khubz is Arabic for bread. Khubzist is conjugated like a French verb,

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Being a khubzist reflects the conditions of life that have forced the youth into a mode where the future no longer exists except as a homogenous repetition. It comes to articulate a logic in the margins where insecurity and uncertainty reigns.422 Christopher Lasch, in an American context, writes of this neoliberal condition: “As the future becomes menacing and uncertain, only fools put off until tomorrow the fun they can have today” (1991:53). Many young men use the term khubzist as a way of signaling that life should be about more than consumption. As Sari tells me, “People here are sick, and I am one of them. We have no dreams and live day by day. We have nothing do to but eat and drink.” Jamil from Kasserine says:

Tunisians can be easily manipulated, especially when it comes to religion. They don’t know anything. Their only goal is just to get rich. But they don’t have a plan on how to do it, and no idea what to do if they become rich. They are khubzists. My friend called me yesterday, to complain, “Life is no good” he said, “I’m depressed.” I live in the same street as you do, I have the same life, I know, why are you telling me? I asked what he wanted to do, he said, “I want to become rich.” How? He has no clue.

Tunisians should be more, they should look for tomorrow, even as most know the difficulty in achieving it. For Jamil, the khubzist attitude makes Tunisians easy to control and manipulated. However, as young Rami argues, it can be understood as safe-guard, “Ennahda tried to introduce Islamism, but the Tu- nisian people didn’t let them. And because Gannouchi is smart, he changed his tune. We are not ideological; it doesn’t work with us. We are pragmatists. Khubzists.” Here the khubzist pragmatism becomes a defense against ideological inculcation. Calling someone a khubzist can be an insult, but it can also be a point of pride. As a young louage driver put it, “The state just wants and the young want from the state. I'm a khubzist. I just work and I don't care about politics. I just want things to be peaceful and do my own work.” A dancer from Sidi Bouzid expresses this tension between critique and pride:

Nidal: I talked to a young French sociologist. She told me that a study had showed that Tunisians are the smartest people in the world. Karim: Smartest how? You mean in math’s? Philosophy? N: No, like in making do, managing in hard circumstances.

422 This insecurity is not necessarily new. But, as I explain below, it goes counter to the dominant nation-station narrative of middle-class Tunisia.

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K: Street smart? N: Yes. Tunisians will always manage. Not like Algerians, they are brave and strong, but they break easily. Tunisians are unbreakable.

Like in the thesis of Hamza Meddeb, the khuzsist life can signal “a day-to-day experience of trickery, an art of seizing opportunities and striking with inge- nuity and improvisation” (2012:x), in contexts of small to no margins and constant threat to survival. Calling oneself a khubzist is also a performance of an independent and make-do attitude in the face of a hostile environment. The positive value expressed by some men in relation to a khubzist life, may in part reflect a sour-grape syndrome: making a virtue out of necessity.423 For many, it is clear that the reason for this khubzist life-style is due to the inability to achieve the standards of adulthood and respectable masculinity. As Ahmed says, “Tunisians just want money, easy money; khobza barda. But I understand, that's the situation. You can't plan. You need 400 million dinars to get married. At least 250 million just to get a house here, and a wedding is so expensive. The ones that can't get married want to get everyone to his level of poverty.”424 Here, the khubzist logic is linked to the desperate search for money, not merely to consume, but above all to enable one to marry. The failure to do so, is understood as activating a mimetic drive where no one wants others to succeed. A khubzist attitude becomes a kind of race to the bottom. Yet like situations of waiting, the khubzist life can also give rise to forms of community. Herzeld writes that, “National embarrassment can become the ironic basis of intimacy and affection, a fellowship of the flawed, within the private spaces of the national culture” (2016:31). Khubzist articulates a kind of “fellowship of the flawed”, where the young acknowledge and share in the hardship of everyday life, while simultaneously critiquing it and the system that gives rise to it Meddeb understands the “race for the khubza” as a form of governmentality in the margins (2012). Without disputing that claim, I read the references to khubzist as a way of deconstructing the nation-state myth of middle class Tunisia. The national narrative that has been promoted for decades, by both Bourguiba and Ben Ali, states that Tunisia is the “economic miracle” of the Arab World, one that is composed of an educated middle-class population.425

423 I am not suggesting that they are under some sort of false consciousness. But rather that, their proclamations of an independent and care-free life are ways of reformulating their precarity in more positive terms. 424 Khobza barda, literally “cold bread” 425 See Baccar Gherib (2011) for an analysis of the importance of this myth.

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Against this notion of Tunisia as a prosperous middle-class country, calling Tunisians khubzist articulates an alternative reality, where instead Tunisia is a country of desperate pragmatists who live hand-to-mouth. The term, it should be made clear, is highly gendered, and a khubzist is always male, although it is not necessarily only young men that are khubzist. Ali says:

Tunisians don’t think about tomorrow. They just eat and drink today and that’s it. They are khubzist. I overheard just the other day two men talking and one of them said, “I don’t care about anything other than eating today, even my kids I don’t care about.” That's a Tunisian for you. Not just the young. Everyone.426

Khubzist articulates the breakdown of the socio-political order as well as the familial order, and connotes a way of being within that order. Like in discussions on corruption, it represents a market logic in which “everyone eats everyone.” It is understood as a masculine performance, both negative and positive, of action without regard for the future. It is descriptive, normative as well as performative. I see the defining of other Tunisians and oneself as khubzist as at once an act of self-reproach and critique directed against those that do not act as they should, as well an attack at the larger state-citizen logics. In all its forms khubzist signals an absence of authority, be it parents, society or the state, and the absence or escape from responsibility, both of the parents and children. Yet, this absence of authority and responsibility has not rendered the khubzist free. He is relegated to making a living in the informal economy where he is at the mercy of others.427 The young Tunisian calling himself khubzist signal an aspiration of independence, because in reality he has little of it.

Schizophrenia The notion that there is an identity crisis among Tunisians, that they are schizophrenic, is another common cultural intimacy. One way that this is often exemplified by the young men is through the reference to Tunisian family- dynamics. As a young man from Gafsa, tells me:

426 “Everyone” meaning all men. 427 Ferguson writes about the informal economy, as one based on a “kind of day-to-day survival on the part of the unemployed, but they are left in a very precarious position – hanging (as the literal meaning of ‘depend’ suggests) by a thread (or perhaps, in the better case, by a frail network of threads)” (2013:231).

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We are a schizophrenic people. We have no identity. You in Syria have an identity, but not we Tunisians. For example, in my family one brother is a drunkard, one sister is an Islamist, my father is a leftist, my mother prays. You are Syrians. Arabs. That’s your identity. But we don’t know what we are.

This notion that the Tunisian family is “schizophrenic” because of its plurality is telling. Another young man puts it like this, “We are neither modern not traditional, neither French nor Arab. We are lost.” A leftist activist talks about it:

We are still searching for our Arabness, wanting to find an Arab identity, all our leaders and thinkers just draw from Arab thought. We have an identity crisis: we are always seeking the Middle East. We get everything second or third hand. But Aflaq just copied his ideas from Tito.428

I have claimed that the term khubzist is a kind of reaction the myth of Tunisia as a middle-class country, and instead posits a precarious hand to mouth life as the normative middle, of the real Tunisia. I understand the self-designation of Tunisians as schizophrenic and having an identity crisis as a response to another nation-state myth: the notion of Tunisia as a comfortable symbiosis of French and Arab, a country in step with both tradition and modernity. Both Bourguiba and Ben Ali invested considerable ideological importance in the notion that Tunisia is on a path of stability and reform, carrier of an Arab- Islamic identity that is also modern. At the very least, pronouncements of schizophrenia are a corrective to the rosy picture, it shows the price of such cultural ambiguity. It could be articulated as saying: the official view is that we are both French and Arab, but we are neither. We are lost and confused. Calling Tunisians schizophrenic can be read both as a critique of the nation-state myth of cultural symbiosis and as an attempt to correct an exaggerated and unrealistic national self-perception.429 The most prominent Tunisia

428 Micheal Aflaq, Syrian founder of Baathism 429 According to Sharabi, a general “schizophrenic” attitude in the Arab World arises out of the social dominance of the petite bourgeoisie, “Neopatriarchy's schizophrenic duality manifests itself most clearly in the petty bourgeoisie, the social class most representative of neopatriarchal society and culture. In this class can be found the most contradictory values and tendencies coexisting without conscious resolution or synthesis, producing the kind of disjointed and contradictory structures and practices that are most typical of this society” (1988:8). Schizophrenia is, for Sharabi, the product of a failed modernization. I do not necessarily reject this claim, but

No Country for Young Men | 309 filmmaker, Nouri Bouzid, has often dealt with themes of belonging and confusion in his films. He remarked, “Are we Arabs? Are we Tunisians? What does it mean to be Arab? What is being Tunisian? Where do I come from?[…]Are we Berbers? Are we a mixture?” (quoted in Lang 2014:36). Given that Bateson’s previously discussed understanding of schizophrenia arises out of contradictory demands, it should not surprise us that the term schizophrenic is the word that the young men use to describe themselves and their society.430 References to schizophrenia and identity crisis can also be read as the dark side of decades of the Tunisian state promoting the “myth of consensus.” The corporatist model, represented by Bourguiba, stressed the unity of the Tuni- sian people and disparaged any articulation of difference or conflict. The form of governance developed during Ben Ali emphasized consensus. Schizophre- nia is a signal that the consensus comes at a heavy price, and hides repression and violence. Hibou writes about Ben Ali’s use of consensus as a myth that “presents itself as an art of harmonious government and as an ethos characteristic of the ‘people’ or the ‘national identity’; it is a ‘golden haze’ that hides the vulgarity of power relations, struggles and negotiations that are after all ubiquitous in Tunisian society” (2017:119). But there is also the fact that what could be understood as something healthy, a plurality of ideas, a toler- ance for difference, is instead interpreted as sign of mental unhealth. The notion of a healthy family is one in which differences are less manifest. There remains, perhaps, some elements of the old order where, “To reject consensus is to oppose the natural social order” (Hibou 2017:120). References to schizophrenia appear to show the difficulty of accepting difference and conflict. It is another sign that what is “democratic” can be considered threatening. It can be understood as an aspect of the larger epistemological crisis; it can reflect an uncertainty, not just what one is doing, but who one is. Like khubzist, the issue of schizophrenia is expressed as simultaneously a general Tunisian conditions and specific to young men. It is often put in connection to a generational crisis. Aymen, a young man from Tataouine in the south who now lives in Tunis, says:

maintain that it also comes to express local particularities in relation to the expected modernization and its effects. 430 This double bind is perhaps amplified by the young men’s suspicion that categories of Arab/Modern and Arab/Berber are mutually excluding categories.

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We, the youth, tend to hate our own country. We don’t fit in it. There is a generational and cultural element of this as well as an economic. We expect things from the state. The youth are always waiting for the state to give them a job. This creates an inferiority complex, since there are so few government jobs. Even those working in the private sector want government jobs. The UDC, the UGTT, all leftists, all they demand is jobs of the state. They don’t try and transform it. And we just blame others. Then there is the generational gap. We young dress and speak differently. We were raised on TV and internet, consumption. Our parents were raised by the state. Our fathers tell us, “You are too modern to be Arab.” Our fathers looked to France, we to the US. Then there is the shame of unemployment. Our fathers tell us, “Get a job, even if its low pay.” But we have higher expectations. We are a patriarchal and individualist society at the same time. We are a very judgmental society. Over-judgmental. Everything is defined by what you do, how you dress, your social status is everything.

What Aymen is expressing is that the young men are caught in a number of crises; between expectations and reality, between being active and passive, between anger and shame, between patriarchy and individualism. Another young man expresses it in more general terms, “Tunisians, particularly the young, don’t like Tunisia and don’t expect anything from it. Not like Mo- rocco or Algeria where people are proud of their country. 80 percent of youth don’t want to be Tunisian. They want to be something else. Somewhere else.” Both are suggesting that the youth, again understood as young men, to some extent have themselves to blame even as they also understand why being a young man in Tunisia is no easy task. For others, all talk of identity crisis is highly class-inflected. Walid, the owner of Metropolis, says:

The Tunisian people have the memory of a rooster. We have not changed since ancient times. Tunisians are comfortable with having two contradictory opinions at the same time: they drink and consider themselves good Muslims. If someone tells them this pen is blue they will believe it, if someone else says it is red they will also believe it. No problems. They are both for and against Ben Ali. Love him and hate him. They say that Tunisians are cultured and educated. But that is just a small elite. And the cultural elites live in a closed world. If they say something it is just to confuse people more. These elites have an identity crisis. Not the rest of the people. Identity crisis demands thinking.

Here, the target is ideas of the Tunisians as “cultured” (muthaqaf), an often- articulated view that is compared to “strong” (and more masculine) Algerians

No Country for Young Men | 311 and “rich but dumb” Libyans. But Khaled undermines this notion and tries to show that it hides a class element. He suggests instead that the talk of identity crisis is another form of self-aggrandizement, and another form of nation- state myth.

From Post-Colonial to Democratic Doubt What these cultural intimacies, these “self-stereotypes”, reveal is the way many young men understand what it means to be “Tunisian.” A “Tunisian” is male, often young, forced into a pragmatic “race for the khubza”, who is lost between East and West, between the past and future, and who neither family nor state are able to or willing to help; he is continually marginalized but also comes to reinforce this marginalization. There are elements of what could be termed a post-colonial self-reproach evident in many of the narratives I have laid out. There is a both explicit and implicit comparative dimension, particularly with an imagined modern West. It follows in many ways from an internalization of a modernist framework where Tunisia and Tunisians are found wanting. Such thinking tends to divide the world into a set of oppositions: modern and traditional, Euro- pean/French and Arab, cultured and uncultured, middle-class and poor, active and passive. Similar sentiments can be found across the post-colonial world, where “underdevelopment” is understood as a moral defect, both in- dividually and socially. As Wassim, in the beginning of the chapter put it, “We are a dependent and subordinate people; economically, culturally, everything.” Such sentiments may become particularly acute during periods of transition, where it becomes evident just how “backwards” the country is. Transitions are moments where expectations and “reality” become particularly clear and perhaps open for change. As Fares says, “The problem is that we are always comparing ourselves to other countries. To the U.S, France or Germany. But we need to know where we are. We are a Third World Coun- try. We need to work from where we are, not where we want to be.” This can be seen as another product of a deconstruction of Tunisian exceptionalism myths; Tunisia is just another Third World Country. The tension is, in part, that the more “honest” one becomes about the state of affairs, the further down the hierarchies of modern and successful countries one is seemingly placed.

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This modernist-infused view of the world, should be understood in relation to the Bourguiba paternalism, that, in many ways, reproduced the colonial logic of dependence and inferiority. As Tunisian Gilbert Naccache writes in Bourguiba et nous, written after Bourguiba passed away in 2001:

The difficulty of speaking, writing even breathing, that is not new. Every word, every line, every step was the result of an incessant fight of each of us against fear, against the negative opinion he wanted us to have of ourselves[…]He heaped his scorn on us, and called on the people—of whom he was equally contemptuous— to despise us for using our intelligence. And it has largely succeeded. (2000:224)

Similarly, Aziz Krichen, in his book Le Syndrome Bourguiba (1993), makes the argument that the sense of inferiority of the colonial experience continued over into the post-colonial, where Bourguiba persisted in a program of keeping the Tunisian population dependent and infantilized. This, argues Krichen, has led to an inability of sons to recognize themselves in their fathers and therefore a crisis in masculine reproduction. A condition he refers to as schizophrenic (1993:14). The young are placed in a position of inferiority towards their fathers, the state and modernity at large. The crisis of agency is also a crisis of paternalist authoritarianism. The section below will investigate this logic further.

LONGING FOR THE FATHER If many of the cultural intimacies appear to reflect a world where the young are left to their own devices, where the family and the father are in many ways absent, another striking aspect of many conversations with young men is the emphasize on “strong leaders” which, I argue, reflects a desire for dependence and an escape of the khubzist logic.

Saddam and Stalin I am in Gafsa for the first time. I am sitting in a café in waiting for two young men, Khaled and Hamza, sent by Wadih to meet me. As they show up and introduce themselves, Khaled exclaims excitedly, “Ah you are Syrian” as soon as they hear my dialect. “Tell me.” Khaled begins, “Are you for or against

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Bashar?”431 Before I have time to try and formulate an answer, Khaled responds himself, “I will tell you. Bashar is bad, but America is worse. There- fore, we have to support him.” Hamza speaks up, “Bashar is a hero, he is fighting both imperialism and fundamentalism.” Khaled looks annoyed, “We are both Baathists” he explains, “but Hamza follows Assad. I follow Saddam.” My shock is hard to hide, “There are Baathists in Tunisia? How is that possible?” I ask. Hamza responds, “Of course there are. There are Nasserites too. But Baathists are bigger. Saddam has always been popular here, but since the attacks on Syria, Assad is popular again.” As I am trying to wrap my head around the thought of the stale Baathist ideologies of the Middle East exciting young Tunisian men, Hamza continues, “There are other leftists too. The Workers' Party is Lenin-Trotskyists. Your friend Wadih is a Stalinist.” This and the many conversations like it I have had highlight a number of interesting points. The merits of Hafiz Al Assad, of Saddam Hussein of Iraq, of Abdel Gamal Nasser of Egypt, are still topics of relevance for many young Tunisians, and not only those that define themselves as on the left. The invocation of masculine leadership should, in part, be understood as demands for “stronger” and more ambitious, state-building processes. This fascination with more obviously military and “anti-West” leaders, like Saddam and the Assad’s, can also be understood as a desire for, and resentment towards, the West. It is particularly noteworthy in a context like Tunisia that, unlike many other Arab states, lacks a history of militarization and war. It represents a desire for a restored dignity. This represents a different kind of dignity from the previously discussed “speaking out” and dignity as state-employment. This is a dignity of “standing up to the West.” Dignity, in all its ambiguous faces, appears to reflect an attraction to, and denial of, the West.432 At the same time, many young are also critical of the fascination with strong leaders. As Ayoub explains it:

We leftists and Arabs don’t have enough good leaders; therefore, we see Saddam, Nasser, Bashar, or anyone that has fought Islamists as heroes. Because we have so few secular leaders here. We are apparently open, but actually closed. This is true for all Tunisians, but the leftists most of all. I personally hate Bourguiba, but I admire him intellectually. Without him we would be even more conservative.

431 “Bashar” here refers to Bashar Al Assad, Syria’s current president 432 Like the parents that one seeks to simultaneously rebel against, supplant and seek approval from. Often, of course, this only comes to reinforce their parental authority.

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There is a complete conflation between the leader and the state, even the nation. As Ali, another young man pointed out when discussing Bourguiba:

We should not worship him [Bourguiba]. This is the problem in the Arab world. I know you live in Sweden, and I know Sweden is a very developed country, but I don’t know the name of your head of state. But as soon as we hear Syria we think of Assad, or Libya we think Qaddafi, or Iraq we think Saddam. We can’t distinguish between the leader and the country. As if he was a king and owned everything.433

This kind of patriarchal and patrimonial understanding of the state is hardly unique to the Arab World. As historians and gender scholars have pointed out, there is long history in the West of masculinizing both the state and leaders (Pateman 1988; Yuval-Davis 1987).434 The reference to the leader in terms of a father symbol is embedded in both state-discourse and everyday language. As Wedeen writes about the importance of the cult of Hafiz al Assad in Syria, it “derives its coherence and intelligibility from the actual relations between the sexes and the practical, lived understandings of gender and power within Syrian families” (1999:45). The use of patriarchal language signals a certain kind of power-dynamics between the state and citizens that is based on unequal hierarchies between genders and generations, based on obedience on the part of the children/citizens but also responsibilities on the part of the father/state. It is another form of as if politics, where people come to behave as if the leader is a father.435 And yet while leaders of the state often make use of such language, how such language is used and understood by the young men is not straightforward.436 Even during Ben Ali’s era such paternalistic language was undermined by a neoliberal

433 Lina Khatib writes “Gaddafi is Libya, and Libya is Gaddafi” (2012:185). Salamé writes, “The distinction between the country and its leader, between the public budget and the resources at the dictator’s disposal, or between national and praetorian armies, is yet to be fully made in reality as well as in perception” (1986:206) 434 For an article on how Ottoman and Islamic tradition has understood nature, the nation and the soil as female and passive, while God, the state and the male as active: see Delaney 1995. 435 Wedeen writes that “the metaphor of the father operates to underscore that Asad is like the family patriarch: similar to but bigger, better, and more powerful than one's own father” (1999:48, italics in original). 436 As Cherstich writes with regard to Libya, “Libyans did not passively accept the view of Gaddafi as a ‘disembodied symbol’ put forward by the propaganda of the regime, but critically engaged with it by questioning it and by creating their own narratives around it” (2014:95).

No Country for Young Men | 315 discourse that shifted the burden away from the state and towards the individual. What does the continued use of such familial language by young men in post-revolutionary Tunisia signal?

Freudian Ambivalence For many thinkers of the Frankfurt School that built on Freud, as well as psy- choanalysts like Erich Fromm, the tendency towards revering authority figures was understood as kind of personality disorder, to be distinguished from “healthy” democratic personalities (Berard 2013). The book The Authoritar- ian Personality, made in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, and first published in 1950, argued in Freudian terms that the authoritarian personality arises out of a poorly developed superego, where parental authority has not been properly internalized and subjects instead need constant external reinforcement. This they claimed produces individuals with “weak egos”, individuals who both resist and desire authority.437 Rather than to dissect the Tunisian family psychoanalytically, however, or treat the young Tunisian men that desire strong leaders and strong states as little more than neurotics with father-issues, my intention in this chapter is merely to make a connection between the language and themes that are used by the young men when speaking of fathers and when speaking of the state.438 To do so, I take inspiration from Freud’s “meta-psychological” work like Totem and Taboo (2013) and Civili- zation and its discontents (1989) rather than his, and his later interpreters, “properly” psychological work.439 The legacy of the state and the father remain deeply ambiguous for many young men in Tunisia. Here, Freud’s emphasis on the ambivalent nature of the father-sons dynamics may be helpful.440

437 Adorno et al., write “Weakness in the ego is expressed in the inability to build up a consistent and enduring set of moral values within the personality; and it is this state of affairs, apparently, that makes it necessary for the individual to seek some organizing and coordinating agency outside of himself” (2019:234). 438 My position is in many ways the opposite the one taken in “the Authoritarian Personality”; “We are indebted to the Freud who developed the theory of the unconscious and of repression, of the Id, the ego and the superego—not Freud the anthropologist” (Adorno et al. 2019:101). 439 In Civilization and its Discontent, Freud makes the case that civilization itself is built on “neurotic” foundations (1989. 440 By invoking Freud, I also do not wish to convey that young men I study are acting on unconscious drives or repressed desires. My position may be understood as more in line with Deleuze and Guattari when they write that, “The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use[..]It represents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing, but it works” (1983:108).

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Revolution as Restoration Given the central place of the leader as a metaphoric father figure in authoritarian Tunisia, the Tunisian revolution can, to some extent, be seen as an attack on paternal authority, in the form of Ben Ali. Writing about the French Revolution, historian Lynn Hunt considers the question facing the revolutionaries: “Once the king had been eliminated, what was to be the model that ensured the citizens’ obedience?” (1992:3). Put another way; the king/father is dead, what now? In the case of Tunisia, a partial answer was the resurrection of the older father, the real father. The primordial murder of the father that Freud discusses in Totem and Taboo (2013) is what sets off the subsequent worshiping of him. Once he is murdered by his frustrated sons, he is resurrected as the symbolic father that instantiates prohibitions and upholds the Law. The paradox is that the moment when the sons depose the father is the moment when they are subject to his authority through what Freud terms “delayed obedience.”441 It is only after the father has been dethroned that Law comes into being and he is wor- shiped. The need for authority is felt at the precise moment when it has been removed. In the background chapter, I discussed how the post-revolutionary period has seen the “return of Bourguiba”, in the form of a widespread nostalgia for the “father of the nation.” This has been particularly clear in the case of the octogenarian leader of Nida Tounis, Beji Qadi Essibi, who won the presidential election in 2014. His presidential campaign was marked by explicitly taking up the mantle of Bourguibism. As a report by Kawkabi, a Tunisian organization, put it, “Mobilizing the legacy of ‘bourguibism’ today is a way to appeal to these nostalgic feelings of a strong leader and a strong state, among Tunisians, and to gain political credit over “Islamists‟ depicted as incompe- tent” (2016:31). This return to Bourguiba follows an older logic of revolutions, it is, to an extent, revolution in its original term: restoration. Arendt writes that, “The revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which to us appear to show all evidence of a new spirit, the spirit of the modern age, were intended to be restorations” (1965:43).442 Or as Marx wrote in his famous opening passage of the The Eighteenth Brumaire:

441 Ruth Stein writes “Following this murderous act, they [the brothers] develop toward their dead father a posthumous, ambivalent, dialectically complex relationship of guilt and love, hostility and remorse” (2010:41). 442 Interestingly the Arabic word for state, dawla, has an older connotation with rotation and circularity (Ayubi 2009:22)

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At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language. (2000:1)

Revolution is, in Freudian terms, “a family romance; getting free from the parents of who he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who as a rule, are of higher social standing” (1959:74). The “real” father, Bourguiba, is restored, and his usurper, Ben Ali, expelled. The power of the myth of Bourguiba lies precisely in its sense of familial familiarity and restoration in the face of the new unknown.443 Essibsi managed to draw on the disparate aspects of the myth of Bourguiba to garner support among a diverse set of groups. Yet, several factors curtailed his ability to bring about a full paternal restoration. Crucially, Essibsi was forced to shared power with another father-figure, Rachid Gannouschi. This political constellation is often referred to as “the rule by the two Sheikhs.”444 This sharing of power is also represented in the new political system, with a dual president and prime minister, taken from the French system.445 Yet, among the young men in the southern and interior regions of the country where Bourguiba’s legacy is more contentious, the story of the return of true paternity via Bourguiba is more complicated and has in many ways been resisted. Part of this may be in the strong leftist tradition, particularly in Gafsa, but much of it is due to the sense of historical marginalization. Many in the south and interior region regard both Bourguiba and Ben Ali as representing the coast rather than the country as a whole. If Bourguiba is the father of the nation, in many parts of the country, his sons continue to feel excluded, mis- treated and resentful.

443 Bourguiba represents the undisputed “father of the nation.” Beyond this, for some he is considered a more liberal and pluralistic leader, for others it is his secular credentials. He is seen by many as more “honest” than his successor, stories about his lack of interest in material gains are repeated often, while for some he represents more socialist oriented policies than Ben Ali. 444 Gannoushi, leader of the Ennahda party, the moderately Islamist party that ruled together with Essibsi’s party Nidaa Tunis for much of 2014 to 2019. 445 Both Nida Tounis and Ennahda are center-of-right parties that attack exactly the strongly modernist and socialist infused policies of Bourguiba. They at once call back to the prestige of state and attempt to reduce its responsibilities vis-a-vis its citizens.

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No Ties Between Us There appears to be a crisis in the father-figure that mirrors the crisis of the state as experienced by the young men, both as an excessively violent father, and one where authority has been undermined. On the topic of fathers, Sari explains to me:

I have a typical relationship to my father. There are no ties between us. It’s just financial. He gives when I’m young and I give when I’m older. Even that, we can no longer manage. That’s how it is in Tunisia. Only maybe three people in a hundred actually talk to their fathers. Have conversations. There is a word here “Sibta” (belt). The Tunisian father speaks only in the language of the belt: he is the dictator of the house. He only talks about what is and isn’t allowed. If we argue it is neither out of love or hate. A Tunisian is like a phone, mechanical, a robot, without feeling. We love like robots. We go through the motions but there is nothing inside. There is a sadness here that is so commonplace that you don’t feel it.

These are stark words, and no less stark for being repeated often. When discussing their relationship to their father in general terms, phrases like “dictator of the house” are common cultural intimacies.446 Alu says, “The problem in the Arab world is that the men, the fathers don’t hug their children. Fathers can hit their mothers in front of the kids but not hug her or kiss her.” In their work, Tunisian artists and intellectuals have long discussed questions of masculinity, particularly the father-son relationship in relation to the post-colonial condition. According filmmaker Bouzid, “With us the problem of the father is associated not with the Oedipus complex but with the myth of Abra- ham, who was prepared to sacrifice his own son. The son submits to the father and serves him” (quoted in Lang 2017:57).447 On the other hand, coexisting with the narrative of a strict father is another narrative, where the “problem”

446 At the same time, when asked about their particular relationship, the answer is often framed differently. Unlike Sari above, many will respond “I have a good relationship to my father.” 447 See Najib Djaziri Á l’ombre du père (2015) for a similar argument. For arguments on the father-son complex and its authoritarian tendencies across the Arab World see Barakat (1991) and Sharabi (1988). There is also a small psychoanalytical literature that focuses on the mother- son dynamic in the Arab World, building on Tunisian sociologist Abdelwahab Bouhdiba’s work. Bouhdiba writes about a Juwdar complex, after the hero in one of the Thousand and One Nights stories. Juwdar must pass through several magic doors. At the seventh he discovers a ghost in the guise of his mother, whom he must undress in order to pass through. Daunted by the taboo, he at first fails. He succeeds in his second attempt and gets the hidden treasure. According to Bouhdiba the story signals the over-dependence on the mother among Arab men, and shows the way forward, “One must kill in oneself the image of the mother, profane it, demythify it” (2004:226). See also Riadh (2015) for a specific focus on Tunisia.

No Country for Young Men | 319 lies in the laxity of the fathers. As Youssef puts it, “This idea of adolescence is the source of so much of our problems. The idea that kids should be independent. Now the father has no authority any more. Instead, we are raised by the streets.” The father and the state are both discussed in terms of authority, often in terms of an authority that has been reduced to pure coercion or lost its coercive power altogether. For some, the father/state speaks only in the language of violence. For others, it is the lack of authority, both at home and in society, that is the problem. Either the father cannot give financial support but is reduced to only to violence, or, even the violence is missing. In either case, neither the state nor the father is able to provide for the young; neither discipline nor as role models. The young men are left outside of paternal power, raised instead “in the streets.” The street becomes a sort of liminal space, between the private and public, and represents the dissolution of both familial and state authority. It is both the breakdown of authority and its reduction to pure repression that is resented and feared. Here again the theme of chaos and crisis becomes important, and are for some understood as caused by the removal of the father, both real and symbolic.

State and Family In Tunisia, like many other post-colonial countries, the state-building process following independence was often expressed in terms of family symbols (the state as father, tribes as brothers). Paternal authority remained central, “that state authorities delegate the task of engineering docile subjects to private- sphere institutions, such as the family, and to the figure of spermal paternity par excellence—the father” (Gana 2017:180). At the same time, the practical importance of the biological family was diminished, and increasingly replaced by the symbolic family of the state. What was formerly the prerogative of the head of the household became the responsibility of the state.448 This can be understood as a simultaneous weakening and strengthening of paternal authority. As I discussed in chapter four, the shift in the later 1970s has been one in which the state has disengaged from providing many central services. Thus, some scholars discuss the neoliberal reforms as giving rise to a “return

448 Wedeen writes of the similar dynamic in Syria that “most Syrians had already come to expect the state to provide certain goods and services previously offered by families and by charitable organizations, or formerly not provided at all. To some extent, such expectations reflect the relationship between the weakened authority of leading families and the growing role of the state” (1999:187).

320 | Chapter Ten to the family” and other more “traditional units” as the state has withdrawn. King, in his study of a village in northwestern Tunisia in the mid-90s, examines the effects of the structural adjustment programs, and finds that:

[N]eo-liberal economic transformation led to the retraditionalization of local politics and the resurgence of clientelism. For most peasants the new market arrangements have increased risk but not opportunity. A moral economy at the local level is being revived during state-led economic liberalization. (2003:3)

According to King, the reforms also strengthened the authoritarian tendencies of the Ben Ali regime. The weakening of the already marginal sections of society, making them more dependent on the wealthy, re-emerging “neo-traditional” forms of patronage networks, as well as on the state party, led to a process he terms “liberalization against democracy.” Again, the consequences appear paradoxical, the symbolic father as state and leader is less able or willing to provide, but so, in many cases is the biological father. As the young have become more and more forced to fend for themselves, turned into khubzists, neoliberal reforms have not signaled less state power but a different kind: less responsibility and reward and more repressive. The breakdown of paternal authority and its simultaneous turn towards more violence is highly destabilizing, and the democratization process has only increased this sense of instability.

Productive Violence Much of the issues surrounding the state are not unique for young men but shared across generational, class and gender divides in Tunisia, even as the lack of economic opportunities has hit the young in interior regions dispro- portionately hard. However, if one thing stands out in the way that many young men talk of the state, it is that their relationship with the state is mediated in large part through violence and the threat of violence. The various branches and guises of the police are a direct and frequent link between the young men and the state; and often a brutal one. In perhaps no other group is the difference between the proclaimed image of the state and its everyday practices starker than among young men in the interior. While marginalized young men also encounter other aspects of the state; its schools, its public offices, its universities, and understand the state in a myriad of ways, for many the security apparatus becomes the most vocal and visceral way of talking about it. As a student from Gasfa says, “We young from this region don’t

No Country for Young Men | 321 know the state outside of our ID cards and police brutality.” Or, as a young man in Kasserine put it succinctly, “The state is empty. The state only creates police, not hospitals. And they beat people up.” This is, of course, not strictly speaking an accurate description of the Tunisian state. Despite the marginalization of interior regions and neo-liberal reforms, the welfare dimensions of the Tunisian state are considerable, particularly in a regional perspective. Yet this sentiment is still revealing and important. It is “true” in the sense that not all practices of the state are understood as equal in constituting the image of the state, or the experience of the state. It also reveals the gap between expectations and reality. Together with corruption and the failure to provide, it appears that it is the coercive dimensions of the state that are understood to be central in the experience of the state by young men. It is interesting that violence is not necessarily viewed as something negative, what is bemoaned is a lack of productive violence; violence that can discipline and provide. Holly High conceptualized the tension in people’s understanding of the state in a small village in Laos, through a Laotian origin myth. In this myth humanity was created through the union of a dog and a woman:

I interpret the story of the dog and his human wife as a story about the very different potentialities of power. Power can be wild and dangerous, and mean being fed upon and thus destroyed. But domesticated, power can also be nurturing, a source of protection from rapacious forces, of sustenance and perhaps even of the creation of life. (2014:25)

High sees in this myth a distinction between the masculine and feminine faces of the state. There is the masculine destruction and female sheltering and providing. But, in the context of young men in Tunisia, the state is understood in terms of the different aspects of masculine power. Both dimensions of state power, the violent and the providing, can be articulated in masculine and above all, in fatherly, paternalistic terms. It is the father that provides and protects, but also disciplines, if necessary, through violence or the threat of violence. The Freudian ambivalence lies in the promise of the father to both punish and allow the son to become the father. The young desire the state, not only in that they want “it” to help them, but to become the state. To become fathers, not only in symbolic terms, but very concretely. State employment means an ability to have a family. To become a father, means both being dependent on the state, as well as becoming someone who has dependents. The inability of the state to provide employment represents a rupture in the ability to one day become a father. Nowhere, perhaps, is the tension between the

322 | Chapter Ten state as a provider and threat, as the double face of paternal authority, clearer than in the way that the state is experienced as external and violent, and at the same time familial and desired. This tension is perhaps best understood in connection to the image of the all-powerful Tunisian state, a legacy of Bour- guiba, always contradictory never realized, that lingers in the narratives of the young men. It provides both sustenance and resistance. Hansen and Stepputat refer to the experience of the post-colonial state as “the paradox of inadequacy and indispensability” (2001:2). It is often violent, repressive and unable to fulfil the most basic demands of its citizens yet it is still desired and even demanded. It is clear is that the language of a paternal state is a narrative used and understood by the young men to signal responsibility on the part of the state, even as it also occasions violence. It becomes a symbolic resource for the young, even if a highly ambivalent one. It involves clinging to a vision that the state is unwilling or unable to fulfil but does not completely abandon. The rejection of responsibility by the state is a rejection of a particular paternalist model of the state that the state simultaneously disavows and enacts. Here, the insistence by the young men that the state is powerful and can thus be held accountable is understandable. If the state is no longer able to accommodate the expectations and demands of the young in the periphery, if the locus of power and thus responsibility lies elsewhere, then both waiting and resistance become meaningless exercises aimed at nothing. It is in this context that the desire for the paternalistic state could be understood. The tensions of the Ben Ali regime partly arose out of a context in which the regime articulated a language of “stability through reform” that purported to provide guides for success within its narrow confines. Yet, the path of success was more and more opaque, more and more neoliberal, and more and more removed from the language of the state itself. This tension may have shattered the system eventually, but now the language of the state, less hypo- critical perhaps, is also all the more confusing. Furthermore, in the face of a neoliberal logic that seeks to obscure the lines of responsibility, to make power-dynamics invisible, the youth cling to the older model which admits to violence for purposes of disciplining but also responsibility. In the paternalist model, the lines of expectations and responsibilities are clear. In the neoliberal model, no such lines are visible. In its purest form it becomes impossible to demand anything. Better, perhaps, a violent father than being or- phaned.

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A STATE OF BELIEF Should these various forms of cultural intimacies be understood as forms of resistance or as reproducing the power of the state? For Herzfeld, cultural intimacies are ways of bridging the experiences of everyday life with the official state discourse and thus a way of reducing tensions and conflicts.449 He goes so far as to claim that “nation-states can in fact only survive in good order when potentially disruptive and disobedient everyday practices are tolerated within the internal spaces of everyday life” (2016:9). Herzfeld is not interesting in exploring how cultural intimacies may play out differently in authoritarian or democratic contexts. For him, such tensions exist within all states. At the same time, he claims that cultural intimacy and its “insight comes, however, at a certain cost to democratic and administrative ideals: citizens (including many bureaucrats) treat rules as though they existed primarily to serve particularistic interests” (2016:14). Cultural intimacies are, for Herzfeld, forms of “the safety valve”; they allow frustrations to be articulated, but ultimately come to reinforce the established order. Herzfeld’s concept of cultural intimacies is close to James C Scott’s notion of hidden transcripts, but serve different functions. For Herzfeld, cultural intimacies are allowed and accepted by the state, as a way of operating despite flaws, while for Scott, hidden transcripts are the spaces where state or domination does not reach. For both, they are forms of negotiation between the state and more marginal groups. But if for Scott, they are sites of resistance, for Herzfeld they are part of constructing the state, they, in fact, defuse resistance. Herzfeld writes:

Because it is also a space in which people feel safe from official interference— where its defining rejection of official norms affords that sense of internal security—it may also have the paradoxical effect of mobilizing support for, or at least weakening resistance to, official importunings. (2016:5)

Similarly, Yeal Navaro-Yashin, in her study of cynicism towards the state in Turkey, argues that the state appears to survive deconstruction, even deep- seated cynicism. She writes:

[In] Turkey during the 1990s critique was a central, common, and ordinary mode of relating to the state. People from all sections of society were constantly involved in criticizing various manifestations of the state in the most sophisticated manner.

449 He writes, “the formal operations of national states depend on coexistence—usually inconvenient, always uneasy—with various realizations of cultural intimacy” (2016:8).

324 | Chapter Ten

In other words, I argue that the so-called public in Turkey has already critiqued and deconstructed the state. And yet, simultaneously practices of reproduction, regeneration, and re-reification keep re-dressing “the state” in a variety of garbs. (2002:4)

For Navaro-Yashin, the state is a fantasy, which “according to Žižek’s reading of Lacan (1995), is a psychic symptom that survives analysis, critique, or deconstruction” (2002:4). According to Navaro-Yashin, it does not matter whether or not one “believes” in the state, so long as one continues to act as if the state were not deconstructed:

[C]ontemporary subjects are conscious of the reality of social relations that underlie icons of reification. And yet (and this is the point), the same people take actions upon the world as if they did not know, as if they were deluded by ideology, as if ideology were reality. This is cynicism. (2002:159-160)450

For Herzfeld, and Navaro-Yashin, there is no discernable difference between critique and belief, nor between authoritarian or democratic contexts. Even when people critique the state, they still act as if they believed, which invariably means a continued construction and production of the state and the nation and one’s relationship to it. It is certainly plausible to treat many of the cultural intimacies that I have discussed as ways of attempting to make sense of everyday life. As ways of reducing chaos and disappointment by making the inability of the nation- state to live up to its own ideal understandable, and to prepare the citizens for dealing with this flawed institution. It is true, that like Herzfeld points out, “The option of blaming the state gives definition and authority to its shadowy power” (2016:16). Nevertheless, there are other dimensions at work as well. Cultural intimacies of state and society, I argue, are not only expressions of cynicism. They also provide the grounds for a critique of state practices as well as its image. The constant surprise, anger and verbal protestation against such practices are a sign that they are not just expected, but that there are still notions that things should be different. One could argue that it is precisely because the young men take the state seriously, because they “believe” in its promise, that they pose a threat. Are they cynical about the state? Yes, but

450 Navaro-Yashin focuses on cynical narratives of the state, of the sort I discussed in the previous chapter on corruption. As I attempted to show in that chapter, frustration and even cynicism also reveals hopes, desires and expectations.

No Country for Young Men | 325 they are cynical because they believe. For Navaro-Yashin, cynicism, despite itself, reproduces the state, because in action, the cynics still believe. She calls this “a technique of contemporary state power” (2002:163). By contrast, I would argue that in contexts of neoliberal obfuscation it is exactly “reproducing” the state that marks the point of critique. The young men refuse to let the state off the hook, they refuse to let “it” be deconstructed. In both Her- zfeld and Navaro-Yashin’s accounts, people react to the narratives of the state by either counter-narratives or cynicism, and yet what I suggest is that by continuing to reproduce a state-centered narrative of responsibility and dependence, the youth are partaking in its construction, not out of lack of options or ignorance but something else. I suggest that in a context of neoliberalism, reification of state power becomes a kind of challenge. Rather than being accomplices in what Mitchell (2006) calls state effects, the young are challenging a state that is increasingly removed. For political ethnographers that have discussed the state, there is a tendency to portray the state and its language as external:

There is little doubt that a mythology of the coherence, knowledge, and rational- ities of the (ideal) state exists, thrives, and empowers many otherwise widely dis- crepant practices. This myth is carefully cultivated inside the bureaucracy and among political figures as the state’s own myth of itself and is constantly enacted through grand spectacles, stamps, architecture, hierarchies of rank, systems of eti- quette, and procedures within a vast expanse of the bureaucracy. (Hansen & Step- putat 2001:17)

Like many non-realist scholars Hansen & Stepputat see that the myth of state power is “cultivated inside the bureaucracy and among political figures.” Yet, what if this myth is being cultivated not “from above”, but “from below”? Or at the very least, what if there is more than one arena of myth making? It is not necessarily the case that it is the agents of the state that project the image of the state as coherent and all-powerful. While simultaneously pressing the “dignity of the state”, many political leaders and state employees in post-revolutionary Tunisia attempt to signal the limits of the state. They attempt to shift the burden of responsibility “up”, to transnational the organization; and “down”, to society and the individual. Instead, it is often the young in the margins that keep the idea of the powerful state alive.

326 | Chapter Ten

The Dangers of Knowing What are the implications of the above discussed cultural intimacies for the democratic transition? The narratives reflect not only a process of de/constructing the state, and society, but also a process of discovery. The opening of the “empty space of power” has been a both unsettling process and a potentially transformative one. It entails a moment in which society looks at itself, but these moments of reflection are often disconcerting. I argue that cultural intimacies under democratic transitions involve a form of self-discovery, a re- evaluation of the self and the state. Wassim, in the introduction, discussed the necessity of a “personal democratic transition”, of acknowledging the flaws within oneself. Understood in this way, a democratic transition could be opportunity for developing a critique and understanding of the problems in society and oneself, and for MacIntyre’s “epistemological self-consciousness.” In this conceptualization, democratization opens up for new ways of society to see itself. And that seeing oneself, can be a positive process of change. As Jamil puts it, “To be cured you first need to acknowledge that you are sick.” Leila, a young journalist offers her take:

The fact that people are so critical and don’t trust any authority is a positive sign. It’s a new phenomenon. After the revolution, we trusted everyone and never used to criticize politicians or leaders. Now, there are no more role-models, we don’t trust anyone anymore. This is a good thing. Even if people don’t have enough distance yet and realize how hard it’s going to be to build up this country. It’s normal this mistrust. We did not know any politicians before 2011. It will take time and practice to build a functional relationship between people and politics.

Here, democratization is understood as a dialectic process; from excessive hope to mistrust and then towards a more balanced relationship between citizens and the state. The issue of novelty that Leila raises, bears considering. The transition is uncertain because it is unfamiliar. I do not dismiss it. In fact, I believe this unfamiliarity adds extra force to the uncertainty and makes it more visible. Uncertainty arises out of a lived experience, even if it may come to be exaggerated.451 Yet, the mistrust that Leila talks about is not only directed towards politics and the state, but towards oneself and those around one. Ali explains,

451 As Frances Pine explains in the context of post-communist Poland “Some of these fears and senses of loss are obviously well grounded in the reality of lived experience, ‘of actually existing postsocialism’. They tend, however, to be exaggerated, blown up and dwelt on as metaphors expressing a more general sense of unease with and in the world” (2002:97).

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“Without honesty how can you improve? If, for example, you see a problem or issue with me it’s good that you tell me, that you shine a light in it, so it becomes visible to me, so I can see it and solve it. But a lot of people here are schizophrenic. They do not want to see.” Wassim suggested that, “Before a person can reach his goals, get what he wants from politics, from the state, from this or that, he needs to make peace with himself.” The issue of being of looking at oneself and one’s society “honestly” is a theme that has preoccupied Tunisian writers and filmmakers. In Mohamed Zran’s movie Essaida, the film begins with the lines “Look at ourselves as we are, that we might become better than we are.” Similarly, the filmmaker Férid Boughedir says, “an adult society is one that is capable of looking at itself in the mirror” (Lang 2014:262). In this, what may be termed, “enlightenment narrative”, revealing “the truth”, even harsh ones, means coming to terms with oneself and improving. Such expectations go back at least to the French Revolution. Arendt writes on the French revolutionaries:

Their favoured simile was that the Revolution offered the opportunity of tearing the mask of hypocrisy off the face of French society, of exposing its rottenness, and, finally, of tearing the facade of corruption down and of exposing behind it the unspoiled, honest face of the peuple. (1965:106 Italics in original)

And yet, the case of Tunisia, and the young men, reveals a tension with this “enlightenment narrative.” Before we too readily assume that truth and time will produce a more stable and democratic relationship between citizens and the state, it is important to acknowledge that epistemological self-consciousness entails risks. Many young men have taken hard looks at themselves, and found themselves wanting. For here, when the facade of Tunisian society is torn down, and the mask is removed, it is not an “unspoiled and honest face” that stares back, but a corrupt and violent one.452 Herein lies the risk, for the realization of how embedded corruption and violence is, in society, and oneself, is frightening. According to Žižek, the spread of the new authoritarian impulse across the West arises out of populism, where:

[T]he enemy is externalized or reified into a positive ontological entity (even if this entity is spectral) whose annihilation would restore balance and justice […]In

452 Like psychoanalytical forays into the realm of the unconscious; what lies hidden is rarely pleasant.

328 | Chapter Ten

other words, for a populist, the cause of the troubles is ultimately never the system as such but the intruder who corrupted it (financial manipulators, not necessarily capitalists, and so on); not a fatal flaw inscribed into the structure as such but an element that doesn’t play its role within the structure properly. (2006:55)

Like Wassim’s scorpions, the populist impulse refuses to acknowledge the poi- son within. If, however, for Žižek, the resurgence of populist authoritarianism comes from such a refusal to see and accept the corruption within, then among the young Tunisians, a desire for an authoritarian leader comes, instead, at the moment when they see and accept the corruption within. If the authoritarian impulse, in many established democracies, is driven by an externaliza- tion of the source of crises; a corrupt other, in Tunisia it is internalized. It arises from realization that can be expressed as, “We are the dangerous. We are the corrupt. Therefore, our best option is violence from above that can keep us in check, a return to the outside/inside father figure that can discipline and provide.” The desire for the return of autocratic order is brought on not by the refusal to know, but by the knowing itself. The democratic process opens up simultaneously for a “moment of truth” as well an authoritarian revival. The young men’s cultural intimacies, more than deconstructing the state, deconstruct themselves and reveal a doubt over the self and others. Between the khubzist pragmatism and schizophrenia, what is “believed in” and desired is the state and its promise of providing. This is not to say that the claims that arise out of the epistemological crisis are somehow the truth. I make no such strong claims, and I use the term truth hesitantly.453 The point, here, is that while democratization may engender opportunities for self-examination, these revelations are also disorienting. Rather than claim that the public transcripts of the dictatorship were lies and the current democratic public discourse is true, I argue that these “democratic” truths should be seen in relation to the previous public transcripts. Even if many where cynical about their implementation, they were still desired and hoped for. Velikonja writes of Eastern Europeans’ nostalgic for socialism that, “they prefer the past and maybe even flirt with the idea of its return mostly because

453 As Lefort warns, one should be careful in saying that the view afforded from this position of democratic uncertainty is the truth: “Whilst the contours of society become blurred, and whilst the markers of certainty become unstable, there arises the illusion of a reality which can explain its own determination in terms of a combination of multiple de facto relations (1988:228). In other words, democracy garners its own fair share of illusions. As Žižek discusses, modern democratic life is full of instances of disbelief or cynical distance (1996). Yet under authoritarianism, the disbelief cannot be expressed publicly, without fear of reprisals.

No Country for Young Men | 329 they are absolutely sure it cannot return” (2009:546). In the context of Tuni- sia, it is a good deal more unclear to which degree the young men in the interior are, or are not sure, that the authoritarian past cannot or should not return. Especially given the fact that the authoritarian state has returned in all other countries of the Arab Spring save Tunisia. And yet, I believe that, like in former communist countries, the longing for dictatorship “is not only about past realities but is in large measure about past dreams, past visions, past expectations” (ibid). In post-Ben Ali Tunisia, the youth have deconstructed these past dreams and visions; the myth of the “Tunisian miracle” and the prosperous middle- class country has been shattered. Ben Ali sought to maintain these myths through censorship and violence, yet even during the years of dictatorship hidden transcripts and cultural intimacies doubtlessly circulated, and the anger at the failure of these political imaginaries fueled the revolution. While few, now, believe in the implementation of these myths, the myths themselves are powerful precisely because they represent genuine aspirations and desires of people. This does not mean that they are solely produced from the top, but that they have become embedded in the political imaginaries and have survived deconstruction. Current governments, while still beholden to realizing these myths, cannot maintain the same illusions through democratic means. The post-revolutionary reality, thus, appears even bleaker. Ben Ali may be gone, but the dream of a strong state that can provide for, and create, a middle-class Tunisia without conflict, is not.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has argued that cultural intimacies concerning khubzists and schizophrenia come to signal correctives of the nation-state myths of Tunisia. What the cultural intimacies reveal is that rather than a middle-class society existing in comfortable symbiosis between modernity and tradition, Tunisia is a nation dominated by young (men) living hand to mouth, struggling to survive and uncertain over themselves and others. In deconstructing these nation-state myths, the young reveal that all is not well. Like the biological father that can no longer provide, the state too has abandoned its sons to fend for themselves. Under such conditions, the pull of the paternalist state, that may be violent but promises to provide, is tempting, and many young men articulate counter-narratives of state responsibility in the guise of a strong state and

330 | Chapter Ten strong leader. The democratic transitions amplify these critical narratives by making them more readily open, but they may also risk undermining the processes of transition. The desire for a strong state is simultaneously an attempt to call the state to account, and is a reaction to the epistemological crisis that appears to show a society that is fraying at the seams. Does a democratic transition then perhaps require not only self-critique but also an acceptance of ones’ flaws? Making peace with oneself? Or does it instead require a certain belief in oneself and society, however unjustified it may be at first? A kind of leap of faith? Arendt makes an interesting claim that, “under fully democratic conditions deception without self-deception is well-nigh impossible” (2006:297). Could we then understand the difference between democratization and democracy as the difference between truthfulness and self-deception? And is such self-deception necessary for the uncertainty of democracy to not spill over into full-scale crisis? I offer no answers, but only emphasize the difficulty of transitions, particularly in times of neoliberalism. I would argue, if anything, that the young Tunisians have turned self-criticism into almost an art form, and that this self-critique is an expression of a sense of crisis, but also a sign of vibrant debates and discussions that could only be termed democratic.

11. Conclusions

It is not enough simply to know the thing you wish to destroy; to complete the task you have to have felt it – Walter Benjamin

This was very depressing reading. Have you not found anything hopeful? – Professor commenting on a draft of my thesis.

You are always asking us about what is positive. How things have improved. Why are you so desperate to find hope here? Don’t you understand that we have given up hope? We feel no hope or anything else anymore – Sari

SUMMARY The benefit and burden of an ethnographically driven thesis is that its grounded theory-like approach moves in a multitude of directions; unruly and prey to the whims of providence. It is certainly the responsibility of the researcher to steer the finished text towards straighter paths; although stops and occasional detours are also the prerogative of the scholar. Ethnographic research is often more interested in developing narratives and themes through thick descriptions and narratives rather than thin definitions. As Flyvbjerg writes, these “narratives may be difficult or impossible to summarize into neat scientific formulae, general propositions, and theories” (2006:237). Without claiming to be a neat summary, this final chapter attempts to lay out the central claims and contributions of the thesis.

331 332 | Chapter Eleven

Neoliberalism Carried off Many, Democracy and the Devil Took Care of the Rest. The thesis began by noting the widespread disappointment and anger of young men, directed at the state but at also the democratic transition more broadly. The study has attempted to make sense of their frustration and to capture democratization as experience. To succinctly summarize: this thesis has argued that “uncertainty” is built into democracy, and that this uncertainty, this “empty space of power”, is experienced as particularly acute during periods democratization. In the case of the young men in Tunisia’s interior their experience of uncertainty has been amplified by their precarity. The democratic uncertainty over where power lies, together with a neoliberal retreat of a state that can provide “bread and dignity” has led to calls by the young men for a strong state, whether democratic or not. To summarize less succinctly: The study has argued that on the level of experience, democratization has for the young men been one of chaos, a sense of loss of personal and economic security, as a collapse in national solidarity, as the breaking of taboos, as freedom without responsibility. Part of this sense of chaos is inherent in the symbolic uncertainty of democracy. It arises out of the opening of public space and confusion concerning the question of where power now lies. Narratives that flourish in public spaces, including those on corruption examined in chapter nine, appear to show a breakdown of distinctions that is understood as threatening; this increasingly enfolds and implicates not only the state but society and the self. The narratives of crises appear to reinterpret the authoritarian past as one of stability and thus as a potential escape from the current democratic instability. I do not claim that this automatically means that authoritarianism is experienced as a certainty, but that the young men, during the democratization processes, retroactively come to imagine the authoritarian past as one of certitude and symbolic order. Another way to formulate this it is that the authoritarian desire for closing discourse can only be expressed in the open space of democracy. In a Lefortian reading, this way of being, this struggle with uncertainty, is itself the core of democracy. As such there are no definite lines between democracy and democratization. However, if the symbolic uncertainty appears for Lefort to take place “above the heads” of citizens, by contrast, in the account I have presented, the youth are very much “aware” of the uncertainty of democracy. It is a lived and embodied crisis of everyday life, and of larger political imaginaries. Thus, I define democratization as an extreme form of Lefortian democracy; for it renders the fractures and empty spaces of power

Conclusions | 333 more visible and visceral. By calling democratization an extreme form of democracy, this does not mean that it is “unnatural” or “excessive”, rather that it illuminates internal dynamics present in all democracies. Like a believer that has lost his faith in God, the newly democratized are acutely aware of the loss, of the empty place where God used to be. Those that are born into secularized societies may not experience this loss of the transcendental quite as directly. And yet the place of what Lefort calls the other remains empty even if it has, for a time, become obfuscated by other calming illusions. More than anything, I press the fact that the yearning for a closure of the democratic “empty space” is not merely the result of elite conspiring or ideological obfuscation, but is, partly, produced by the democratic process itself. Neither the terms “from above” nor “from below” capture the immanent dimensions of this process. Furthermore, I suggest that the instability of democratization in Tunisia is not purely part of the immanent process of moving away from authoritarianism. Parts of this experience of uncertainty are tied to, and amplified by, concrete aspects of a deteriorating security as well as what is involved in being a citizen in the margins under conditions of socio- economic marginalization. To a large part, the long-shattered expectations of (male) citizenship fueled the revolution, but they continually weigh against the formal successes of the transition. One of the central claims of this thesis is that the democratic sense of uncertainty has been intensified through the precariousness of life of the young men in the margins, at stark odds with their expectations of a “dignified” life. Taken together, these unmet expectations, uncertainties and fears have led to a context in which the democratization process is experienced as an epistemological crisis. A recurring question is, “What is going on here?” The destabilization does not simply concern the nature of political institutions, and uncertain outcomes of political elections, it is a larger de-centering of everyday experiences. In the chapter on methods, I alluded to the similarities between social science and conspiracy theory thinking. The “dark side” of interpreting social phenomena is an over-interpretation that becomes pathological via an excess of meaning. By contrast, the “dark side” of democratization can be understood as a lack of interpretive coherency, a falling away of meaning. This epistemological uncertainty invariably gives rise to attempts to recover a meaningful interpretive framework, whether democratic or not. I suggest that while transitions may open up for a critique of the democratic process, and society at large, in contexts of a neoliberal logic this deconstruction may lead

334 | Chapter Eleven many in the margins to prefer the epistemological certainty of authoritarianism, rather than a democratic state where people may speak out but “no one listens.” From the young men’s perspective, a paternalistic model comes with state responsibility and clearer lines of expectations. The democratic process has been followed by an increased sense of state disengagement and the young being left to their own devices. The democratization appears to have amplify the fear of the absent state. Without a sense that democracy too can provide “bread and dignity”, for many young men paternalist dependence may be preferable to democratic isolation. I have understood the “dark side” of epistemological crises as deeply entangled with a larger crisis of neoliberal governance. Yet, an important aim of the thesis has been to distinguish these experiences, at least analytically. Ten- tatively, I have argued that the neoliberal crisis of masculinity has been experienced as an inability to attain adulthood, increased corruption and obscuring the path to success. In chapters five and six I suggest the young men’s experience the crisis of masculinity is also shared and visible and to a large part blamed on the state. The young men are not yet neoliberal subjects, who internalize their own “failures.” By contrast, the democratic crisis laid out in chapter eight, nine and ten, while equally experienced as one of economic hardship, is enmeshed in a sense of a larger social crisis; of loss of distinction; of violence from within; of a loss of interpretative framework. Yet, here, not only the state is understood as responsible, but society as a whole, and to some extent the individuals themselves. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, it would seem that to the extent that they can be separated, the neoliberal crisis of state-citizenship is blamed on the state, and the democratic crisis is more “internalized.” This is only partly the case, however, for the young men also understand the democratic diffusion of power as a way for the state to avoid responsibility. In terms of experiences both neoliberalism and democratization are tied to uncertainty over where power lies, a loss of distinctions and a sense of increased corruption. Conceptually, we can say that the neoliberal redefinition of power is one where, while everything is in theory sayable, silence rules; for there is nowhere to address speech towards. Power is represented as residing only within the individual, all the while obfuscating larger conflicts and forms of dominations. Democracy, by contrast, does not make symbolic power invisible, only empty, and therefore open for contestation. It would be too neat however, to say that it is only this neoliberal invisibilization that the young men rebel against. For,

Conclusions | 335 on the level of experience, the two logics cannot always be distinguished. Fur- thermore, the uncertainty of democratization, even in its “pure” form, contains its own horrors. The French Revolution, initiated though it was by the urban masses, is often said to have foreshadowed the final victory of the bourgeoisie.454 Simi- larly, one can ask if the Tunisian revolution, begun in the margins, has come to herald the larger triumph of neoliberalism of the center? If this is the case, then at least the young men appear to resist such a development, even if their defiance is ambiguous and full of tensions and contradictions. Ultimately, the question of the degree to which these two crises can be separated remains an open one, for empirically they are deeply tied together. Further research would be required to be able to make any larger claims regarding the relationship between democratization and neoliberal crisis. De- spite many enduring questions and uncertainties, this study has raised issues with direct implications for a number of fields discussed below.

CONTRIBUTIONS This study has been an exploration of the experience of democratization. It has sought to develop a framework for approaching this experience, a contribution in its own right to the study of democratization and democracy. The study has also reached potentially valuable conclusions for democratization studies and our understanding of democracy. By looking at democratization via political imaginaries of state-citizen dynamics, it has also engaged with scholarship on the non-realist state in the Arab World and beyond, and raised questions regarding some of the assumptions of this field. It has also drawn on research on public space and youth, and sought to contribute, however minimally, to these discussions.

A Non-Unified Framework of Democratic Experience One of the central contributions of this study is to present a novel approach to studying democratization. The aim has been to attempt to capture democratization as an experience. In doing so the study has taken a number of conceptual moves. Building on Lefort, the study understands democracy as a destabilizing of symbolic power. It argues that there are, on the level of the

454See for example, Barrington Moore Jr (1966).

336 | Chapter Eleven symbolic, no clear boundaries between democracy and democratization. It suggests, however, that the democratic dissolution of certainty is particularly pronounced and visible in periods of transitions, and that the process is therefore more potentially perilous. Understanding democratization and democracy means understanding such matters as experiences, as ways of being in the world, distinct from other ways of being. This experience of what democracy is, may be different from the way that interlocutors themselves define democracy or the democratic transition. Following Lefort, it is in the ability to talk more freely that democracy comes to be actualized. Free and open public space is an elementary par- ticle of democracy, but it also gives rise to indeterminacy at the level of both the symbolic and the everyday. How that indeterminacy is expressed is contextual and depends on prior state citizen dynamics. The narratives that emerge from the previously hidden transcripts come to reflect political imaginaries; understood as shared interpretive frameworks of state and citizenship composed of expectations and desires. These are not necessarily peaceful.455 Democratization entails that previous ways of interpreting oneself and one’s surroundings are no longer tenable, new political imaginaries loom, even if these may take the form of a desire for a return to the past. The free public discourses that both constitute the transition and arise out of it represent both continuity and discontinuity, and come to enable an articulation of the democratic present as crisis, thus opening up for a reimagining of the authoritarian past. This framework does not in any way assume the insignificance of formal and electoral processes. It suggests, however, that while formal institutions might change, political imaginaries linger and transform in less straightforward ways, ways that are often difficult to capture. This study has sought to apprehend these political imaginaries ethnographically by looking at places, practices and narratives of young men in the margins. Particular emphasis has been put on cafés as central public spaces where narratives of the transition and state-citizen dynamics come alive; they are furthermore places of waiting. Waiting is understood to be linked to expectations and desires of the state and citizenship.

455 Thomas Blom Hansen, using a Lefortian approach to study Hindu right-wing politics, writes “We must acknowledge that democracy gives rise to a new imagination of society that makes new identities and claims possible, but also makes possible new forms of violent conﬂict and new fantasies of power and xenophobias” (1999:9).

Conclusions | 337

This framework, and this study as a whole, has emphasized that the experience of democratization, and democracy more broadly, is deeply tied to expectations on and experiences of the state and citizenship. This is particularly true in contexts like Tunisia, where the role of the state has been dominant, if ambiguous and contested.

Democratization Studies If much of the democratization literature studies non-elites only to the extent that they partake in overt political activity, this study argues that understanding the experience of democratization in the margins brings the fragile nature of transitions into fuller view. Elite focused and formalist understandings of democracy are not wrong but like all ways of seeing, they are partial. There is a deep ambivalence, a sense of confusion, in the experience of democratic transition that is missing in much of the existing work on democratization. Conventional wisdom among democratization scholars implies that periods of transition, above all, need political stability; thus, also warning against ambitious economic reforms that threaten the interests of the powerful. Prze- worski has claimed “we cannot avoid the possibility that a transition to democracy can be made only at the cost of leaving economic relations intact” (1995:33). Scholars have argued that bringing old elites on-board, often meaning maintaining their privileges, is more important than economic redistribution (Grugel & Bishop 2014:88). Similarly, Arendt in her On Revolu- tion makes the claim that revolutions succeed only to the extent that they focus exclusively on building political institutions rather than attempting to solve what she calls “the social question” (1990). Transitioning societies may thus face a Faustian bargain: maintain the economic status quo but open for increased popular anger and disappointment or put a smooth transition at risk by more radical reforms. The study, however, argues that at least part of the problem lies in the prevailing definitions of democracy where political change is understood as divorced from social and economic ones. I have argued in chapter five that formalist definitions of democracy are inadequate in capturing everyday meanings. Among the young men more utopian and aspirational expectations of democracy persist. These expectations and desires may be vague but come to emphasize the dissonance between what democratization scholars and political elites expect of a transition and what those in the margins do. While many young men associate democracy with elections and freedom of speech, to the degree to which they understand Tunisia to be

338 | Chapter Eleven democratic, it is rarely experienced as something positive. Most clearly the concept of democracy has for them a wider aspirational dimension, captured in their demand for dignity. Dignity means the ability to speak out, but more than that, it means opportunities for secure employment, it means an ability to start a family, and it means the sense of being heard and recognized. We could say that the young men’s frustrations are due to an error on their part. That they have confused democracy with something else. That they conflate socio-economic prosperity with political freedoms. This, I believe, would be a mistake. A potentially dangerous one. The risk with narrow, or formalist, definitions of democracy, is that they do not necessarily correspond to the lived experience. And this is why it is important to be aware of expectations on democracy and experiences of democratization and take them into considering in our scholarly deliberations of the meaning of democracy.456 If democratization is often understood to decentralize power, by looking at experiences we also come to understand democratization as a process of an uncertainty over where power is located. An uncertainty that for marginalized and precarious groups is experienced as threatning and dangerous. In many ways this study follows Lefort in viewing democracy as essentially political, as arising out of the opening of public space; it is constituted by the ability to speak freely. Democracy is here conceptually distinct from substantive issues of dignity, employment and social justice. Yet, and this is important, the study also claims that the expectations and desires of populations are central in understanding how transitions are experienced and judged. Given a Lefortian reading of democratic transitions—as difficult and uncertain at the best of circumstances—the study suggests that democratization, under conditions of neoliberalism, becomes all the more challenging. The already present sense of precarity comes to amplify the nostalgia for the authoritarian past; that song of sirens that is ever present in democracies. While successful transitions may create more complex and thus more durable forms of institutions; this thesis has argued that what also follows is the creation of instability both at the level of the symbolic as well as at the level of experience. At the level of the symbolic this is merely another sign of democracy, but the experience is enhanced by an everyday sense of economic precarity. This reflects serious fears and concerns in a post-authoritarian context.

456 This is not to argue that our scholarly definitions of democracy need necessarily to be in line with “popular” understandings of democracy, but merely that local understandings come to impact how democratic transitions are experienced. Such experiences are not irrelevant for the outcome of transitions.

Conclusions | 339

An argument can be (and has been) made that the “problem” of the Tuni- sian transition lies primarily in the lack of sustained economic growth (World Bank 2014, 2018). However, considering the recent history of Tunisia as an experimental testing-basket of international development organizations, the argument for growth merely begs the question: growth? How? After all, economic growth and reform have been the Tunisian state mantras since its independence, although for many in the interior the sense of exclusion has continued.457 As an old man in Gafsa tells me, “We have read and heard about and experienced our marginalization since I was a kid in school. The government has been saying that ‘we will improve these areas’ as far back as I can remember, and yet nothing happens. The government does nothing.” Mean- while, Tunisian politicians will often point to the meagre state resources at their disposal and the pressure from Western institutions.458 Leaving aside the difficult question of how, this study does not make the claim that greater material security will somehow automatically alleviate the burdens of symbolic crisis, nor that its relative lack will mean certain return towards authoritarianism. Nothing in the narratives of this study suggests any degree of determinacy. However, the relatively smoother democratization processes in countries with strong economic growth and relatively robust welfare regimes such as South Korea and Taiwan may give us some indication that economic factors come to have an important impact on the way the crisis of certainty is experienced. Taken together, this study suggests that democratization scholarship, beyond formal dimensions, not only needs to pay attention to the degree to which a population may express support for democracy or not, but also to the wider sense of crisis and rupture that may arise out of the open space of power. It may well be that the more democracy is experienced, the more at risk it is. It also calls for investigating how expectations and desires, how larger political imaginaries, come to play themselves out among various groups. In the case of the young men in Tunisia, their need for dignity goes beyond political representation. It appears to include other forms of recognitions, both material and symbolic as well as a sense of forward movement, a promise of a better

457 What propels economic growth and whether the main issue is one of “economic growth” or redistribution, is a topic much beyond this thesis. In the case of Tunisia, while low growth figures have undoubtedly exacerbated a difficult situation, it is far from clear what remedies would be needed, and what kinds of reform would be necessary. 458 As one member of Nidaa Tounis told me “After the revolution, we made plans to invest heavily in the interior regions, but the EU, IMF and World Bank, told us no. You need to invest in regions where you already have the infrastructure, they said” (Interview May 13, 2015).

340 | Chapter Eleven future. This study proposes that any framework that attempts to approach the experience of democratization but ignores the place of state-citizen dynamics, informed by previous authoritarian regimes, and expressed during transitions, does so at its own peril.

States and their Imaginaries In discussing democratization this study has emphasized the radical discontinuity between pre- and post-revolutionary Tunisia. Another thread of this thesis has emphasized the continuities of the way the state comes to be understood and articulated by the young men. The non-realist view of the state taken by this thesis, has regarded the state as a partly symbolic entity. The purpose has been to “explore the simultaneous suspicion, uncertainty, fascination, and desire that surround the state” (Nel- son 2004:118). The study began with laying out the broad strokes of the historic state-citizen dynamics in Tunisia. Despite the frailties of the Tunisian state, the background chapter nonetheless emphasized the state as a locus of generating desires and expectations, even as it has increasingly been unable to actualize them. For young men in the margins, these expectations centered around realizing a historically masculine citizenship, often understood as state employment. One of the dynamics that came to undermine the authoritarian order, and set off the 2010 uprising, was the continued failure of the state to provide such citizenship. A dimension of the political imaginaries that has not changed following democratization is that the articulations of symbolic state power by the young men have been overwhelmingly masculine. The most direct way this is expressed is the way that the state is envisioned as a symbolic father, both dangerous and desired. In chapter ten, I conceptualized this view of the state as a kind of Freudian ambivalence. This ambivalence contains three main elements. First, is a father/state that the young men both seek to resist and to become. Second, the overthrow of paternal authority merely gives further force to its symbolic power. Third, is a paternal state whose diminishing authority is as threatening as its power to destroy. This notion of the “state as a father” is a shared political imaginary, it has been invoked since the time of Bourguiba, to signal dependence on the part of the citizenry. But this paternal state is also invoked by the young men to demand their inheritance. In chapters nine and ten, the state that appears to emerge in the accounts of the young men, even in its obvious violence and repressive form, is still one

Conclusions | 341 that is suffused with masculine, moral and visionary expectations. In the imaginations of the young men, the state is both a manifestation of violence and of unfulfilled expectations. This is a state of contradictions; there is the violent dimension of the state together with its future-oriented promise. There is the everyday state, the state of flesh and blood, which for many is not the most significant part. Further, there is the state beyond materiality and locality; a translocal and moral entity. This notion of the state as both an institution of violence and a moral force is another indication of the blurred boundaries between the state and the nation.459 Non-realist scholars like Mitchell (1999) and Migdal (2001) claim that the political imaginary of the unity and power of the state, and its distribution across space, is part of state power itself. As Hansen & Stepputat explain, this myth of unity continues to “persist in the face of everyday experience of the often profoundly violent and ineffective practices of government or outright collapse of states” (2001:2). Yet, unlike non-realist scholars who emphasize the way that the state is cultivated through its emissaries and functionaries, in this thesis the loudest voices that sing its praise are those that bear the brunt of its violence. Even, or perhaps especially, in places and among groups that are particularly vulnerable to the violent aspects of the state, the state as ideal, as distinct from other social forces, remains strong. Even if one posits that the promise of the state was begun in its centers, it is now perhaps in its peripheries that its mythic power is cultivated most firmly. One may speculate that having born such hardships in the name of progress, and having been denied it for so long, such marginalized groups will be the least willing to forfeit the dreams of a state that can provide. It is these groups that have the most to lose in the transformation of the state into an instrument of market-driven ma- chinery. This may not be enough, however, to explain the remarkable resilience of the vision of the state. Just as the privatization and liberalization programs have not weakened the state, as much as changed it, so too has the inability of the state to provide not reduced its significance. It has survived countless revolutions and parricides. The perceived absence of the state merely signals its significance. The state even in its most profane forms contains elements of a sacred promise, and democratization appears to have done little to dim its imaginative power.

459 This could be understood in terms of what Fassin discusses as the Weberian and Durkheim- ian aspects of the state. “If, as Weber affirms, the state holds the ‘monopoly of legitimate use of violence,’ signifying that the latter is not its sole means of acting, but that it is ‘its specific means,’ by contrast, for Durkheim, it is also the ‘organ of social justice’ through which ‘is organized the moral life of the country’” (2015:3).

342 | Chapter Eleven

Such conclusions appear partially in line with non-realist scholars like Ya- varo-Nashin (2002) and Herzfeld (2016) who argue that cynicism and anger directed at the state comes to reinforce state power. This study, however, has sought to show that in calling for the state, the marginalized are not only reconstituting it, they are also calling for another kind of state. Chapter eight claims that even for the many young men that understand the state as a fundamentally corrupt and corrupting entity, there is a strong expectation that the state should be different. They want a state which is not governed by a logic of corruption, a state not only for the rich but a state that provides employment, freedom and national dignity. What has been suggested throughout the thesis is that the young men are able to, through both words and deeds, express a discontent, a politics of sorts. This is apparent in its most expressive forms of continuous protests and demonstrations but also in its more quotidian forms, that at first glance may appear as passive. Through both protests and waiting, the young are able to articulate a no, a rejection of the status quo, which in many parts of the more “developed” world often appears inconceivable.460 If that no set the authoritarian state collapsing, it has in many ways taken on a different resonance in the new post-authoritarian context. It has become a polyphonic no, which may signal a wish to return to more paternalistic politics, a rejection of neoliberal renegotiation of state prerogatives, and even at times a no to the democratization process as a whole. If the youth still call out their rejection, louder now than ever, is anyone listening? Not, perhaps, those they think should be listening. That state may no longer exist, even as they attempt to bring it into being. The early state and nation building processes were accomplished via interpellation. Now, by contrast in the silence of the state, there is an attempt at a reversal of sorts by the young men: to call upon the state, to turn it into reality, to give depth to its fierce apparatus. In their waiting for a response, something is happening, even if it may not take the form they, or we, anticipate or desire. Theirs at least is a communitas of waiting, as unpredictably creative as it may be unsettling.

Public Space and Youth Studies Finally, in attempting to capture the everyday experiences of democratization the study has also contributed to our understanding of public space, particularly in connection to youth and masculinity.

460 It is likely that “no” is being expressed everywhere, even if “we” are not listening.

Conclusions | 343

The study has claimed that cafés are important public spaces in which to investigate how narratives of the state and the broader democratization process come to life. More concretely, cafés are significant as sites of visibility, bracketing and contestation. In chapter five, by studying cafés as places of waiting, I have argued that the public presence of young men is a visibilization of the failure of the male breadwinner model and thus a crisis of masculinity. Their waiting comes to represent the continuities of the past and the failures of the present. Cafés, particularly so-called popular cafés, provide a sense of communitas, of bracketing, among young men. This can be seen as a form of Bayat’s non-social movement of the quiet encroachment of the everyday (2010). Their social and visible failure to become adults translates into a refusal of neoliberal subjecthood. Yet unlike in Bayat’s account it is driven by the desire to escape youthfulness more than reveling in it. Auyero, who looks at bureaucracies in Argentina, argues that to make someone wait is to have power over them. Auyero writes, “Domination works, we contend, through yielding to the power of others; and it is experienced as a waiting time: waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others” (2012:4). Nevertheless, the waiting of the young Tunisian men is equivocal. Among many things, they are waiting for employment, waiting for adulthood, waiting to become full citizens. Waiting, while “surrendering to the authority of others”, also means signaling that it is after all the state that should do something. It is thus simultaneously a signal of refusal and an acknowledgement that it is the power of the state that bestows adulthood. To keep someone waiting is also an acknowledgement of sorts, of responsibility towards those that wait, however hierarchical. While the young men’s waiting cannot be regarded as just passive since much happens while they wait, and this waiting can and does turn into protests, it is also reinforcing dependence. I do not then wish to neatly describe it as a form of resistance. It certainly carries aspects of defiance, of contestation, towards a neoliberal discourse of individuals left to themselves. On the other hand, a rejection of certain forms of neoliberal statecraft and subjectivity is not the same as rejecting a world in which social mobility and respectability are expressed through the constantly rising expectations of conspicuous consumption. The young men’s visibility, bracketing and contestations also reinforce a model of dependence as well as the (masculine) respectability of state employment. Similarly, the youth through their protests and their waiting may call upon the paternalistic promises of the state, to demand a form of redistributive politics that may take the form of

344 | Chapter Eleven dependence, which is often preferred to the alternative. Furthermore, this is a highly gendered form of waiting. That the young men can continue to demand and wait for their “rights” is in large part enabled by the invisible labor of women. In their waiting the young men also come to reinforce public spaces as predominantly male. By examining new emerging forms of cafés, which I have termed counter- public cafés, chapter six also studies how waiting can provide meaning for the young men. Whether through activism, or culture, or more equal gender dynamics, or simply places to hang out, these cafés are spaces where the burdens of waiting become something more; where time is turned into something more meaningful. As sites of both direct contestation and wider meaning- making they are thus potentially important counters to radical Islamist group’s use of public spaces to reinforce a strict gender separation. Arising out of the disappointment of the revolution, they are also a kind of revolution through other means. Yet, they also point to the limits of this form of everyday free spaces. They come to signal that outside their safe confines, little has changed. And as counter-public spaces of “withdrawal and regroupment” (Fraser 1996:125) they contain elements of exclusion. Only those with the “right kind of attitude” are allowed to partake in this quotidian revolution. They represent both a widening of the bracketing of communitas to include young women, as well as the privatizing logic of more exclusive kinds of cafés. I have suggested that what such counter-public cafés bring out is that all kinds of public spaces contain dimensions of both inclusions and exclusions. Looking for the revolutionary category or subjectivity has been a constant fixture of Western academic research. This search for the revolutionary subject imbued with the potential for radical change has been continually found and lost.461 With the outbreak of the Arab Spring, youth became the object of intense focus and expectation, as embodying a new revolutionary force. Do I then treat the marginalized youth as this long sought for revolutionary subject? I cannot claim to have completely overcome that impulse. And yet if they are revolutionary, it is often despite themselves. What many cry out for, when one listens, is order and stability, a way out of liminality and waiting. There is then the paradox, that the revolution has dramatically increased the focus on youth as a category. And yet the revolution and much of the subsequent

461As Thomassen writes, “once it became evident that the Western working classes had turned into docile bodies, the search for revolutionary potential was directed toward Russian workers, then Chinese peasants, then Third World movements, then peasants in general, then women, then students, then some of these categories in combination” (2014:193).

Conclusions | 345 demands of youth is exactly to escape youthfulness and to be able to become adults. Simply by doing nothing they augur failure of the social order. Thus, I term them unbidden revolutionaries. The revolution showed the risks of state and social inaction, and the transition revealed the inability of the new order to change these dynamics.

The Absent Mother This study has touched upon, albeit indirectly, the connection between the state and the nation. Scholars have repeatedly pointed to the way that the nation is often coded as feminine in the West (Hunt 1992) as well as in the Middle East (Delaney 1995). The nation can be articulated as a symbolic mother that needs to be protected by the masculine state and its sons. This, it is argued, articulates a gendered notion of citizenship. As Suad Joseph writes:

Although the forms of patriarchy have differed and changed, the discursive linkage of woman/mother to nation (and man/father to state) has reinforced the reproduction of gendered hierarchy, facilitating the institutionalization of gendered citizenship in state-building projects. (2000:7)

By contrast, I observed the absence of narratives among the young men that construe the nation as mother, and the tendency to conflate the nation and the state, both of which are expressed in masculine terms. The “nation as mother” is a fundamentally passive construct. In a sense the nation cannot fail, only the father/state is active and can thus disappoint. Has the nation, in its “active failure” also become masculine, another aspect of the symbolic father? I offer no answers except to suggest that perhaps the construct of the “nation as mother” is more ambiguous in the Tunisian margins than previous scholarship suggests. Further studies may seek to problematize assumptions of clear-cut distinctions between state and nation, and masculine and feminine forms of power.

LIMITATIONS & FURTHER RESEARCH Many pertinent questions raised in the study remain, at best, only partially answered, or unanswered altogether. To what degree are the experiences discussed unique to the young men I have spoken to in Kasserine and Gafsa? What other factors may exacerbate or mitigate the uncertainty of democracy, to make it more or less visible? What aspects of the democratic experiences are

346 | Chapter Eleven purely tied to neoliberalism and what aspects are merely amplified by neoliberalism? Further studies may attempt to examine other groups or other narratives. For example, democratization in contexts without a neoliberal crisis, among populations less, or more, affected by its disruptive logic; in countries with more equal, or stronger, economic growth; among young women. One may expect that expectations and desires are readjusted and change over time; how will these expectations of the state and democracy develop in the light of new realities? Further studies may choose to look at marginal populations in “consolidated” democracies. When it comes to amplifying the sense of democratic confusion, what role has the media played in general, and social media in particular? The form may be as important as the content. Are there analogous developments to the epistemological crisis in the growing distrust of institutions in the West, as information becomes more decentralized and more widely shared? Having studied cafés, what other spaces and places may be suitable for capturing the everyday experience of the democratic and of imaginaries? Further studies may include consideration of state bureaucracies or even the private spaces of the home.

POSTSCRIPT At the time of writing this, Tunisia is still hailed as the sole success-story of the Arab Spring. Much of what I have written here, while not setting out to disprove that claim, can be seen as problematizing what is involved in that success. Despite this, I believe that the achievements of the transitional process in Tunisia have been real and impressive. A host of factors, such as prudent political leadership, strong civil society activism and lack of an interventionist military, have undoubtedly contributed to this relative success of Tunisia. Tu- nisians have continued to show remarkable resilience in a context of serious security concerns and poor economic conditions. The protests of 2010-2011 destabilized the whole political order. Since then, there has been a constant stream of demonstrations, many of which have hardly made the news, either nationally or internationally. Democratically elected governments may be more insulated from the instability of demonstrations than authoritarian ones. Revealing inconvenient truths in an authoritarian context can be highly disruptive, it reveals that the world is not as the

Conclusions | 347 regime, and people themselves, may wish it to be. If revealing “truths” in the context of democratization does not produce the same immediately destabilizing effects, then the implications for the long term of a political dispensation seen as unjust are nonetheless worrying. Questions of distribution, jobs and economic security have continued to haunt the transition despite all the successes of the Tunisian political process. It seems that for many young men, and probably many others too, the shift from authoritarianism to democratization, perhaps even democracy, has in their own words provided little besides uncertainty. If we take them at their word, and there are good reasons why we should; what does that mean for future of democracy, in Tunisia and beyond? Democratization is almost by definition understood as a liminal transition, as a temporary rite of passage. Building on the rites of passage analogy, one may imagine that the West, EU and international organizations would be the so-called master of ceremonies who takes the neophyte Tunisia on its deconstructive journey of liminality. Under their wise guidance, and following the legalization of political parties, civil society and free and fair elections, and finally a widespread popular acceptance of the democratic “rules of the game”, Tunisia is then reintegrated back into the international order. Now as a “ma- ture” and publicly recognized member of the society of democratic nations. There are certainly elements of such a perspective in the way that Western aid and expertise is conducted in relation to Tunisia. Even with academia such expectations still flourish. Lest we become fooled by this exemplification, let us, instead, imagine that the West, and its emissaries of international organizations, are more like the trickster than the master of ceremonies. The trickster is the liminal character par excellence; he purports to guide the subject away from chaos but is his own harbinger of uncertainty and liminality (Thomassen 2004). Like a trickster, the concert of Western experts brings with them their own turmoil in the form of economic projects and political dependencies, which brought out the crisis to begin with. Both stories may or may not be convincing, yet they equally assume that Tunisia is in a transition; bound for the shore of Western consolidated democracy, or failing in its voyage. By contrast, this study has argued that the very desire for certainty that is being expressed among the young men in Tu- nisia would categorize it as already democratic in Lefort’s sense. Thus, on the question of whether Tunisia is democratic, the answer “yes” does not mean that it is “consolidated”, a meaningless term in a Lefortian perspective, it

348 | Chapter Eleven means only that it is at risk, balancing on a knife’s edge. This in itself is merely another sign of democracy; always one step away from the allure of certainty.

The Bird Will Not Return to its Cage

On October 13, 2019, on the second round of the presidential elections, Kais Saied faced Nabil Karoui. Both candidates lacked established political parties, they represented anti-establishment sentiments and emphasized the need to develop the interior regions. Karoui, a well-known businessman and media mogul with connections to Berlusconi, had only recently been released from jail on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. His opponent, Kais Saied, a stern 61-year-old professor in constitutional law with a conservative bent, had a reputation for honesty. He had risen to prominence through his calls for the respect of the dignity of the constitution and state in combination with more bottom-up forms of governance. Saied won by a landslide, getting almost 73 percent of the votes. It was an election that had seen an unusually high voter turnout, particularly among the young; a group where Saied gar- nered ninety percent of the votes. One of his first acts as president was to head to Kasserine and Gafsa, and meet with youth and youth groups, to start what he termed as more open lines of communication. For once, it appeared that the youth had been heard. Saied’s emphasis on rule of law and constitutional sovereignty can be understood to be in line with the traditional Tunisian nation-state myth of constitutionalism, as well as capturing widespread frustration with corruption and self-serving politicians. His persona of a strict but fair disciplinarian also appears to appeal to young men and their paternalistic view of state power. At the same time, his ideas of reforming the state through radical decentralization of power to the local levels appear novel and may signal a shift away from the older centralizing visions of politics. Perhaps it hints at new political imaginaries, where the state is less a distant entity. Whatever the case may be, the closed space of authoritarian silence has been shattered, and for now at least, has been replaced by a multitude of loud voices. As the young man in Gafsa told me of the time before the revolution, “We were all like a caged bird. Quiet and didn’t sing.” Kais Saied ended his final presidential debate with the words, "The bird will not return to its cage, and it will never again accept breadcrumbs."

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Sammanfattning

Fokus för denna avhandling är unga tunisiska mäns upplevelser av demokratisering efter revolutionen 2010–2011. Den är baserad på fjorton månaders fältarbete mellan 2015 och 2019, framförallt i mindre städer i Tunisiens marginaliserade inre regioner. Syftet med avhandlingen är att förstå erfarenheter av demokratisering och demokrati och den övergripande forskningsfrågan är: hur upplevs demokratisering? Avsikten med frågan, som diskuteras i kapitel 1, är att utveckla teoretiska insikter om demokratisering och demokrati bortom begreppens formella definitioner genom att undersöka tunisiers vardag och sätt att vara i världen. I forskningen förstås ofta demokratisering som en process där makt decent- raliseras, från envåldshärskare eller enpartistyre, till “folket” via fria val och demokratiska institutioner. Avhandlingen visar dock hur denna process också skapar osäkerhet kring maktens lokalisering. Studien belyser vidare hur marginaliserade grupper kan uppleva denna osäkerhet som hotfull och farlig. Ge- nom att undersöka dimensioner bortom de rent institutionella bidrar därför avhandlingen teoretiskt och metodologiskt till demokrati- och demokratise- ringsforskningen, samt till förståelsen av relationerna mellan stat och medborgare. I kapitel 2 presenteras avhandlingens teoretiska ramverk som bygger på den franska politiska tänkaren Claude Leforts förståelse av demokrati. Han analy- serar demokrati som en destabilisering av symbolisk makt och menar att i demokratin finns en inbyggd symbolisk osäkerhet, det han kallar demokratins tomma maktutrymme som uppstår ur, och i, demokratins offentliga rum. Sym- bolisk makt behandlas i avhandlingen som en form av politiska fantasier, det vill säga de övergripande föreställningarna kring relationen mellan stat och medborgare. Dessa föreställningar är sällan entydiga och innefattar medbor- garnas förväntningar, begär och besvikelser i relation till staten. Föreställning- arna formas av både historiska och nutida förhållanden mellan staten och medborgarna, men de kan också omformas i ljuset av demokratins tomma maktutrymme, där nya politiska fantasier kan uppstå och artikuleras. Lefort menar att den symboliska osäkerheten är allestädes närvarande i demokratier

men inte alltid synlig. Demokratisering definieras i avhandlingen som en ex- trem form av demokrati där sprickorna och de tomma maktutrymmena blir mer synliga, påtagliga och upplevda. De unga männens liv i Tunisien periferi är sedan länge definierat av ekonomisk och social otrygghet, där många är utan arbete, eller arbetar i den in- formella sektorn, och därför inte har råd att gifta sig och bilda familj, det vill säga att “bli vuxna”. Avhandlingen lägger därför särskild vikt på att analytisk och empirisk skilja denna maskulinitetskris som de unga männen genomlever, och som de senaste decenniernas nyliberala politik i Tunisien har förstärkt, från den demokratiska osäkerheten som uppstår i demokratins spår. Samtidigt visar avhandlingen hur dessa två kriser är sammanlänkade och förstärker varandra. I kapitel 3 diskuteras avhandlingens metodologiska ingångar. Under fält- arbetet har framförallt etnografiska metoder använts, och analysen är inspire- rad av tolkande teorier. Kärnan i det empiriska material utgörs av det som unga männen talar om, samt vad de gör, det vill säga både deras narrativ – deras berättelser – och deras praxis. Avhandlingen behandlar de unga männens väntan i offentliga rum som en viktig form av praxis, där deras förväntningar och förhoppningar som medborgare i relation till staten blir särskilt tydliga. Genom att undersöka hur de unga männen talar om staten och sig själva som medborgare, samt vad de gör, söker studien förstå och kontextualisera deras politiska upplevelser. Kapitel 4 fungerar som ett bakgrundskapitel och undersöker dynamiken mellan stat och medborgare i Tunisien efter självständigheten 1956. Likt många andra stater, har den tunisiska staten de senaste decennierna gått från att lova ekonomisk trygghet och social mobilitet till en mer nyliberal agenda, där medborgare alltmer förväntas klara sig på egen hand. Statens oförmåga att tillhandahålla "bröd och värdighet" – revolutionens slagord – var en viktig orsak till den tunisiska revolutionen 2010–2011. I kapitlet beskrivs vidare ut- vecklingen i landet efter revolutionen, där marginaliserade ungdomar fortsatt upplever olika former av exkludering. Dessa ouppfyllda förväntningar fortsät- ter att påverka de unga männens upplevelse av, och syn på, övergången till ett mer demokratiskt styre. Sedan följer sex empiriska kapitel som är organiserade i två delar. I kapitlen 5, 6 och 7 undersöks det offentliga rummet i dess fysiska dimensioner och ett antal individer följs över tid. Vidare undersöks politisk fantasi – föreställningar

om det politiska – genom olika dimensioner av väntan och väntans konsekvenser. Den andra delen, med kapitlen 8, 9 och 10 fångar ett antal unga mäns upplevelser av demokratisering genom berättelser i det nya offentliga rummet. Kapitel 5 och 6 granskar sambandet mellan plats och demokratisering. Här analyseras kaféernas roll som viktiga offentliga rum i det postrevolutionära Tunisien. Kapitlen betonar väntan som en form av praxis knuten till förvänt- ningar på, och önskemål om, stat och medborgarskap. I kapitel 5 undersöks så kallade folkliga kaféer, som domineras av män i olika åldrar. Dessa folkliga kaféer har länge haft en viktig roll i Tunisien, som samlingsplatser där män från olika sociala grupper kan mötas som jämlikar. De unga männen till- bringar mycket tid på kaféerna i en tillsynes fruktlös väntan på jobb. För dessa medborgare tydliggör denna mycket iögonfallande väntan att demokratiseringsprocessen misslyckats, och att trots revolutionen har relationen mellan stat och medborgare inte förändrats. Denna väntan förstärker vidare en mas- kulin uppfattning om medborgarskap, då det är unga män (och inte kvinnor) som tillåts vänta på staten. I kapitel 6 analyseras en ny slags aktivist-kaféer som skapats efter revolutionen och som är öppna också för kvinnor. De är platser där unga män och kvinnor kan träffas och är därför mer inkluderande än folkliga kaféer. På dessa kaféer försöker unga aktivister skapa nya sociala relationer och nya former av politik i rum som är dolda för omvärlden. Kaféerna är därför både inkluderande och exkluderande. Kapitel 7 följer fem unga mäns liv och fångar deras vardag i städerna Gafsa och Kasserine i Tunisiens utkant. Trots olika förhåll- ningssätt fortsätter dessa unga att vänta på staten. Genom denna väntan ställer de unga männen staten till svars. Kapitel 8 fångar de unga männens upplevelser av demokratisering och demokrati genom ett närstudium av deras narrativ om dessa processer. Dessa narrativ ger uttryck för en känsla av både kaos och förlust. Det är berättelser om förlusten av personlig och ekonomisk säkerhet samt förlusten av en nat- ionell solidaritet. Efter revolutionen kan dessa berättelser nu uttryckas öppet då det uppstått ett fritt offentligt rum. Men det har också lett till att demo- kratiseringen ökat upplevelsen av osäkerhet. Många unga män menar att demokrati borde vara mer än val och en öppen offentlighet. Det borde också vara ett system där staten kan, och ska, tillhandahålla arbete och trygghet (både materiell och symbolisk). De unga männens berättelser om osäkerhet kopplas i kapitlet till en vidare socioekonomisk kris, samt till krisen i förhål- landet mellan stat och medborgare. Det offentliga rummets nya öppenhet har, tillsammans med socioekonomisk sårbarhet, orsakat en radikal destabilisering

av hur de unga männen tolkar sin sociala och politiska verklighet och har där- för skapat en känsla av epistemologisk kris. I denna kris letar de unga männen efter nya tolkningsramar som kan vara både demokratiska och auktoritära. Samtidigt tolkar många de negativa aspekterna av Tunisiens demokratisering – ökat våld och korruption – som uppkomna ur kollektiva och individuella misslyckanden. De unga männen känner nostalgi till den auktoritära peri- oden, som visserligen var förtyckande men makt och ansvar var då mera synliga och tydliga. Nu lämnas de unga männen på egen hand. De kan demonstrera men “ingen lyssnar”. De unga männens narrativ om statlig korruption och hur dessa speglar både förväntningar och besvikelser analyseras i kapitel 9. Sådana berättelser är en grundläggande del av hur de i vardagen ser på staten liksom på sitt eget medborgarskap. Den stat som framträder i dessa narrativ är inte bara korrupt utan också och korrumperande. Demokratiseringsprocessen, menar de, har lett till ökad inflation, smuggling och våld. Genom dessa negativa narrativ artikulerar de unga männen samtidigt alternativa visioner om hur staten bör vara. Staten borde behandla dess medborgare lika, oavsett om de har kontakter och resurser eller inte. Framförallt borde staten ge unga män möjligheter till ett värdigt liv genom att tillhandahålla arbete. Kapitel 10 undersöker vardagliga erfarenheter av staten genom olika former av så kallade kulturella intimiteter, det vill säga vardagliga uttryck och formuleringar som knyter an till nationalstatsmyter. Snarare än att se Tunisien som ett modernt land med en stor och välutbildad medelklass, och snarare än att se sig själva som detta lands representanter, beskriver de unga männen sig själva i termer som khubzist (desperata och utan moral) och schizofrena. Ka- pitlet undersöker även hur staten förstås av de unga männen i primärt maskulina och patriarkala termer, där “fadern/staten” bör både disciplinera och bistå sina “söner.” I både kapitel 9 och i kapitel 10 visar avhandlingen att över- gången till demokrati i Tunisien – där den offentliga sfären alltså blivit mer öppen – samtidigt har resulterat i en omfattande kritik av staten som upplevs vara alltmera våldsam, korrupt och samtidigt frånvarande. Denna kritik kan förstås som en vägran att acceptera den nutida (nyliberala) visionen av staten där skyldigheter helt läggs på individen och där staten/fadern endast straffar. Istället kräver många unga män en närvarande och stark stat, vare sig den är demokratisk eller inte. Sammantaget visar avhandlingen hur demokratisering, genom öppnandet av fria offentliga rum, ger möjlighet till marginaliserade grupper att uttrycka

sina berättelser och sina frustrationer. Detta kan förstås som en del av demokratins tomma maktutrymme, där ingen enskild grupp eller individ längre kan ta sig ensamrätten att tala i folkets namn. Samtidigt skapar denna nya verklighet osäkerhet gällande var makt är lokaliserad, och framförallt vem som har ansvar. För de prekära unga männen – vars liv redan definierats av osäker- het – upplevs detta som ännu en börda, som en förstärkning av den nyliberala dynamik där staten allt mer upplevs som frånvarande. De unga männen vän- tar fortfarande på att de demokratiska löftena – bröd och värdighet – skall in- frias.

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35. Agneta Bladh (1987) Decentraliserad förvaltning. Tre ämbetsverk i nya roller. (Studentlitteratur) 91-44-27731-8 36. Nils-Eric Hallström (1989) Lagen om ungdomslag i beslut och genom- förande. 91-7146-782-3 37. Maritta Soininen (1989) Samhällsbilder i vardande. (CEIFO) 91-87810-03-X 38. Stefan Lindström (1991) Hela nationens tacksamhet. Svensk forsknings- politik på atomenergiområdet 1945-1956. 91-7146-932-X 39. Yeu-Farn Wang (1991) China's Science and Technology Policy: 1949-1989. 91-7146-953-2. 40. Jan Hylén (1991) Fosterlandet främst? Konservatism och liberalism i högerpartiet 1904-1985. (Norstedts) 91-38-50086-8 41. Jan Johansson (1992) Det statliga kommittéväsendet. Kunskap, kontroll, konsensus. 91-7146969-9 42. Janina Wiktoria Dacyl (1992) Between Compassion and Realpolitik: In Search of a General Model of the Responses of Recipient Countries to Large-Scale Refugee Flows with Reference to the South-East Asian Ref- ugee Crisis. 91-7146-007-X 43. Leo Bartonek (1992) Der Topos »Nähe« - Ernst Blochs Eintrittsstelle in die Sozialwissenschaften. Ein Beitrag zur Ontologie der modemen Ge- sellschaft. 91-7153-022-3 44. Jan-Gunnar Rosenblad (1992) Nation, nationalism och identitet. Sydaf- rika i svensk sekelskiftesdebatt. (Bokförlaget Nya Doxa) 91-88248-24-0 45. Alexa Robertson (1992) National Prisms and Perceptions of Dissent: The Euromissile Controversy Reflected in Opinion and the News in the UK and the FRG 1980-1983. 91-7153-070-3 46. Lars Lindström (1993) Accumulation, Regulation, and Political Strug- gles. Manufacturing Workers in South Korea. 91-7153-121-1 47. Göran Bergström (1993) Jämlikhet och kunskap. Debatter och reform- strategier i socialdemokratisk skolpolitik 1975-1990. (Symposion Graduale) 91-7139-135-5 48. Jens Bartelson (1993) A Genealogy of Sovereignty. 91-7153-140-8 49. Ingvar Hjelmqvist (1994) Relationer mellan stat och kommun. 91-7153-186-6 50. Emmanuel Obliteifio Akwetey (1994) Trade Unions and Democratisa- tion: A Comparative Study of Zambia and Ghana. 91-7153-250-1 51. Kristina Boréus (1994) Högervåg. Nyliberalism och kampen om språket i svensk debatt 1969-1989. (Tidens förlag) 91-550-4129-9 * Steve Minett (1994) Power, Politics and Participation in the Firm (Athe- naeum Press Ltd, Newcastle) 1 85628 331 3 52. Michael Karlsson (1995) Partistrategi och utrikespolitik. Interna moti- veringar och dagspressens agerande i Catalina-affären 1952 och EEC-frågan 1961/62. 91-7153-346-X 53. Sun-Joon Hwang (1995) Folkrörelse eller affärsföretag. Den svenska konsumetkooperationen 1945-1990. 91-7153-379-6 54. Ulrika Mörth (1996) Vardagsintegration - La vie quotidienne - i Europa. Sverige i EUREKA och EUREKA i Sverige. 91-7153-460-1 55. Claes Wahl (1996) The State of Statistics: Conceptual and Statistical Reasoning in the Modern State 1870-1940. 91-7153-506-3

56. Peter Kjaer (1996) The Constitution of Enterprise: An Institutional His- tory of Inter-firm Relations in Swedish Furniture Manufacturing. 91-7153-538-1 57. Eva Haldén (1997) Den Föreställda Förvaltningen. En institutionell historia om central skolförvaltning. 91-7153-578-0 58. Kristina Riegert (1998) "Nationalising" Foreign Conflict: Foreign Pol- icy Orientation as a Factor in Television News Reporting. 91-7153-743-0 59. Peter Ehn (1998) Maktens administratörer. Ledande svenska statstjäns- temäns och politikers syn på tjänstemannarollen i ett förändringsper- spektiv. 91-7153-779-1 60. Magnus Norell (1998) Democracy and Dissent. The Case of an Israeli Peace Movement, Peace Now. 91-7153-828-3 61. Jan Lionel Sellberg (1998) Hur är samhället möjligt? Om den tidig- moderna naturrättens språkfilosofiska grunder. Brännpunkt: Samuel Pufendorf. 91-7153-825-9 62. Jan-Axel Swartling (1998) Ideologi och realitetsarbete. Om analys av makt och dominans på etnometodologisk grund. 91-7153-846-1 63. Magnus Ekengren (1998) Time and European Governance. The Empiri- cal Value of Three Reflective Approaches. 91-7153-861-5 64. Peter Strandbrink (1999) Kunskap och politik. Teman i demokratisk te- ori och svensk EU-debatt. 91-7153-943-3 65. Jouni Reinikainen (1999) Right against Right. Membership and Justice in Post-Soviet Estonia. 91-7153-951-4 66. Eric Stern (1999) Crisis Decisionmaking: A Cognitive-Institutional Approach. 91-7153-9936 67. Ulf Mörkenstam (1999) Om "Lapparnes privilegier". Föreställningar om samiskhet i svensk samepolitik 1883-1997. 91-7265-004-4 68. Cecilia Åse (2000) Makten att se. Om kropp och kvinnlighet i lagens namn. (Liber) 91-4706080-8 69. Margreth Nordgren (2000) Läkarprofessionens feminisering. Ett köns- och maktperspektiv. 91-7265-133-4 70. Charlotte Wagnsson (2000) Russian Political Language and Public Opinion on the West, NATO and Chechnya. Securitisation Theory Re- considered. 91-7265-135-0 71. Max M. Edling (2000) A revolution in favour of government. The Amer- ican Constitution and ideas about state formation, 1787-1788. 91-7265-130-X 72. Pasquale Cricenti (2000) Mellan privilegier och fattigdom. Om italiensk demokrati och socialpolitik ur ett välfärdsstatsperspektiv. 91-7265-179-2 73. Henrik Berglund (2000) Hindu Nationalism and Democracy: A Study of the Political Theory and Practice of the Bharatiya Janata Party. 91-7265-198-9 74. Magnus Reitberger (2000) Consequences of Contingency: the Pragma- tism and Politics of Richard Rorty.91-7265-199-7 75. Mike Winnerstig (2001) A World Reformed? The United States and Eu- ropean Security from Reagan to Clinton.91-7265-212-8 76. Jonas Nordquist (2001) Domstolar i det svenska politiska systemet: Om demokrati, juridik och politik under 1900-talet. 91-7265-218-7

77. Kjell Engelbrekt (2001) Security Policy Reorientation in Peripheral Eu- rope. A Perspectivist Approach. 91-7265-234-9 78. Susanna Rabow-Edling (2001) The intellectuals and the idea of the nation in Slavophile thought. 91-7265-316-7 79. Nelli Kopola (2001) The Construction of Womanhood in Algeria. Moudjahidates, Aishah Radjul, Women as Others and Other Women. 91-7265-317-5 80. Maria Jansson (2001) Livets dubbla vedermödor. Om moderskap och arbete. 91-7265-340-X 81. Dagmar von Walden Laing (2001) HIV/AIDS in Sweden and the United Kingdom Policy Networks 1982-1992. 9-7265-342-6 82. Marika Sanne (2001) Att se till helheten. Svenska kommunalpolitiker och det demokratiska uppdraget. 91-7265-348-5 83. Bror Lyckow (2001) En fråga för väljarna? Kampen om det lokala ve- tot 1893-1917. 91-7265-359-0 84. Magnus Enzell (2002) Requiem for a Constitution. Constitutionalism and Political Culture in Early 20th Century Sweden. 91-7265-395-7 85. Welat Songür (2002) Välfärdsstaten, sociala rättigheter och invandrar- nas maktresurser: En jämförande studie om äldre från Mellanöstern i Stockholm, London och Berlin. 91-7265-405-8 86. Johan Lembke (2002) Defining the New Economy in Europe. A Com- parative Analysis of EU Technology Infrastructure Policy, 1995-2001. 91-7265-417-1 87. Maria Wendt Höjer (2002) Rädslans politik. Våld och sexualitet i den svenska demokratin. (Liber). 91-47-06585-0 88. Håkan Karlsson (2002) Bureaucratic Politics and Weapons Acquisition: The Case of the MX ICBM Program. 91-7265-531-3 89. Andreas Duit (2002) Tragedins institutioner. Svenskt offentligt miljö- skydd under trettio år. 91-7265-528-3 90. Lucas Pettersson (2002) Information och identitet. Synen på television- ens politiska roll i Sverige och EU. ISBN 91-7265-549-6 91. Magnus Jedenheim Edling (2003) The Compatibility of Effective Self- Ownership and Joint World Ownership. 91-7265-589-5 92. Peter Hallberg (2003) Ages of Liberty: Social Upheaval, History Writ- ing and the New Public Sphere in Sweden, 1740-1792. 91-7265-629-8 93. Linus Hagström (2003) Enigmatic Power? Relational Power Analysis and Statecraft in Japan’s China Policy. 91-7265-628-X 94. Jacob Westberg (2003) Den nationella drömträdgården. Den stora berättelsen om den egna nationen i svensk och brittisk Europade- batt. 91-7265-681-6 95. Eva Erman (2003) Action and Institution – contributions to a discourse theory of human rights. 91-7265-726-X 96. Göran Sundström (2003) Stat på villovägar. Resultatstyrningens framväxt i ett historisk-institutionellt perspektiv. 91-7265-750-2 97. Ersun Kurtulus (2004) State Sovereignty. The Concept, the Referent and the Ramifications. 91-7265-754-5 98. Magdalena Kettis (2004) The Challenge of Political Risk. Exploring the Political Risk Management of Swedish Multinational Corpora- tions. 91-7265-842-8

99. Sofia Näsström (2004) The An-Archical State. Logics of Legitimacy in the Social Contract Tradition. 91-7265-924-6 100. Gunilla Herolf (2004) France, Germany and the United Kingdom – Cooperation in Times of Turbulence. 91-7265-797-9 101. Lena Dahlberg (2004) Welfare relationships. Voluntary organisa- tions and local authorities supporting relatives of older people in Sweden. 91-7265-928-9 102. Anette Gröjer (2004) Den utvärdera(n)de staten. Utvärderingens in- stitutionalisering på den högre utbildningens område. 91-7265-939- 4 103. Malena Britz (2004) The Europeanization of Defence Industry Pol- icy. 91-7265-916-5 104. Hans Agné (2004) Democracy Reconsidered. The Prospects of its Theory and Practice during Internationalisation - Britain, France, Sweden, and the EU. 91-7265-948-3 105. Henrik Enroth (2004) Political Science and the Concept of Politics. A Twentieth-Century Genealogy. 91-7265-967-X 106. Lisbeth Aggestam (2004) A European Foreign Policy? Role Con- ceptions and the Politics of Identity in Britain, France and Germany. 91-7265-964-5 107. Catrin Andersson (2004) Tudelad trots allt – dualismens överlevnad i den svenska staten 1718-1987. 91-7265-978-5 108. Johan Lantto (2005) Konflikt eller samförstånd? Management- och marknadsreformers konsekvenser för den kommunala demokratin. 91-7155-103-4 109. Daniel Helldén (2005) Demokratin utmanas. Almstriden och det politiska etablissemanget. 91-7155-136-0 110. Birgir Hermannsson (2005) Understanding Nationalism, Studies in Icelandic Nationalism 1800-2000. 91-7155-148-4 111. Alexandra Segerberg (2006) Thinking Doing: The Politicisation of Thoughtless Action. 91-7155-179-4 112. Maria Hellman (2006) Televisual Representations of France and the UK under Globalization. 91-7155-219-7 113. Åsa Vifell (2006) Enklaver i staten. Internationalisering, demokrati och den svenska statsförvaltningen. 91-7155-243-X 114. Johnny Rodin (2006) Rethinking Russian Federalism. The Politics of Intergovernmental Relations and Federal Reforms at the Turn of the Millennium. 91-7155-285-5 115. Magnus Lembke (2006) In the Lands of Oligarchs. Ethno-Politics and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Indigenous-Peasant Move- ments of Guatemala and Ecuador. 91-7155-300-2 116. Lenita Freidenvall (2006), Vägen till Varannan Damernas. Om kvinnorepresentation, kvotering och kandidaturval i svensk politik 1970-2002 91-7155-322-3 117. Arita Eriksson (2006) Europeanization and Governance in Defence Policy: The Example of Sweden. 91-7155-321-5

118. Magnus Erlandsson (2007) Striderna i Rosenbad. Om trettio års försök att förändra Regeringskansliet. 978-91-7155-448-2 119. Anders Sjögren (2007) Between Militarism and Technocratic Gov- ernance: State Formation in Contemporary Uganda. 978-91-7155- 430-7 120. Andreas Behnke (2007) Re-Presenting the West. NATO’s Security Discourse After the End of the Cold War. 978-91-7155-522-9 121. Ingemar Mundebo (2008) Hur styrs staten? 978-91-7155-530-4 122. Simon Birnbaum (2008) Just Distribution. Rawlsian Liberalism and the Politics of Basic Income. 978-91-7155-570-0 123. Tove Lindén (2008) Explaining Civil Society Core Activism in Post- Soviet Latvia. 978-91-7155-585-4 124. Pelle Åberg (2008) Translating Popular Education – Civil Society Cooperation between Sweden and Estonia. 978-91-7155-596-0 125. Anders Nordström (2008) The Interactive Dynamics of Regulation: Exploring the Council of Europe’s Monitoring of Ukraine. 978-91- 7155-616-5 126. Fredrik Doeser (2008) In Search of Security After the Collapse of the Soviet Union: Foreign Policy Change in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, 1988-1993. 978-91-7155-609-7 127. Mikael Blomdahl (2008) The Political Use of Force: Beyond Na- tional Security Considerations as a Source of American Foreign Policy. 978-91-7155-733-9 128. Jenny Cisneros Örnberg (2009) The Europeanization of Swedish Al- cohol Policy. 978-91-7155-748-3 129. Sofie Bedford (2009) Islamic Activism in Azerbaijan: Repression and Mobilization in a Post-Soviet Context. 978-91-7155-800-8 130. Björn Harström (2009) Vad vi inte får se. 100 år av censurpolitik. 978-91-7155-878-7 131. Monica Andersson (2009) Politik och stadsbyggande. Modernismen och byggnadslagstiftningen. 978-91-7155-944-9 132. Jenny Madestam (2009) En kompispappa och en ytlig djuping. Parti-eliters ambivalenta partiledarideal. 978-91-7155-962-3 133. Marja Lemne (2010) För långt från regeringen – och för nära. Ex- pertgruppen ESO:s födelse, levnad och död. 978-91-7447-006-2 134. Maria Carbin (2010) Mellan tystnad och tal – flickor och hedersvåld i svensk offentlig politik. 978-91-7447-037-6 135. Sofie Tornhill (2010) Capital Visions. The Politics of Transnational Production in Nicaragua. 978-91-7447-052-9 136. Barbara Kunz (2010) Kind words, cruise missiles and everything in between. A neoclassical realist study of the use of power resources in U.S. policies towards Poland, Ukraine and Belarus 1989–2008. 978-91- 7447-148-9 137. Eva Hansson (2011) Growth without Democracy. Challenges to Au- thoritarianism in Vietnam. 978-91-7447-199-1 138. Anna Ullström (2011) Styrning bakom kulisserna. Regeringskansliets politiska staber och regeringens styrningskapacitet. 978-91-7447-235-6 139. Karl Gustafsson (2011) Narratives and Bilateral Relations: Rethinking the 'History Issue' in Sino-Japanese Relations. 978-91-7447-305-6

140. Svend Dahl (2011) Efter folkrörelsepartiet. Om aktivism och politisk förändring i tre svenska riksdagspartier. 978-91-7447-357-5 141. Emelie Lilliefeldt (2011) European Party Politics and Gender: Config- uring Gender Balanced Parliamentary Presence. 978-91-7447-379-7 142. Andreas Johansson (2011) Dissenting Democrats. Nation and Democ- racy in the Republic of Moldova. 978-91-7447-406-0 143. Ola Svenonius (2011) Sensitising Urban Transport Security: Surveil- lance and Policing in Berlin, Stockholm, and Warsaw. 978-91-7447- 390-2 144. Katharina Tollin (2011) Sida vid sida - en studie av jämställdhetspoliti- kens genealogi 1971-2006. 978-91-7389-898-0 145. Niklas Bremberg (2012) Exploring the Dynamics of Security Commu- nity-Building in the post-Cold War Era: Spain, Morocco and the Euro- pean Union. 978-91-7447-463-3 146. Pär Daléus (2012) Politisk ledarskapsstil: Om interaktionen mellan personlighet och institutioner i utövandet av det svenska statsminister- ämbetet. 978-91-7447-535-7 147. Linda Ekström (2012) Jämställdhet – för männens, arbetarklassens och effektivitetens skull? – En diskursiv policystudie av jämställdhetsarbete i maskulina miljöer. 978-91-7447-327-8 148. Lily Stroubouli Lanefelt (2012) Multiculturalism, Liberalism and the Burden of Assimilation. 978-91-7447-597-5 149. Mats Wärn (2012) A Lebanese Vanguard for the Islamic Revolution: Hezbollah's combined strategy of accommodation and resistance. 978- 91-7447-604-0 150. Constanza Vera-Larrucea (2013) Citizenship by Citizens: First Genera- tion Nationals with Turkish Ancestry on Lived Citizenship in Paris and Stockholm. 978-91-7447-636-1 151. Göran von Sydow (2013) Politicizing Europe: Patterns of Party-Based Opposition to European Integration. 978-91-7447-666-8 152. Andreas Nordang Uhre (2013) On Transnational: Actor Participation in Global Environmental Governance. 978-91-7447-709-2 153. Cajsa Niemann (2013) Villkorat förtroende. Normer och rollförvänt- ningar i relationen mellan politiker och tjänstemän i Regeringskansliet. 978-91-7447-776-4 154. Idris Ahmedi (2013) The Remaking of American Strategy toward Iran and Iraq: Outline of a Theory of Foreign Policy Change. 978-91-7447- 813-6 155. Mikiko Eto (2014) Women and Politics in Japan: A Combined Analysis of Representation and Participation. 978-91-7447-833-4 156. Monica Svantesson (2014) Threat Construction inside Bureaucracy: A Bourdieusian Study of the European Commission and the Framing of Ir- regular Immigration 1974-2009. 978-91-7447-853-2 157. Magnus Lundgren (2014) International organizations as peacemakers: The evolution and effectiveness of supranational instruments to end civil war. 978-91-7447-950-8 158. Andreas Gottardis (2014) Reason and Utopia. Reconsidering the concept of Emancipation in Critical Theory. 978-91-7649-016-7 159. Matilda Valman (2014) Three faces of HELCOM - institution, organization, policy producer. 978-91-7649-033-4 160. Max Waltman (2014) The Politics of Legal Challenges to Pornogra- phy: Canada, Sweden, and the United States. 978-91-7649-047-1

161. Mikael Olsson (2015) Austrian Economics as Political Philosophy. 978-91-7649-062-4 162. Matilde Millares (2015) Att välja välfärd. Politiska berättelser om val- frihet. 978-91-7649-082-2 163. Maria-Therese Gustafsson (2015) Beyond Conflict and Conciliation: The Implications of different forms of Corporate-Community Relations in the Peruvian Mining Industry. 978-91-7649-125-6 164. Henrik Angerbrandt (2015) Placing Conflict: Religion and Politics in Kaduna State, Nigeria 978-91-7649-233-8 165. Per-Anders Svärd (2015) Problem Animals: A Critical Genealogy of Animal Cruelty and Animal Welfare in Swedish Politics 1844–1944 978-91-7649-234-5 166. Helena Tinnerholm Ljungberg (2015) Omöjliga familjen. Ideologi och fantasi i svensk reproduktionspolitik 978-91-7649-231-4 167. Elín Hafstensdóttir (2015) The Art of Making Democratic Trouble: Four Art Events and Radical Democratic Theory 978-91-7649-232-1 168. Björn Jerdén (2016) Waiting for the rising power: China’s rise in East Asia and the evolution of great power politics 978-91-7649-394-6 169. Martin Westergren (2016) The Political Legitimacy of Global Govern- ance Institutions: A Justice-Based Account 978-91-7649-521-6 170. Björn Ottosson (2017) A Cacophony of Voices: A Neoclassical Realist study of United States Strategy toward Central Asia and Southern Cau- casus 1991–2006 978-91-7649-626-8 171. Livia Johannesson (2017) In Courts We Trust: Administrative Justice in Swedish Migration Courts 978-91-7649-694-7 172. Karin Gavelin (2018) The Terms of Involvement: A study of attempts to reform civil society’s role in public decision making in Sweden 987-91- 7797-165-8 173. Åse Lidbeck (2018) Allianser och Illusioner: Socialdemokratin och konsumtionsbeskattningen 978-91-7797-203-7 174. Alba Mohedano Roldan (2018) Equality and Participation: Distribu- tion of Outcomes in Participatory for Managing Natural Resources 978-91-7797-296-9 175. Anneli Gustafsson (2018) Riksdagsdebatt iscensatt: Ett feministiskt tea- tralt perspektiv på subjektskonstruerande makt i det demokratiska sam- talet 978-91-7797-280-8 176. Jasmina Nedevska Törnqvist (2018) Why Care About Future People's Environment? Approaches to Non-Identity in Contractualism and Natu- ral Law 978-91-7797-400-0 177. Christofer Lindgren (2018) De små medlens betydelse: Om menings- skapande, mångtydighet och styrning i offentlig förvaltning 978-91- 7797-448-2 178. Faradj Koliev (2018) Naming and Shaming: The politics and effectiveness of social pressure in the ILO 978-91-7797-460-4 179. Max Fonseca (2019) Your Treatment, My Treat? On Lifestyle-Related Ill Health and Reasonable Responsibilitarianism 978-91-7797-530-4 180. Tua Sandman (2019) The dis/appearances of violence: When a 'peace- loving' state uses force 978-91-7797-512-0

181. Helena Hede Skagerlind (2019) Governing Development: The Millen- nium Development Goals and Gender Policy Change in Sub-Saharan Africa 978-91-7797-604-2 182. Tarek Oraby (2019) A Darwinian Theory of International Conflict 978- 91-7797-811-4 183. Johanna von Bahr (2020) International organizations and children’s rights: norm adoption, pressure tactics and state compliance 978-91- 7797-962-3 184. Christina Alnevall (2020) Women’s Discursive Representation. Women as Political Representatives, Mother and Victims of Men’s Violence in the Mexican Parliament 978-91-7797-966-1 185. Hedvig Örden (2020) Securing Judgement: Rethinking Security and Online Information Threats 978-91-7797-937-1 186. Magna Robertsson (2020) Personligt mod. Om krigsdekorationer som mjuk normstyrning under insatsen i Afghanistan åren 2008-2012 978- 91-7911-034-5 187. Karim Zakhour (2020) While We Wait: Democratization, State and Cit- izenship among Young Men in Tunisia’s Interior Regions 978-91-7911- 106-9

Stockholm Studies in Politics 187 Karim Zakhour While We Wait

Democratization, State and Citizenship among Young Men in Tunisia's Interior Regions While We Wait Karim Zakhour

ISBN 978-91-7911-106-9 ISSN 0346-6620

Department of Political Science

Doctoral Thesis in Political Science at Stockholm University, Sweden 2020