Shadow Zones: Contraband and Social Contract in the Borderlands of Tunisia by Alyssa Marie Miller Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Anne Allison, Supervisor ___________________________ Kamran Ali ___________________________ Engseng Ho ___________________________ Laurie McIntosh ___________________________ Ellen McLarney ___________________________ Harris Solomon Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 i v ABSTRACT Shadow Zones: Contraband and Social Contract in the Borderlands of Tunisia by Alyssa Marie Miller Department of Cultural Anthropology Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Anne Allison, Supervisor ___________________________ Kamran Ali ___________________________ Engseng Ho ___________________________ Laurie McIntosh ___________________________ Ellen McLarney ___________________________ Harris Solomon An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Cultural Anthropology in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 Copyright by Alyssa Miller 2018 Abstract Although Tunisia has been celebrated as the unique success story of the Arab Spring, its emergent democracy has failed to resolve the structural inequalities that caused the 2011 revolution, or meaningfully include marginal subjects within its address. This dissertation documents the life-worlds of those left behind in Tunisia’s democratic transition by tracking the precarious labor of smuggling by youth in the Western-Central interior. For unemployed youth living in the shadow of underdevelopment, smuggling offers a rare avenue of insertion into productive life, where the border serves as a natural resource for generating value through arbitrage. Disappointed by the revolution’s implicit promise of structural change, many young Tunisians now use these routes of economic survival to join up with jihadist militias abroad. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kasserine, an impoverished province on Tunisia’s Algerian frontier, I examine how smuggling practice generates a landscape of ambivalent belonging to the nation, a “Shadow Zone” that elicits desire for the state, as well as the material means to evade it. I show how cross-border movement refracts the meaning of social justice for local actors, including petty smugglers and informal laborers who work the border economy, Tunisian families whose sons have been recruited to militias in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, and unemployed youth and civil society groups who militate for equitable development. iv Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... vi 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 Transition à Deux Vitesses .................................................................................................... 8 What is a Shadow Zone? ..................................................................................................... 13 The Meanings of Movement in the Shadows ................................................................... 20 Method ................................................................................................................................... 24 2. Getting by in the Shadow Zone ............................................................................................ 28 Kasserine: A Storehouse of Treasure ................................................................................ 33 Province of Martyrs .............................................................................................................. 37 Geographies of Smuggling .................................................................................................. 50 Gender and the Moral Economy of Smuggling ............................................................... 60 We Eat Off of Risk ................................................................................................................ 67 Sons of the Border ................................................................................................................ 72 Impasse .................................................................................................................................. 74 3. Kasserine, Région-Victime ..................................................................................................... 79 The South is the South ......................................................................................................... 83 From Shadow Zone to Région-Victime ............................................................................. 88 Truth and Dignity Come to Kasserine ............................................................................... 94 Self-Harm and the Politics of Endurance ........................................................................ 101 v Revolution Redux ............................................................................................................... 106 Strangers in the Capital City ............................................................................................. 110 The Night Pharmacy .......................................................................................................... 113 ‘Aycha Behiya ..................................................................................................................... 119 4. Kinship with the Vanished .................................................................................................. 122 Tunisianité and the Unruly Subject ................................................................................. 125 Performing Kin-Bonds in Public ...................................................................................... 130 The Efficacy of Familial Sentiments ................................................................................. 134 Lines of Flight from Filial Piety ........................................................................................ 137 The Missing Son as a Spectral Presence .......................................................................... 145 Genealogies of Mobility ..................................................................................................... 148 Ambiguities of Remembrance .......................................................................................... 152 Warda’s story ...................................................................................................................... 158 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 167 5. Youth Crisis and Representation ........................................................................................ 169 Precarity is my Statute ....................................................................................................... 170 A Cinema without Citizenship ......................................................................................... 176 Revolution and Documentary Film ................................................................................. 190 Images from the Margins .................................................................................................. 195 Learning from the Western Steppe .................................................................................. 201 6. A People’s State of Emergency ............................................................................................ 205 They Have Reconciled with Each Other, but We Do Not Forgive .............................. 206 vi Origins .................................................................................................................................. 214 Birth of a Hashtag ............................................................................................................... 221 Round One........................................................................................................................... 229 Māhish Dāwla: This is not a State ................................................................................... 236 Return of the Remnants, or Creeping Azlām ................................................................. 249 Iterations of Hope ............................................................................................................... 257 7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 262 References .................................................................................................................................. 269 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 292 vii List