http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2364-5613
ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT
Mainstream analyses of Tunisia’s post-2011 democratic transition have been largely divided along two mutually exclusive narratives. There are those hailing the country as ‘the Arab Spring’s only success story’ on the one hand and those sounding sensationalist alarms about the country’s democratization failure and return to authoritarianism on the other. This is consistent with, and perpetuates, a problematic zero-sum binary in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) scholarship between either a linear democratization process or authoritarian resilience. Furthermore, these reductionist representations highlight the failure of predominant democratization theories to account for the nuances and complexities of democratic transition. This paper critically examines the binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s democratization and explores their underpinning in two competing Orientalisms: the classic Orientalism underscoring an ontological difference (and inferiority) of the ‘Arab world’ to the West, and a liberal civilizing Orientalism which, while acknowledging an ‘essential sameness’ between the West and the ‘Arab world’, places the West as the temporal pinnacle of democracy and the normative monitor of democratic success. This paper thus rejects the binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s transition and advocates for a more nuanced narrative which accounts for the patterns of continuity with and change from authoritarian structures within the democratization process.
Introduction
Mainstream media and academic analyses of post-revolution Tunisia’s democratic transition have relied on ‘change’ from authoritarianism as the prevalent framework to understanding the country’s transition. The existing discourse on Tunisia’s democratization has been largely divided between two diametrically opposed narratives, within the change framework, advanced by those hailing the country as the Arab Spring’s only success and a beacon of democracy and hope in a region rocked by unrest and dictatorship on the one hand, and those sounding sensationalist or click-bait alarms on Tunisia’s return to dictatorship and the existence of counter-revolutionary forces derailing the country’s democratization process on the other. This perpetuates a problematic zero-sum binary in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) scholarship between ‘either democratic change or authoritarian continuity’.1 This paper argues that this binary narrative is fundamentally entrenched in Orientalist discursive representations of MENA in relation – and as inferior to – the West as the normative apex of democracy and modernity. This paper advocates for a nuanced representation of Tunisia’s complex democratization process which accounts for the mechanisms through which authoritarian institutional structures undergo gradual reform within a democratizing environment. This paper thus rejects the limiting ‘change’ discourse, and instead advocates for a ‘continuity and change’ paradigm in exploring Tunisia’s post-authoritarian institutional reform context.
The first section critically examines the patterns of binary representation of Tunisia’s democratic transition in mainstream discourses. This provides an overview of the mutually exclusive ‘success’ and ‘failure’ narratives advanced by analysts carrying underlying assumptions of an implicit democracy endpoint against which success and failure are assessed. This section highlights the failure of democratization theories to account for the complexity of democratic transition due to their tendency to rely on predominant authoritarian resilience and democratization paradigms in MENA scholarship. The second section explores the Orientalist underpinnings of the success or failure narrative through arguing for the existence of two competing Orientalisms driving either side of the narrative: a classic Orientalism relying on the assumption of the MENA region’s ontological difference from, and inferiority to, the West to conclude the inevitable failure of democratization due to cultural and religious incompatibility with democracy, and a liberal civilizing Orientalism which instead advances an ‘essential sameness’ argument but places the West as the temporal pinnacle of democracy, and thus a normative monitor of the so-called Arab Spring’s democratic outcomes. The third section examines the broader institutional context of authoritarianism in pre-revolution Tunisia, through exploring the institutional and police state basis for the survival of Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime. This section thus lays the groundwork for understanding the Tunisian post-revolution context of change from, and continuity with, authoritarian structures. The final section attempts to juxtapose Tunisia’s democratic transition with narratives of post-revolution ‘clean breaks’, using Skocpol’s social revolution criteria as benchmark, to offer an alternative and nuanced narrative of Tunisia’s transition from authoritarian rule through illustrating the mechanisms of both continuity with and change from authoritarianism in Tunisia’s post-2011 democratic transition.
Problematic binary representations of Tunisia’s democratic transition
An examination of mainstream academic and journalistic analyses of Tunisia’s democratic transition reveals a recurrent dichotomy between accounts touting the country’s democratic success, and those warning of or lamenting its failure and return to dictatorship. This binary narrative carries the assumption of an ‘endpoint’ to democratic transition. However, this endpoint against which the country’s ‘success’ or ‘failure’ are judged remains unacknowledged, undefined, and unchallenged by analysts advancing such judgments. This implicit endpoint is consistent with ‘the endpoints generally adopted in democratization studies (see Linz and Stepan 1996 Problems of Democratic Transition)’ which ‘share a common core: essentially liberal, free market, Western democracy of the Euro-American type’.2
Some analysts on the ‘failure’ camp have pointed to cabinet reshuffles, a controversial reconciliation law, and repeated postponements of municipal elections as ‘concerning moves that, taken together, signal a major backsliding in democratic development’.3 Others have made the oxymoronic judgment that by passing the reconciliation law, ‘Tunisia’s Parliament just cast a vote against democracy’.4
Furthermore, the connotations carried by judgments such as ‘Democracy derailed?’ and the ‘backsliding’ in democratic development imply a linear and two-directional path to democracy, forwards or backwards. This assumption lacks nuance and fails to capture the complexity of democratization processes, leading to the reinforcement of the predominant authoritarian resilience or democratization paradigms characteristic of MENA scholarship.5 For example, the postponing of the Tunisia municipal elections signalled the difficulty of passing a satisfactory Code on Local Authorities rather than a failing democratization process. Likewise, the 2017 Reconciliation law, which granted immunity to complicit civil servants of the Ben Ali regime, was a blow to the transitional justice process as it undermined the Truth and Dignity Commission’s authority, but did not signal the return of the old regime.6 By the same token, increased democratization in one aspect of governance does not mean the entire process is progressing, as simultaneous or subsequent reassertion of authoritarian practices can also occur.
Similarly, Walles uses the January 2018 protests, a response to government austerity measures, to present an ‘either or’ situation for the democratic transition by intellectualizing that ‘recent developments in Tunisia raise a fundamental question about the country’s future: Is it still on track as the Arab Spring’s only success story, or is it drifting back toward authoritarianism?’.7 This statement manages to advance a doubly problematic analysis of Tunisia as ‘the Arab Spring’s only success story’ while simultaneously reverting to its authoritarian nature. Walles’ analysis draws on underlying ‘democratization endpoint’ assumptions to assess that ‘in particular, the Tunisian government needs to address more effectively the tough economic problems the country faces and that pose the greatest risk to its democratic advancement’.8 This assumption is echoed by other analysts who posit that ‘unfinished work in Tunisia’s economic reforms […] in turn imperil its democratic evolution’.9 Presenting slow economic growth and persistent unemployment as a sign of democratic failure is an uncommon, if not outlandish analysis in other contexts, such as Greece’s debt crisis.
While some analysts on the ‘failure’ camp acknowledge the potential for Tunisia’s transition to adhere to democratic criteria despite economic woes, others were more unequivocal about the democratic failure, stating that ‘2015 marked only the beginning of Tunisia’s authoritarian return. At that time, the task of removing the façade of Tunisia’s “success story” to reveal the injured and contorted, but still chugging authoritarian system fell to political analysts’.10
This failure discourse is challenged by a diametrically opposed ‘success’ narrative, with the preponderance of analyses of Tunisia’s transition as ‘a “model for the Arab Spring”, a “success story”, a “beacon of hope” and even a “Carthaginian Summer”’.11 The underlying driver for this narrative is Tunisia’s exceptionalism, a theme that features heavily in Western media’s ‘success’ narrative in which Tunisia ‘stands as an exception in the Arab world for having peacefully completed a democratic electoral process’.12 This exceptionalism is rooted in, and reinforces, the Orientalist judgment that Tunisia is a success by the region’s standards. Indeed, ‘the latest readings of the Tunisian experience have not shied away from condescending tropes regarding the success of its stable, liberal transition as opposed to the volatility and illiberal failings of other “Arab spring” countries’.13 Masri hypothesized ‘”Why Tunisia?”, is a question that resonates among Arabs yearning for similar democratic outcomes and wondering why such freedoms remain out of their reach’.14 Indeed, some have considered Tunisia’s democratic transition a success solely due to the fact that the country ‘has not unraveled into civil war like Syria or Libya. It has not undergone a counter-revolution that returned it to the autocracy of its pre-revolution days, like Egypt has’.15 The neoliberal endpoint assumption or measure for success also remains undefined and unchallenged in this discourse. However, it is apparent in analyses linking democratic success to Foreign Direct Investment and economic support. As Culbertson noted in analyzing why ‘Tunisia is an Arab Spring success story’, ‘the World Bank supported Tunisia’s economy with a $5 billion loan in March. The U.S. is helping with border security and several other measures. Negotiations for a free trade agreement between Tunisia and the EU are underway and several European countries are making bilateral contributions’.16 This narrative overlooks the role of ‘the failed western neoliberal economic model which impoverished Arab masses while enriching a rentier elite and their dictators’17 in partly fuelling the Arab uprisings. Some analysts critically examined the neoliberal assumptions informing this narrative, arguing that ‘the current fascination with Tunisia’s democratic achievement, echoing the blind celebration of the so-called Tunisian economic miracle during the Ben Ali era, requires critical analysis’18
Notwithstanding more nuanced and critical analyses of Tunisia’s transition,19 or indeed the growing body of academic literature providing a nuanced understanding of democratization in MENA,20 the zero-sum, success or failure binary discourse on post-2011 Tunisia has engendered a predominant narrative of Tunisia’s democratic transition that is ‘broadly shifting between the dynamics of either democratic change or authoritarian continuity’.21 A critical examination of predominant representations of Tunisia’s revolution is necessary to reveal the ideology imbedded in the ‘linguistic system and understood in terms of interaction, a “form of institutional talk” (O’Keeffe, 2012) between media and readers, listeners or viewers’.22 Indeed, Ben Labidi’s analysis of Western TV and print commentary shows its contribution to the elevation of a singular understanding of the ‘Arab Spring’ over others, through the repetitive use of a linguistic repertoire.23 Chomiak argues that ‘while both optimists and pessimists have good reasons for their outlook, analysts’ extensive focus on political achievements indicative of liberal democratic consolidation, or the linking of devastating events to a ‘reversal of democracy’, have not only painted a limited and minimalist picture of where Tunisia stands today but have also influenced public opinion’.24 Indeed, the reductive binary representation of Tunisia’s transition between success and failure is academically and politically problematic as ‘juxtaposing moments of success with trends of failure, has resulted in an emphasis of an epistemology of absence—the idea that something fundamental is missing in Tunisia […]. Most devastatingly, the reform-focused emphasis based on absence and inadequacy, has contributed to popular sentiments of frustration with the post-revolutionary governments and potentially dangerous calls to bring the old order back’.25 This paper argues that the binary narrative framing Tunisia’s transition is rooted in, and further reinforces, a faulty democratization framework which fails to capture the complexity of democratic transition and leads to the perpetuation of zero-sum discursive representations of democratization processes in the MENA.
Critiques of democratization discourses abound,26 mainly due to the failure of consecutive democratization theories to account for ‘contradictions between the literature and the actual dynamics on the ground’.27 This gap between democratization theory and practice is linked to the fact that ‘the reality of democratization is, indeed, much more complicated than official Western discourse imagines’.28 The result is the predominant, Western-centric democratization framework, which relies on ‘“Western categories” and “Western discourse” distorts understanding of the dynamics of politics in the Middle East’.29 Howard and Walters argue that US-global power-driven disciplinary pressure within political science to study Eastern Europe and the Middle East ‘in terms of their overarching political and economic “underdevelopment” marginalized questions that were not obviously tied to regime change or “modernizing” reform’.30 These dominant paradigms left political scientists ‘ill-equipped to explain the uprisings’ of 1989 in Eastern Europe and of 2011 in MENA.31 It followed that, ‘as governments were being overthrown in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the struggle over the meaning of those events began’.32
The failure of democratization to account for, and contextualize, the Arab uprisings warrants a re-examination of the academic and political perspectives through which democratization processes are being framed. ‘Given the long-standing debate over how the Arab world has been portrayed in the West, discursive representation of the Arab uprisings is undoubtedly an important issue when trying to make sense of Western responses, or lack thereof, to developments in the region’.33
Two competing orientalisms: classic orientalism vs. liberal civilizing orientalism
The binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s democratic transition are delineated by and entrenched in two competing Orientalist narratives: a Classic Orientalism enabling and framing a narrative of the impending failure of Tunisia’s democratic transition and a liberal civilizing Orientalism driving the uncritical success narrative. Examining the representations of the Arab uprisings in Western or Western-centric coverage reveals Orientalist discursive patterns. Some scholars have argued that the Western-imposed ‘Arab Spring’ naming had Orientalist connotations. As Shihade and Shihade highlight, ‘the concept of seasons is embedded in a long history of Orientalizing the region, as if what happened in the history of MENA before 2011 did not qualify for an acknowledgment of the energies, struggles, and fighting for a better life that the MENA societies have been waging against western colonialism, intrusions, and unjust local governments for over 100 years’.34 Furthermore, they posit that the persistence of three dynamics, namely Orientalism, Euro-centrism and modernity ‘still have relevance in the misunderstanding of the so called “Arab Spring”’.35 While these three dynamics have interlinked underpinnings and manifestations, this section only focuses on Orientalist manifestations in the discursive representations of the Arab uprisings.
The classic Orientalist framework rests on the assumption of a singular Arab or Muslim world’s ontological difference from and inferiority to the West. ‘Crucially, Islam—and the Middle East consequently—operates as an internal category of Western politics, producing a perception of the West as liberal, tolerant and advanced’.36 As the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were unfolding, observers showed a reluctance to call them as such, due to their unwillingness to determine ‘whether these are “real” revolutions, and whether these revolutions are the making of the West (Europe, U.S., and Israel), and a doubt in the agency of the Arab people to make their own history’.37
Critics pointed to the ubiquity of reductionist, essentializing and Orientalist mainstream representations of the 2011 events as a singular and cohesive democratization wave of ‘Arab Spring’, as the shockingly condescending New York Times overview states ‘an Arab revolution began, in a hardscrabble stretch of nowhere’38 Ventura argues that ‘despite the fact the revolts occurred in a short period of time, one after another, and that their protagonists used the same slogans (freedom and fall of the “regime”) and methods (such as the use of the Internet and smart phones), to consider them as one revolution implies embracing an abstract viewpoint that reduces and neutralizes the real differences between the various Arab countries’.39 Indeed, Anderson rejects the reductionist analysis of the various uprisings citing that ‘the patterns and demographics of the protests varied widely’.40 This inaccurate generalization persists to date, despite evidence throughout the past seven years of the great variations in the processes and outcomes of the different uprising movements. For instance, Gladstone’s article ‘Five Strongmen, and the Fate of the Arab Spring,41 ’ forces a juxtaposition between the fates of deposed, assassinated, or presiding Arab autocrats. The result is a disjointed article uncomfortably resting on the growingly unsupported ‘Arab Spring’ generalization and failing to provide any degree of connection or logical link between the accounts of the ‘five strongmen’.
Salaita examined trends in corporate American media coverage of the Arab uprisings. He defined corporate American media as overlapping with mainstream media, such as ‘network and cable news channels, major-circulation newspapers, and high-traffic websites (usually owned by conglomerates, such as Slate by Microsoft, or the websites of the television channels themselves)’.42 His analysis revealed that corporate American media coverage represented the 2011 uprisings from the point of view of American (corporate) state interests. ‘If no specific benefit to American state interests is apparent in the possible outcomes of a given uprising, corporate media simply invent an advantageous potential result and report from that standpoint’.43
Salaita’s research also revealed the existence of various Orientalist ‘tropes and narratives throughout the reportage of corporate sources’.44 For instance, he observed that even when the revolutions were reported in favourable tone, ‘there was no notable acknowledgment or retraction of the basic Orientalist formula of Arab culture and Islam being incompatible with democracy’.45 Similarly, some academic analyses explicitly placed Islam both at the centre of the uprisings and as an existential threat to their success by advancing the factually dubious and unsupported claim that ‘a core issue in the post-Arab uprising era is the question: Who is a true believer and who is a non-believer?’ This statement is further problematized by the claim that an unspecified ‘sectarian conflict between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims (…) poses a serious threat to the stability of the regional states and to stakeholders in the wider world, including the United States and its allies’.46
Similarly, the framing of the 2011 revolutions as representative of an ‘Arab awakening’ reveals the Orientalist ‘depiction of Arabs as a quiescent people who put up with dictatorship for decades and are finally waking up from their torpor’.47 This narrative ignores revolts against European colonialism in Algeria and Egypt since the nineteenth century, and revolts in Syria and Palestine against French, British and Zionist rule. Furthermore, this narrative ignores Arab revolts against local tyranny and the role of the West ‘who have stood in their way every step of the way and allied themselves with local dictators and their families (and in many cases handpicking such dictators and putting them on the throne)’.48 Instead, dominant representations of the 2011 revolutions connote that ‘the Arabs’ ‘were coming to their senses, rejecting the violence and barbarity of their culture in favor of the enlightened modernity so laboriously exported to them by Western benefactors’.49 This discourse is thus consistent with the basic tenets of classic Orientalism, as ‘the tendency to generalize and the lack of critical and historical considerations are among the most striking marks of the Orientalist attitude towards the non-western world’.50
These classic Orientalist representations result in the denial of MENA people’s agency in determining their own history. However, the significance of the 2011 revolutions in regional and world politics prevented the marginalization of the events in mainstream coverage. As a result, the Arab uprisings contravened ‘long standing Orientalist assumptions about the incompatibility of Arab culture or Islam with democracy (as democracy has been envisioned and defined by a Eurocentric conception of modernity)’.51 Thus, a liberal civilizing Orientalist narrative emerged.
The ‘liberal civilizing narrative’ highlights an essential identity between ‘Arabs’ and the West, a narrative in which human rights play a prominent role.52 This effectively departs from the Classic Orientalist view ‘of the Orient that assumed that it was ontologically—that is, in its very being or essential nature—radically different from (and usually inferior to) “our” own Western world’.53 This liberal civilizing narrative was apparent in and reinforced by the discourse of Western leaders and major EU statements.54 This paradigm establishes an ‘essential sameness’ between the West and the ‘Arab world’. As Obama posits ‘we recognized our own beliefs in the aspirations of men and women who took to the streets’,55 Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s numerous ‘Arab Spring’ speeches also adhered to the liberal civilizing narrative, by establishing the essential sameness between the protestors and ‘ordinary Americans’. In a 2011 speech, she stated that ‘Americans believe that the desire for dignity and self-determination is universal—and we do try to act on that belief around the world. Americans have fought and died for these ideals. And when freedom gains ground anywhere, Americans are inspired’.56 French President Emmanuel Macron more recently opted for a less subtle approach to highlighting this narrative; ‘you [the Tunisian people] have managed to establish civil status where many people thought it was impossible. Through this cultural and democratic revolution, you have disproved those around the world who are still saying that societies where Islam is present are not compatible with democracy’,57 seemingly ignoring Malaysia and Indonesia as other cases of Islam’s compatibility with democratic governance.58
Furthermore, Borg links this process to the embeddedness of the liberal civilizing narrative in framing the 2011 developments, painting the MENA region as a ‘liberal subject who finally has come of age and no longer is willing to tolerate encroachments of her/his essential sovereignty’.59 However, this narrative’s underlying assertion is the West’s role in instilling and promoting the Arabs’ rejection of oppression and desire for democracy and human rights, by placing the West as a driving force and provider of technological and ideological impetus and tools for the 2011 revolutions. Within this framework, even when Orientalist representations of a presumably homogenous ‘Arab world’ as dangerous, chaotic and violent are not being deployed, the MENA region continues to be portrayed as ‘stagnant, passive, and always in need for help from the outside (from the West), which mirrors the official discourse of Western governments’.60
This is apparent in the ways mainstream analyses highlight the central Western role and Western origins of the Arab uprisings, such as the way ‘Western technology enabled the protests, and the role of the ideas of US non-violent resistance theorist Gene Sharp in inspiring the Arab revolutionaries’.61 In a 2011 ‘The Nation’ article, the author determined that ‘the force of Sharp’s emancipatory thinking was on full view in Egypt last month, as a population long thought to be too passive to throw off the yoke of tyranny finally found its voice’62 Perhaps most symbolic of this dismissive drive to credit Western technology for the 2011 uprisings is the sizable body of literature labelling the uprisings as a ‘Facebook revolution’, despite critical voices denouncing such assertions as ‘half-truths’ and ‘an act of dehistoricization’.63 In his gruesomely dismissive analysis of how ‘a spat over pears in Nowhereville (could) turn into a national uprising’, Cohen was quick to proclaim a leader for the Tunisian revolution: ‘Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook’.64 Laacher and Terzi argue that ‘there is no need to go too far back in time to find, in particular in Tunisia and Egypt, forms of dissemination of ideas and information not controlled by the authorities, as well as modes of civil disobedience to colonial domination’.65
Furthermore, the advancement of the Western role in the Arab uprisings is also reflected in some academic analyses explicitly linking the impetus for the uprisings to exported conceptualizations of human rights and democracy. ‘Arab intellectuals increasingly had access to western education. While, on one hand, this led to a brain drain, on the other hand it has brought new ideas back home (…). Unquestionably, global developments and the emphasis on human rights discourse had an impact on the thirst for democracy in Arab states’.66
Thus, while the liberal civilizing narrative refutes the orientalizing tenet of ontological difference between the West and MENA, ‘it establishes Western powers as legitimate monitors of how the Arab uprisings unfold, by introducing a notion of time. This notion, in the form of allegedly successful progress on achieving democratic and human rights protecting societies, differentiates the Western world from MENA societies, and is ultimately what establishes the authority of the West’.67
The persistence and perpetuation of these two competing Orientalist discursive underpinnings is made possible by the hegemony of Western-centric paradigms of democracy and modernity, placing the West as the spatial and temporal pinnacle of modernity.68 While an examination of these notions of Western-centrism and modernity is beyond the scope of this paper, their hegemony results in, and normalizes, Orientalism(s)’s persistence as ‘a stance that could be (and was) adopted even by those who were unprejudiced or even sympathetic to Arabs, Muslims, Islam and so on, or indeed by “Orientals” or Muslims themselves’.69 Also beyond the scope of this paper are the processes through which the binary narrative depicting Tunisia’s democratization is also perpetuated by the Tunisian government which manufactures discursive representations along those lines. This is ascribed to the underlying mechanisms at play that simultaneously co-opt and incentivize the government to play into this binary framework, namely the interlinked and mutually reinforcing mechanisms of the hegemonic Western-centric notions of democratization and modernity, and the subjugation of the ‘other’ which engages in self-orientalizing in order to benefit from its perceived adherence to these hegemonic notions.
Pre-revolution Tunisia: an authoritarian police state
To understand Tunisia’s democratization process through the lens of continuity with, and change from, authoritarian institutional structures, this section will provide an overview of the state structures that contributed to the resilience of Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime. Deposed president Ben Ali’s exodus in January 2011 surprised academics and analysts as his ‘mukhabarat (intelligence-based) police state had turned back an outbreak of popular unrest as recently as 2008, and at age 74 he remained, if not youthful, at least aware and seemingly in charge’.70 Tunisia’s first post-independence president, Habib Bourguiba, relied on a police state apparatus to maintain his authoritarian rule but his successor, Ben Ali, not only continued these practices, but further reinforced them.71
The resilience of Ben Ali’s dictatorship was linked to the robustness of Tunisia’s coercive apparatus.72 Indeed, Scholarship examining Tunisia’s pre-revolution authoritarian regime suggests that ‘the raison d’être of Ben Ali’s security institutions was to protect the regime, not the population’.73 However, Ben Ali’s authoritarian resilience did not solely rely on the security apparatus, but rather extended to capture and control the state bureaucracy and its institutions. Arab authoritarian regimes ensure their continued existence through blurring the line between state institutions and ruling parties, rendering them indistinguishable.74 Accordingly, Ben Ali’s ruling party, the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique (RCD) gradually took over the state administration and became ‘a state bureaucracy regulating the whole of daily life and imposing its logic down to the smallest detail’.75 This hegemonic one-party control over the state bureaucratic apparatus ensured authoritarian durability through its embeddedness in state institutions.76
Moreover, the RCD control over state bureaucracy aimed to create an attractive environment for foreign investment and sustain the narrative of the Tunisian model, which relies on strong and effective institutions to distract the international community from human rights abuses. ‘Donors praise the coherence of Tunisian demands, the efficiency of administrative services that manage international aid and credit, the rate of absorption of external finance, the effective management of foreign currency and debt, and the ability to respond to the expectations of donors in terms of the organization and quality of the partners’.77 In order to maintain this balance between authoritarian control over public and private space, while presenting an attractive allure to foreign investment of upholding democracy and international standards, the Ben Ali regime engaged in authoritarian upgrading, a process consisting of ‘reconfiguring authoritarian governance to accommodate and manage changing political, economic, and social conditions’.78
Authoritarian upgrading was achieved by Ben Ali through reconfiguring the state institutions to practically nullify any discursive gains in freedoms and civil space. Some Arab regimes, including Tunisia, allowed the expansion of civil society in order to ‘improve their standing with Western donors and with international financial institutions at a moment of fiscal crisis’.79 However, they maintained their political control over civic space through a blend of ‘repression, regulation, cooptation and the appropriation of NGO functions by the state to contain the deepening of civil societies and to erode their capacity to challenge political authority’.80 The Tunisian regime adapted state institutions to appropriate and maintain authoritarian control over civil society space. For example, The Tunisian Human Rights League, founded in 1975, was the first human rights civil society organization in the Arab world. To counter the challenge the league posed to the authoritarian monopoly over human rights rhetoric and debates, the regime institutionally expanded its role as defender of human rights, through establishing the office of the Special Advisor to the President on Human Rights and the Supreme Authority for Human Rights.81 ‘Within less than a year, the Tunisian Human Rights League [temporarily] shut down’.82 Thus, the hegemonic institutions acted as critical regime support to manage internal divisions and co-opt potential challengers.83
Tunisia’s police state: a tool for authoritarian resilience
The state security institutions were equally harnessed to ensure authoritarian survival, leading to the birth of the police state. The Tunisian armed forces fall under the remits of the Ministry of Defense (MoD) and include the army, navy, and air force.84 The internal security forces (ISF) ‘controlled by the MoI [Ministry of Interior] include the police, the National Guard, the Judicial Police (which operates in the Ministry of Justice and the courts, but is controlled by the Ministry of Interior), the Intervention Forces (Special Weapons and Tactics [SWAT] forces), and the Presidential Guard Forces’.85
The marginalization and de-politicization of the armed forces, especially the army, in favour of the ISF, represented one of the major approaches and factors contributing to the resilience of Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime. Presidents Bourguiba, and especially Ben Ali, marginalized the Tunisian armed forces, keeping them politically and militarily weak.86 Bourguiba, who created the Tunisian army after independence in 1956, ensured that it remained small and confined to barracks. The need to neutralize and seclude the army was accentuated following a 1962 failed coup by army officers loyal to Salah Ben Youssef, Bourguiba’s political rival.87 Bourguiba adopted measures aimed at preventing another attempted coup. These included underfunding the army, placing the National Guard under the MoI instead of the MoD to avoid cooperation between the National Guard and the military, prohibiting military officers and soldiers from voting or joining political parties, and promoting officers loyal to his regime to command the armed forces.88
Amongst the first cohort of Tunisian officers providing leadership to the army was Ben Ali.89 Ben Ali climbed the political ladder rapidly to become Secretary of State for National Security in 1984, Minister of Interior in 1986, and ultimately Prime Minister shortly before staging a bloodless coup deposing Bourguiba on 7 November 1987.90 Ware erroneously observed that the irony of the removal of Bourguiba by a ‘military man whose profession Bourguiba sought to isolate from the inner circle of power since the earliest days of independence’91 would lead the military to enjoy ‘a higher degree of visibility and influence than ever before’.92 On the contrary, Ben Ali’s ascension to power through the internal security system rather than the military is evidence of the supremacy of the Tunisian internal security apparatus over the armed forces.93
Ben Ali initially elevated senior military officials to traditionally civilian posts, such as ministers of interior, foreign affairs and justice, and General Direction of National Security. He further included two military officers in the National Security Council (NSC) and mandated the council to meet weekly and tasked it with ‘collecting, studying, analyzing, and evaluating information related to domestic, foreign, and defense policies with the aim of safeguarding internal and external state security’.94 However, following an alleged military coup, the Barraket Essahel case, Ben Ali forced the officers he previously placed as ministers into retirement and prevented military personnel from accessing any civilians or security posts.95 Additionally, he exponentially increased the budget and equipment of the MoI at the expense of the MoD, with the MoI budget reaching 50% higher than that of the MoD by 2010.96 The subsequent marginalization of the army is a major contributing factor to the centrality of the MoI in Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime.97
Hibou notes that ‘the ubiquity of the Ministry of the Interior is not merely physical. It is also moral, administrative and political’.98 Indeed, Ben Ali’s Tunisia was amongst the ‘most heavily policed states in the world, and the police was clearly the most feared and reviled institution in the country’.99 The MoI was the central institution coordinating Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime, through rigorously monitoring and suppressing dissent. A glaring example of the repressive role played by the MoI unfolded during the second World Summit on the Information Society in 2005, which the United Nations chose Tunisia to host.100 This choice came despite the fact that the Tunisian intelligence apparatus under MoI control was noted for its ‘extensive filtering of web content, blocking of opposition websites, revocation of press licenses for media outlets that published politically sensitive news, and use of the Internet and social media sites to conduct surveillance of political and social activists’.101 The event was marked by a visible presence of internal security agents, the physical harassment of Tunisian activists and their prevention from attending sessions with Western counterparts, and several reports of beatings and physical intimidation of participants by security officers.102 The omnipresence of the security forces and the climate of fear and self-censorship enforced by the Tunisian police state caused the 2011 revolution to shock analysts and the international community.103
This section demonstrated the internal institutional basis for authoritarian resilience in pre-revolution Tunisia. However, in addition to authoritarian upgrading, the complacency of the international community played a role in the maintenance of Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime. Paciello notes that the EU played a key role in maintaining Ben Ali in power, despite its pro-democracy discourse. The EU preferred to maintain the status quo over political reform in Tunisia, ‘with the view to prioritising economic reform and ensuring cooperation on geostrategic issues and domestic European interests (e.g. terrorism and illegal migration)’.104 Regarding human rights abuses of the Tunisian regime during the abovementioned World Summit on the Information Society, ‘unsurprisingly, the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society website contains no reference to these events’.105 The external factors contributing to the survival of the Ben Ali regime are beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is important to note that ‘the promotion of Tunisia as a “bon élève démocratique” today poses the same problems as the defense of Tunisia as a “bon élève économique” in the past, and rests on similar neoliberal and depoliticizing assumptions’.106 Such narratives ‘also conveniently ignore the past role external powers played’ in propping up Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime.107
Tunisia’s post-authoritarian transition: continuity and change
The revolution removed Ben Ali from power and triggered a transition away from authoritarianism. However, the revolution did not produce a clean break from the institutional foundations of the authoritarian regime, thus making the transition process complex and non-linear. This section examines the patterns through which the transformation of the institutions put in place by Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime, namely the RCD, enabled them to lay the foundation for a gradual democratic transition rather than radical overhaul. Using Skocpol’s understanding of ‘social revolution’ as a clean break benchmark, this section establishes that Tunisia experienced a political revolution, rather than a social revolution, due to the lack of sufficient institutional transformations, ideological difference, and the continuity of social and economic structures. In addition, Boubekeur (2016) identifies that the Tunisian transition resembles a bargained competition type of ‘pacted transition’.108 Therefore, by understanding Tunisia’s transition through these frameworks, this article establishes the ‘continuity and change’ paradigm as the necessary lens to providing a nuanced examination of the country’s democratic transition.
Something old and something new
The salient discourses on Tunisia’s democratic transition have advanced zero-sum representations of the country as either succeeding or failing to democratize. However, Tunisia’s post-2011 transition is consistent with incremental reform within a democratization process, rather than a clean break from authoritarian institutional structures. As such, assessment of this period must account for the gradual nature of this process, characterized by both continuity with, and change from, authoritarian rule.
In the cases of the French (1789), Russian (1917) and Iranian (1979) revolutions, a clean break from the past was achieved. The removal of the ruling classes, the Ancien Régime, and the Romanov and Pahlavi dynasties, led to the transformation of state structures. As monarchies became directorial, Soviet, and Theocratic republics, the French nobility and feudal taxation, the Tsarist bureaucracy, and the one-party state absolutism systems were all abolished. Furthermore, in contrast to monarchical absolutism, new dominant ideologies of liberté égalité et fraternité, Marxist inspired Leninism and anti-American Red-Shi’ism109 were the driving forces behind dramatic changes of state and society.
Tunisia’s revolution did not produce a clean break from the past institutional or state structures. With a focus on ideals such as freedom, social justice and dignity, the Tunisian Revolution is sans idéologie as it lacked a visionary intellectual current or a concrete state restructuring programme. Despite the impressive scale of mass mobilization and resistance, the revolution did not produce new ideologies but ‘lacked a clear ideological foundation and were spontaneous uprisings against the excesses of repressive states, lack of good governance, rule of law and accountability’.110 Instead, it focused on ‘broad issues of human rights, political accountability, and legal reform’.111 In Iran, ‘revolutionaries formed the Provisional Revolutionary Council as an alternative organ of power to that of the shah’,112 while in Tunisia, the old regime, minus the old leader, was tasked with addressing the popular demands and reforming itself. Therefore, successive leaders and governments have largely continued with the same, unsuccessful, policies rather than seek any radical changes to the status-quo. Regarding new philosophies on the economy, policies for growth and recovery, and primary drivers for the revolution, the government solution remains seeking IMF loans in exchange for implementing neoliberal structural reforms. This is consistent with Ben Ali’s approach. Austerity policies resulting in protests bear a striking resemblance to 2011 when Bread, freedom, and national dignity were key revolutionary slogans. ‘Tunisians now have more freedom and some dignity. But bread is scarcer than ever’.113 Radically different ideas to reform the broken social system have not emerged. As such, it would be inaccurate to assess the Tunisian revolution using the same standards as the French, Russian, and Iranian political and socially-transformative revolutions.
Instead, it is important to frame the events after 2011 as somewhere between reform and revolution, a refo-lution; ‘a process of political, economic, and social change that combines both elements of reform or structural modifications with aspects of a revolution’.114 Tunisia does not conform to what Skocpol determines to be a ‘social revolution’ as ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures’115 have not occurred. The protests may have ‘evolved from localized socioeconomic demands into a national popular movement’,116 mirroring ‘class-based revolts from below’, what Skocpol describes as the vehicle for carrying through revolution. However, this did not lead to an absolute dismantlement of the old political system or the full collapse of existing state structures. State organizations, dominant ideologies and class structures have not been transformed. Instead, they have experienced varying degrees of incremental change and reform while a degree of continuity persists.
The Tunisian revolution came as a response to growing regime corruption and deteriorating socio-economic conditions.117 The division of the security forces and marginalization and de-politicization of the military had been Ben Ali’s deliberate policy to ensure regime survival. However, this very approach helped the military play a role in accelerating the regime’s downfall. The military’s refusal of Ben Ali’s order to fire on protestors was rooted in their lack of institutional interests that tie their fate to the survival of the regime.118 In fact, while the strategy of dividing the command structure of the armed forces may reduce the political threat they pose to the regime, it ‘makes the security forces more prone to defections in the event of mass protests’.119 The army’s defection ‘left Ben Ali with no means to quash the demonstrators forcibly, and he fled to Saudi Arabia that same day’.120
After Ben Ali’s exodus, the major institutional change has been the RCD party’s dissolution. On the surface, it appears that single-party rule was replaced with a political pluralism. However, as Tunisia did not undergo an equivalent Reign of Terror or Red Terror purging of state officials, former RCD and former regime officials have continued to be part of the politically relevant elite. Rather, they have cemented their position in the new political order by forming a ‘reactive’ Authoritarian Successor Party (ASP); Nidaa Tounes. Nidaa was created ‘in reaction to a transition to democracy, either by high-level authoritarian incumbents in anticipation of an imminent transition, or by former high-level incumbents shortly after a transition’.121 This demonstrates continuity with the old system as old players are involved in the new democratic game of governance.
Loxton identifies that the existence of Nidaa is consistent with a transition pattern in which ‘ASPs are present in all major world regions’122 and not only post-communist states. Neither is the role of ASPs inherently detrimental to democratic transitions. Wright and Escriba-Folch associate authoritarian parties’ involvement in the distribution of power following regime change with a higher likelihood of democratization.123 Due to their interest in ‘preserving some modicum of power for themselves in a new democracy’, authoritarian parties are more likely to seek to influence power distribution during the interim period following regime change.124 Loxton also credits Nidaa for supporting Tunisia’s democratic transition by integrating potential former-regime spoilers, thus helping further incremental change to occur. ‘By sweeping the legislative and presidential elections of 2014, the party made democracy “safe” for figures who might otherwise have felt tempted to subvert the new regime’.125
This was manifest in Tunisia in the wake of Ben Ali’s departure, when RCD elites maintained the country’s stability through a swift Constitutional hand over of power. On 14 January, Fouad Mbazaa, Speaker of Parliament and RCD member, assumed the role of interim president and created an interim government, headed by former Prime Minister and RCD member Mohamed Ghannouchi, to steer the country through the early phases of political transition.126 Although this government quickly lost legitimacy due its members’ ties to RCD,127 it provided the necessary stability in the immediate wake of the revolution for the state institutions to function effectively. As one observer noted, ‘where in the world would you find a people who made a revolution on Friday and went back to work on Monday?’.128 Indeed, ‘there was a sense that nothing and everything had changed at the same time. The key to this transition was a thoroughly institutionalised state’.129
The top-down, leaderless transfer of power laid the foundation for a largely peaceful democratic transition and prevented state collapse. However, this democratic and constitutional transfer of power allowed RCD elites to maintain their position of privilege in a democratic transition. The post-revolution political transformations revealed the successive governments’ willingness to comply with popular demands and conform to the Constitution in peacefully steering the country through the first phases of a democratic transition. However, the political and institutional transformations leading to the October 2011 elections of a National Constituent Assembly (NCA) demonstrate both the authoritarian ‘continuity and change’ characteristic of democratic transition.130 It is ‘problematic to look at the uprisings solely relying on “change” as the dominant perspective because we can always detect a certain amount of continuity in the political, social and economic relations of societies having witnessed massive upheavals’.131 This is evident in Tunisia’s transition, which has been marked by a constant struggle to maintain a balance between breaking from old guard institutions and the ‘undoubted resistance of RCD elites to whole-scale change’.132
Events prior to the October 2011 NCA elections were emblematic of the continuity and change paradigm within which the transition was unfolding. In March 2011, the official dismantlement of key authoritarian institutions, namely the RCD, the State Security Division and the political police, and the legalization of the Islamist Ennahdha party133 represented a move away from the parameters of the ancien régime. Similarly, the appointment of Beji Caid Essebsi as Prime Minister of the third interim government was aimed at accentuating the political will for change, as Essebsi had distanced himself from the Ben Ali regime in 1994.134 However, Essebsi served as Minister of Interior, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Defense under Bouguiba, and as President of the Chamber of Deputies under Ben Ali between 1989 and 1991.135 Analysts and protesters cast doubt on the effectiveness of Essebsi’s appointment in breaking with the old regime, given his symbolization of the old guard.136
The establishment of the Nidaa Tunis party by Essebsi in April 2012 was consistent with the continuity and change theme of Tunisia’s transition. Within the absence of consensus over the transitional justice priorities and the measures to be taken against former RCD officials, the interim government attempted to satisfy public demands for justice through the arrest of RCD members and the confiscation of the property of individuals linked to Ben Ali.137 However, these measures were by no means systematic, and debate ensued about the right of former RCD members to participate in political life. Ennahdha, holding 89 of the 217 seats in the NCA, spearheaded an effort to submit a bill drafted by five parties, including coalition members Ennahdha and Congrès pour la République (CPR),138 excluding all former RCD advocates from participating in political activities.139 However, these ‘attempts by Ennahda, CPR, and Wafa deputies to pass an immunization law under which former RCD members would be excluded from the political arena were met by resistance from the 87-year old member of the deposed government Beji Caid Essebsi who qualified the proposed measure as undemocratic’.140 Before the end of Essebsi’s tenure as interim president in December 2011, ‘dozens of permits were issued to former RCD members to establish political parties’.141 The establishment of Nidaa Tunis was welcomed by ‘senior figures from the dissolved RCD, to which the Nida Tounes party officially opened its arms’.142 Nidaa Tunis won 85 of the 217 seats in Parliament during the 2014 elections,143 while Essebsi won the presidency the same year, reviving the debate around the role former RCD supporters will play in the new democracy. Despite increased pluralism in the post-revolution political process, the political sphere contains both new and old players.
Additionally, Tunisia’s security apparatus is still currently accused of being permeated by the old oligarchy, ‘occupying key positions in the administration, the Interior Ministry, the media, the judiciary and so on’.144 Tunisia’s democratic reform has been underpinned by the question of ‘whether or not, and to what extent, it will be able and willing to dismantle the previous power structure’.145 This section illustrated the patterns of continuity with, and change from, authoritarian institutional bases in post-revolution Tunisia. This reveals, and stands in contrast with, the rigidness of the two dominant analytical paradigms to studying transition, namely democratization and authoritarian resilience, and their failure to ‘grasp and explain the complexities on the ground’.146
Conclusion
This paper presented the problematic binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s post-revolution transition relying on a ‘change’ paradigm to assess the country’s democratization process in mutually exclusive ‘success’ or ‘failure’ terms. These binary assessments carry the implicit assumption of a liberal, free market, Western democracy endpoint. The failure of democratization theory to predict the Arab uprisings and to account for the nuances and complexities of transition on the ground is rooted in its continuous reliance on Western-centric hegemonic notions of democracy and modernity which overlook processes and dynamics not directly linked to regime change. This narrative and its resulting reductive assessments of Tunisia’s democratization have concrete implications on the country’s transition. Indeed, the ‘failure’ narrative ‘called into question the revolutionary movement, its aspirations, dreams, courage, and most importantly, the fundamental achievements of Tunisians… More profoundly, such doubts might explain the tacit acceptance by some of the return of former Ben Ali regime elements into politics, the economy and public life’.147 By contrast, the ‘success’ narrative promotes condescending tropes of Tunisia’s exceptionalism by the region’s standards and uses the country’s ability to avoid descending into civil war or chaos as a measure for democratic success. This paper further argued that this binary narrative is entrenched in and framed by two competing Orientalisms: a classic Orientalism shaping the ‘failure’ narrative by relying on perceived ontological inferiority of the ‘Arab world’ and its incompatibility with democracy, and a liberal civilizing Orientalism acknowledging an ‘essential sameness’ between the West and the ‘Arab world’ while placing the West as the temporal pinnacle of democracy and modernity. This paper ascribes the Tunisian pre and post revolution governments’ manufacturing of self-orientalizing narratives of economic and democratic success to the hegemony of Western-centric paradigms of modernity and democracy. These hegemonic notions co-opt the subjects of orientalism while incentivizing them to extract political and economic rent from their co-optation.
This paper rejected the ‘change’ framework characteristic of the binary success and failure narrative and instead advocated for the adoption of a ‘continuity and change’ paradigm to understanding the country’s political and institutional transition. In order to establish a nuanced narrative of the country’s democratization, this paper examined the processes through which the authoritarian one-party state structures contributed to the resilience of the authoritarian regime, its downfall, and ultimately to the establishment of Tunisia’s peaceful democratic transition. Through a juxtaposition with the parameters of a ‘clean break’ as advanced by Skocpol’s theory of social revolution, this paper demonstrated the processes of continuity with and change from authoritarian institutional structures which have characterized Tunisia’s democratic transition.
Disclosure statement
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Notes
1 Paola Rivetti. ‘Continuity and Change before and after the Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco: Regime Reconfiguration and Policymaking in North Africa’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 1 (2015): 1-11.
2 Jamie Allinson. ‘Class forces, transition and the Arab uprisings: a comparison of Tunisia, Egypt and Syria’ Democratization 22, no. 2 (2015): 294-314 at 296.
3 Sarah Yerkes ‘Democracy derailed?’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2, 2017, http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/10/02/democracy-derailed-pub-73285 (accessed
January 13, 2018).
4 Fadil Aliriza and Ouiem Chettaoui. ‘Tunisia’s parliament just cast a vote against democracy’ Washington Post, September 19, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/09/19/tunisias-parliament-just-cast-a-vote-against-democracy/?utm_term=.2e580c66117d (accessed January 14, 2018).
5 Rivetti, ‘Continuity and Change’, 1.
6 Amna Guellali. ‘The law that could be the final blow to Tunisia’s transition’ Middle East Eye, May 23, 2017, http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/reconciliation-bill-threatens-tunisia-s-transition-1123332030 (accessed January 20, 2018).
7 Jake Walles. ‘Half Full, or Half Empty?’ Diwan, January 22, 2018, http://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/75309 (accessed April 24, 2018).
8 Ibid.
9 Issandr El Amrani. ‘Tunisia’s Unfinished Economic Reforms Put Its Democratic Evolution in Danger’ Syndication Bureau, January 30, 2018, https://syndicationbureau.com/en/tunisias-unfinished-economic-reforms-put-its-democratic-evolution-in-danger/ (accessed April 25, 2018).
10 Fadil Aliriza. ‘Return to authoritarianism: An initial autopsy of Tunisia’s ‘democratic transition’ Middle East Eye, September 20, 2017, http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/return-authoritarianism-initial-autopsy-tunisias-democratic-transition-1600154905 (accessed January 27, 2018) .
11 Raphaël Lefèvre, ‘Tunisia: a fragile political transition’, The Journal of North African Studies 20, no. 2 (2015): 307-11, at 307.
12 The Guardian, ‘The Guardian view on Tunisia’s transition: a success story’, December 26, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/26/guardian-view-tunisia-transition-success-story (accessed March 15, 2018).
13 Corinna Mullin and Brahim Rouabah. ‘Requiem for Tunisia’s Revolution?’ Jadaliyya, December 22, 2014, http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/31596/Requiem-for-Tunisia%E2%80%99s-Revolution (accessed February 5, 2018).
14 Safwan S. Masri, Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly (Columbia University Press, 2017), XXV.
15 Shelly Culbertson. ‘Tunisia Is an Arab Spring Success Story’, Observer, April 20, 2016, http://observer.com/2016/04/tunisia-is-an-arab-spring-success-story/ (accessed April 20, 2018).
16 Ibid.
17 On naming Arab revolutions and oppositional media narratives’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 00, no. 0 (2018): 1-15, 5.
18 Nadia Marzouki and Hamza Meddeb. ‘Tunisia: Democratic Miracle or Mirage?’ Jadaliyya, June 11, 2015 http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32181/Tunisia-Democratic-Miracle-or-Mirage (accessed January 28, 2018) .
19 See Laryssa Chomiak. ‘Five years after the Tunisian revolution, political frustration doesn’t diminish progress’ Washington Post, January 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/14/five-years-after-the-tunisian-revolution/?utm_term=.f56392d09f4c (accessed January 28, 2018) and Mullin and Rouabah. ‘Requiem for Tunisia’s Revolution?’.
20 Asef Bayat. ‘The Arab Spring and its surprises’ Development and Change 44, no. 3 (2013): 587-601. Michelle Dunne. ‘Caught in History’s Crosswinds’ Journal of Democracy 26, no. 4 (2015): 75-9.
Fredric Volpi. ‘Explaining (and re-explaining) political change in the Middle East during the Arab Spring’ Democratization 20, no.6 (2013): 969-90.
21 See note 5 above.
22 Ben Labidi, On naming Arab revolutions, 3.
23 Ibid.
24 Chomiak, Five years after.
25 Ibid.
26 See Raymond Hinnebusch. ‘Authoritarian persistence, democratization theory and the Middle East: An overview and critique’, Democratization 13, no. 3 (2006): 373-395; Lisa Anderson. ‘Searching Where the Light Shines’, Annual Review of Political Science. 9 (2006): 189–214; Michelle Pace. ‘Paradoxes and contradictions in EU democracy promotion in the Mediterranean’. Democratization 16, no. 1. (2009): 39–58; Breig Powel. ‘A clash of norms: normative power and EU democracy promotion in Tunisia’. Democratization 16, no. 1(2009): 93–214; and Migda Shihade and Magid Shihade. ‘On the Difficulty in Predicting and Understanding the Arab Spring’ International Journal of Peace Studies 17, no. 2 (2012): 57-70.
27 Rivetti, ‘continuity and change’, 3.
28 Hinnebusch, Authoritarian persistence, 374.
29 Anderson, Searching, 191.
30 Marc M. Howard and Meir R. Walters. ‘Explaining the Unexpected: Political Science and the Surprises of 1989 and 2011‘ Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 2 (2014): 394–408. at 394.
31 Ibid.
32 Stefan. Borg, ‘The Arab Uprisings, the Liberal Civilizing Narrative and the Problem of Orientalism’, Middle East Critique 25, no. 3 (2016): 211-227. at 212.
33 Ibid.
34 Shihade and Shihade, On the Difficulty, 59.
35 Ibid., 57.
36 Billie Jeanne Brownlee and Maziyar Ghiabi. ‘Passive, silent and revolutionary: the “Arab Spring” revisited’, Middle East Critique 25, no. 3 (2016): 299-316 at 309.
37 Shihade and Shihade, On the Difficulty, 59.
38 Roger Cohen. ‘Facebook and Arab dignity’. The New York Times, January 24, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25iht-edcohen25.html (accessed July 20, 2018).
39 Lorella Ventura. ‘The “Arab Spring” and Orientalist Stereotypes: The Role of Orientalism in the Narration of the Revolts in the Arab World’, Interventions 19, no. 2, (2017): 282-97 and 285.
40 Lisa Anderson. ‘Demystifying the Arab Spring’ Foreign Affairs, May/June 2011. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2011-04-03/demystifying-arab-spring (accessed February 5, 2018) .
41 Rick Gladstone. ‘Five strongmen, and the fate of the Arab Spring’, The New York Times, December 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/world/middleeast/ali-abdullah-saleh-strongmen.html (accessed July 20, 2018).
42 Steven Salaita. ‘Corporate American media coverage of Arab revolutions’ Interface 4, no. 1 (2012). 131-45 at 132.
43 Ibid, 133.
44 Ibid., 131.
45 Ibid., 134.
46 Geneive Abdo. The New Sectarianism (Oxford University Press. 2017), I.
47 Massad, Joseph. ‘Arab Revolts—Past and Present’ Al-Jazeera English, November 18, 2011. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011111810259215940.html (accessed July 20, 2018).
48 Ibid.
49 Salaita, Corporate American media, 136.
50 Ventura, The Arab Spring, 284.
51 Ibid.
52 Borg, The Arab Uprisings, 213.
53 Lockman, Zackary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 187.
54 Borg, The Arab Uprisings.
55 White House, Office of the Press Secretary (2016) Address by President Obama to the 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/20/address-president-obama-71st-session-united-nations-general-assembly.
56 Hillary Clinton, Keynote Address at the National Democratic Institute’s 2011 Democracy Awards
Dinner, 7 November 2011.
57 http://www.africanews.com/2018/02/01/macron-lauds-arab-spring-s-contribution-to-tunisia-s-democracy/ .
58 Hamid, Shadi. ‘What’s different about Islam in Malaysia and Indonesia’. Brookings, July 7, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/07/07/whats-different-about-islam-in-malaysia-and-indonesia/ (accessed April 17, 2018).
59 Borg, ‘The Arab Uprisings’, 213.
60 Shihade and Shihade, ‘On the Difficulty’, 60.
61 Borg, The Arab Uprisings’, 215.
62 Sasha Abramsky. ‘Gene Sharp, nonviolent warrior’ The Nation,March 16, 2011, https://www.thenation.com/article/gene-sharp-nonviolent-warrior/ (accessed July 21, 2018).
63 Smaïn Laacher and Cédric Terzi. ‘Facebook n’a pas fait la révolution’ Révolutions dans le monde arabe. Mediapart, March 16, 2011, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/revolutions-dans-le-monde-arabe/article/160311/facebook-na-pas-fait-la-revolution (accessed June 16, 2018) .
64 Cohen. ‘Facebook and dignity’.
65 Ibid.
66 Priya Singh and Kingshuk Chatterjee, Interpreting the Arab Spring. New Dehli, KW Publishers Pvt Ltd, 2013.
67 Ibid., 213.
68 Shihade and Shihade ‘On the Difficulty’; and Borg, ‘The Arab Uprisings’.
69 Lockman, Contending Visions, 187.
70 Peter J. Schraeder and Hamadi Redissi. ‘Ben Ali’s fall’ Journal of Democracy 22, no. 3 (2011): 5-19 at 5.
71 Derek Lutterbeck. ‘Tool of rule: the Tunisian police under Ben Ali’ Journal of North African Studies 20, no. 5 (2015): 813-831 at 815.
72 Steve Hess. ‘From the Arab Spring to the Chinese Winter’ International Political Science Review 34, no. 3 (2013): 254-272 at 261.
73 Querine Hanlon, ‘The prospects for security sector reform in Tunisia’ Strategic Studies Institute. 2012 www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub1118.pdf (accessed August 6, 2016), vii.
74 Steven Heydmann. ‘Upgrading authoritarianism in the Arab world’ The Brookings Institution, October 13, 2007, 11.
75 Béatrice Hibou,The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 110.
76 Hess, ‘Arab Spring’, 263.
77 Hibou, The Force of Obedience, 110.
78 Heydmann, ‘Upgrading authoritarianism’, 1.
79 Ibid.,5-6.
80 Ibid.,6.
81 Ibid.,9.
82 Ibid.
83 See note 76 above.
84 Hanlon, ‘prospects for security’, 9.
85 Ibid.,12.
86 Sharan Grewal. ‘A quiet revolution: The Tunisian military after Ben Ali’ Carnegie Middle East Center, February 24, 2016 http://carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/24/quiet-revolution-tunisian-military-after-ben-ali-pub-62780 (accessed June 27, 2016).
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.
89 L.B. Ware ‘Ben Ali’s Constitutional coup in Tunisia’. Middle East Journal 42, no. 4 (1988): 587-601 at 593.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.,587-8.
92 Ibid.
93 Lutterbeck, Tool of rule, 816.
94 Grewal, quiet revolution, 3.
95 Ibid.
96 Lutterbeck, Tool of rule, 815.
97 Ibid.,815.
98 Hibou, Force of Obedience, 82.
99 Lutterbeck, Tool of rule, 813.
100 Heydmann, ‘Upgrading authoritarianism’, 21.
101 Hess, ‘Arab Spring’ 261.
102 Heydmann, ‘Upgrading authoritarianism’, 22.
103 Jack Goldstone, ‘Understanding the Revolutions of 2011‘. Foreign Affairs. May/June 2011. 11.
104 Maria Cristina Paciello. ‘Tunisia: Changes and Challenges of Political Transition.” MEDPRO Technical Papers, 3, 2011, http://www.medpro-foresight.eu/publication/tunisia-changes-and-challenges-political-transition 4.
105 Heydmann, ‘Upgrading authoritarianism’, 22.
106 Marzouki and Meddeb, ‘Democratic Miracle or Mirage?’
107 Mullin and Rouabah, ‘Requiem for Tunisia’.
108 ‘Pacted transitions are those in which political elites from the authoritarian regime and the democratic opposition engage in multilateral negotiation and compromise and agree to a transition’ (Bonnie N Field. ‘Continuity and Collaboration? Pacting and the Consolidation of Democracy: The Spanish and Argentine Democracies Compared.’ 2001 Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, 5). In Tunisia’s case, the pacts were not initiated by the authoritarian regime and party, but were made after Ben Ali had departed and the RCD dissolved. Therefore, Boubekeur’s analysis demonstrates that the post-revolution ‘pacts’ between ‘the Islamists of Ennahdha party and the networks of so-called secularists and old regime elites—in particular, Nidaa Tounes’ (2016:107) show that Tunisia is undergoing a ‘bargained competition’ process.
109 Ali Shariati, ‘Red Shi’ism vs. Black Shi’ism’. http://www.iranchamber.com/personalities/ashariati/works/red_black_shiism.php (accessed November 18, 2016).
110 Mohamed Daadaoui, “Of Monarchs and Islamists’, Middle East Critique 26, no. 4, (2017): 355-371 at 355.
111 Asef Bayat. Revolution without revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press, 2017). 2.
112 Ibid.,3.
113 The Economist ‘Tunisia needs help if it is to remain a model for the Arab world’, January 18, 2018 https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/01/18/tunisia-needs-help-if-it-is-to-remain-a-model-for-the-arab-world (accessed July 15, 2018).
114 Dale Herspring. ‘Refolution’ in eastern Europe’ European Security 3, no. 4 (1994): 664-690 at 664.
115 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 4.
116 Nouri Gana, The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 128.
117 Paciello, ‘Changes and Challenges’, 5.
118 Grewal, quiet revolution, 2.
119 Goldstone, Understanding the Revolutions, 10-1.
120 Hanlon, prospects for security, 3.
121 James Loxton. ‘Authoritarian successor parties’, Journal of Democracy 26, no. 3 (2015): 157-70 at 159.
122 James Loxton. ‘Peru rejected Keiko Fujimori, but most new democracies vote authoritarian parties back into office.’ Washington Post, June 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/16/most-new-democracies-vote-parties-linked-to-dictatorship-back-in-office-heres-why/?utm_term=.d1bbff37b3df (accessed July 28, 2018).
123 Joseph Wright and Abel Escriba-Folch, ‘Authoritarian institutions and regime survival: Transitions to democracy and subsequent autocracy’ British Journal of Political Science, 42, (2012): 283-309 at 283.
124 Ibid.,284.
125 Loxton, ‘Authoritarian successor parties’, 167.
126 Paciello, ‘Changes and Challenges’, 9.
127 Ibid.,10.
128 Mohamed Salah Omri, ‘Enshrining idealism: Tunisia’s long romance’. Al Jazeera, January 11, 2013.http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/20131810229636675.html (accessed December 28, 2015).
129 Ibid.
130 Rivetti, ‘continuity and change’.
131 Ibid., 1.
132 Emma C Murphy, ‘The Tunisian elections of October 2011: A democratic consensus’, The Journal of North African Studies 18, no. 2 (2013), 231-47 at 233.
133 Ibid., 234.
134 Paciello, ‘Changes and Challenges’, 11.
135 Flora Genoux ‘Tunisie: Les jeunes ne se reconnaissent pas dans Béji Caïd Essebsi’ le Monde, February 28, 2011 http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2011/02/28/tunisie-la-pression-de-la-rue-ne-devrait-pas-diminuer_1486127_3212.html#tjaizTtG0rG1tOh7.99 (accessed January 15 2018).
136 Ibid.
137 Schraeder and Redissi, ‘Ben Ali’s fall’, 17.
138 Human Rights Watch ‘Tunisia: sweeping political exclusion law proposal violates fundamental rights’, June 15, 2013, https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/15/tunisia-sweeping-political-exclusion-law (accessed July 20, 2018).
139 Synda Tajine ‘Tunisia’s most intimidating statesman creates new party’, Al Monitor, June 21, 2012 http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2012/06/beji-caid-essebsi-why-is-he-so-s.html (accessed January 15, 2018.
140 Vanessa Szakal, ‘Circumventing Political Exclusion—RCD after the Revolution and in the Coming Elections’, Nawaat, September 14, 2014, https://nawaat.org/portail/2014/09/14/circumventing-political-exclusion-rcd-after-the-revolution-and-in-the-coming-elections (accessed February 20, 2018).
141 Ibid.
142 Synda Tajine, ‘Tunisia’s most intimidating statesman’.
143 The Guardian, ‘View on Tunisia’s transition’.
144 Paciello, ‘Changes and Challenges’, 12.
145 Ibid.
146 Rivetti, ‘continuity and change’, 2.
147 See note 24 above.