Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia

Abstract This book offers a novel and interdisciplinary exploration of revolution as “situated protest” in Tunisia. It posits a “double articulation” of revolution and peoplehood that feed into each other in a twin ferment. Thus, the book re-narrates Tunisia’s postcolonial politics through the prism of key historical protests. Beginning with the “crucible” of Tunisian constitutionalism (1861) and anti-monarchical revolt (Ali Ben Ghedhahem, 1864–5), it re-conceptualizes the dynamics of change and the resulting key shifts in relations between rulers and ruled. It delves into revolution through a longue durée prism, highlighting spatialities and temporalities of insurgency, reading protest as relational, intersubjective, partial, and demotic. Tunisia’s revolution did not begin in 2010, nor did its rebellious peoplehood. Both, the book argues, were over a century and a half in the making. The book focusses on politics and histories from below, in encounters between bottom-up activism/movement (hirak) and revolution (thawrah). It catalogues the onset of protests in the 1960s with the rejection of collectivization-like cooperatives, through the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolution, and since. Its interpretivist epistemology of synchronic “protestscapes” draws on local knowledge and a rich archive of indigenous discourses, written and spoken. One aim is to re-ontologize protest lives and subjectivities. The book uncovers “traces” of morally-imbued agentic, affective, and cognitive practices and imaginaries of socially acted and en-acted peoplehood across the diachrony of Tunisia’s revolutionary milieu. The protestscapes vividly depict an active citizenry and the becoming of a demos. Their collective memories and imaginaries are stamped by trials of anti-colonial and anti-dictatorial rebellion.