Event Announcement! Decolonizing Tunisia’s Decolonization: The Armed Liberation Struggle and Post-Colonial Planning, A Discussion with Max Ajl (7 November, George Mason University)

WEDNESDAY, 7 NOV 12:00PM 
JOHNSON CENTER, ROOM G (2ND FLOOR) 
GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY  

During the mid-1950s, an almost unknown and erased-from-history armed anti-colonial revolt – the Fellaga/Youssefite rebellion – rippled across the Tunisian countryside, sweeping across the width and depth of the country, even penetrating urban cores. My dissertation, Farmers, Fellaga, and Frenchmen: National Liberation and Post-Colonial Development in Tunisia, recovers the historical memory of that revolt, writing the armed struggle and its repression into the history of the Tunisian national liberation struggle and its effects on subsequent state-building efforts. In so doing I locate the place of the rural smallholder and newly landless, who although central to national liberation would be marginal to post-colonial development. This story cuts against the grain of dominant post-colonial historiography, which depicts a unitary and largely non-violent Western-oriented national struggle as the agent of independence. Such a narrative is the cement which the party has used to justify both its rule, post-colonial developmentalism, and subsequent social inclusions and exclusions. My dissertation shows how moments of collective violence, fueled by regional pan-Arab solidarities and material, propelled the political party which led the liberation movement, the Neo-Destour, to victory and secured the country’s sovereignty from France. Simultaneously, the repression of that struggle led to the exclusion of the marginalized countryside from subsequent state-formation and economic development plans. 

Sponsored by: Middle East and Islamic Studies, Center for Global Islamic Studies, and Arab Studies Institute

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Max Ajl is a doctoral student in development sociology at Cornell University, completing a dissertation on the Tunisian national liberation struggle and post-colonial underdevelopment. His research focuses on food, agrarian, and ecological issues in the broader Arab region, as well as the intellectual history of development alternatives. Max’s articles on intellectual history have been published in the Review of African Political Economy and the Journal of Peasant Studies, and his articles on Syrian and Yemeni long-term rural underdevelopment are forthcoming in several edited collections. He is a member of the Political Economy Project and a co-editor of the Palestine and Political Economy pages at Jadaliyya, and is a member of Thimar, a collective focusing on agriculture in the Arab region. He is also an associated researcher with the Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment, in Tunisia.