Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh, Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia: A Century of Protestscapes (New Text Out Now)

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh, Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia: A Century of Protestscapes (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh (LS & LS): In late 2010 and early 2011 Tunisia was catapulted to the forefront of regional and international attention. The people of this small North African country had started a revolution, not only quickly bringing down a ruthless dictator but also setting off a trend in the neighborhood that was dubbed, for better or worse, the “Arab Spring.” Years after the revolutionary flame had died down, we felt dissatisfied with reigning explorations of this exhilarating phenomena. The puzzle of revolution deserved more investigation, in our view. Unbeknownst so some outside observers, protest was not actually a new occurrence in Tunisia. Those familiar with the anticolonial struggle, and even the precolonial scene of “politics from below,” know that Tunisia’s modern history has been interspersed by bursts of popular protest that were then curtailed by the authorities, from the Bey under the Ottomans to the first President Habib Bourguiba. How, then, did the people make the revolution in 2011—and how did revolution relate to the quest for freedom and dignity, for democracy? This was the key question we set out to answer in our book. In a country (and a region) where so much in politics is made below or outside the state and its institutions, it was clear that Tunisia’s democratic highs and lows were inextricably linked to the drivers and processes of revolution itself.

As we framed both our question and the argument, three angles jumped out at us from the offset, demanding both theoretical attention and extensive empirical evidence. First was popular agency. It is worth repeating even fourteen years later that too often, Arab peoples have been relegated to the land of quietism by Orientalist assumptions, generalizations, and labels. The revolution of 2011 helped to shatter that myth, and we sought in our book to consistently highlight the centrality of the people in creating radical political change—or coming up short in attempts to do so. Second was the importance of history, on which we will elaborate below. Third was the imperative to delve into indigenous sources in Arabic and to a lesser extent in French. The paucity of engagement with local knowledge remains a weak spot in much scholarship on the region, including our topic of Tunisia’s revolution.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

LS & LS: As indicated above, the book addresses the topic of revolution in Tunisia, as well as the implications of protest and revolution for democratic change in the country. To explore these twin topics, we critically converse with the social science scholarship on revolutions. We dub this body of work “metropolitan revolution,” because it is derived so heavily from Euro-American experiences or those of “great revolutions” in Russia and China. That is, we remained unconvinced that extant theories were fully suitable to explaining the anticolonial and postcolonial specificities of the Arab region broadly and Tunisia in particular. Hence while paying tribute to some fine concepts from the works of Tilly, Moore, Skocpol, and others, we take an interdisciplinary and historical approach. Even poststructuralist concepts such as “synchrony” and “diachrony” make their way into our conceptual repertoire, as we examine revolution-in-the-making over the longue durée of one hundred and fifty years (diachrony) and also at particular “moments” (synchrony) that we call protestscapes. More substantively, then, in the book we unpack the trajectory of Tunisia’s revolution from Ali Ben Ghedhahem’s popular uprising in the 1860s through the anticolonial struggles of the 1930s-1950s, dwelling most closely on protest and dissidence of the late 1960s through the 1980s during the rule of Habib Bourguiba (students and unionists), into the years of Ben Ali (the phosphate uprising) and the explosion of 2011. Two chapters also contend with post-2011 protests in the Kamour movement (oil protests) and by football ultras.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

LS & LS: Both of us have studied questions of popular protest and democratization in our previous work. Larbi Sadiki has been researching Arab democracy and democratization for over two decades, and protest has featured in this work even before the 2011 revolutions made “politics from below” an inevitable topic of investigation. To an extent, this book is a culmination of the twin interest in protest politics and democratic struggles marked by the 2000 IJMES article, “Popular Uprisings and Arab Democratization.” Layla Saleh has also worked on protest and revolution, as well as their implications for democratization, in her work on Syria. For the two of us, this book was an opportunity to conduct a very thorough case study of the revolution that started it all in the region. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

LS & LS: We hope and expect that this book will be of interests to all students of Arab politics, revolution, and democratic change. It is our take on the “how” of writing revolution: an epistemology of studying revolution in a cutting-edge way. In addition to the very rich, wide-ranging empirical nuggets our text offers, we hope that the “protestscape” concept will stand out to scholars who can then build on it in their work that may span other cases. The main idea is that examining revolution across a century or more of history lends itself to analytical compartmentalization into different protestscapes (e.g. students, unionists, football fans, or perhaps even music or literature) that are accruing building blocs of popular struggle for emancipation, and crucially, the memories, identity-making, and learning that such protest scenes engender. We also hope that the book encourages others to make use of written local sources. Taking indigenous knowledge seriously means engaging with Arabic (or sometimes French, in North Africa) academic works to political autobiographies to newspapers and other written primary material that is sometimes sidelined by political scientists who may tend to be content with original interview data. Even with all the caveats of the censorship that characterizes dictatorship, what better corpus can exist to teach us about the society and politics and history of any locale than its own sources? This may seem like an obvious point for those of us with postcolonial leanings, but it is worth stressing. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

LS & LS: We are in the early stages of planning and putting together handbooks on political protest (Larbi Sadiki, OUP) and women in MENA politics (Layla Saleh, Routledge). These projects will keep us busy for the next year or two. We also edit the Brill journal Protest, which publishes research articles, special essays, short eyewitness pieces, interviews, and reviews. Volume 5, Issue 1 will be out in spring 2025. 

J: For years many have considered the “Arab Spring” to be dead, a death perhaps confirmed by the 2021 self-coup in Tunisia. How do you view the prospects for democracy in the Arab region?

LS & LS: It is true that de-democratization has unfortunately taken hold across the region. Other cases (e.g. Libya, Sudan, Yemen) are beleaguered by war, while authoritarianism quickly returned with a vengeance in Egypt. Even in the place where the promise of democracy burned brightest—Tunisia—the dismantling of democratic institutions, by an elected president no less, took only a decade. In fact, we were engrossed in writing our book on 25 July 2021, when the President dramatically launched Tunisia’s own de-democratization. The sobering event challenged us to think deeply about the interplay between revolution and democracy. Our own hunch had been that popular disaffection not only with the economic downturn but also the ineptitude and power obsessions of political elites were detrimental to democratization in the country. Unfortunately, 25 July exemplified this backlash against democratization in the birthplace of Arab revolution. We reflect on this paradox a bit in the book’s conclusion. We suggest that revolution is not fixed in either its end-point or in the shape of political change that it brings about. Hence revolution, even a popular revolution, may not necessarily bring about sustainable democratization. Here again the issue of popular agency, that of protestors in the street but also political elites haggling over ministries and parliamentary seats, comes into play. At the same time, just as democratization may not be a foregone conclusion in cases of revolution, its setbacks are not necessarily a permanent death sentence either. Re-democratization does not seem to lie ahead in Tunisia’s immediate future, but neither is it a buried aspiration for (some) of its people. As always in the politics of the region, we should not become too comfortable with the status quo. Change which is in the nature of the political everywhere comes especially quickly and turbulently in the Middle East. January 2011, July 2021, October 2023, and now December 2024 in Syria are all good examples of political surprises with far-reaching consequences. Recent events in Syria also confirm that the revolutions began in 2011 morph and change along the way, never uniformly across cases. The multi-sided armed conflict that started as peaceful protests in Syria was not so dormant after all. What lies ahead in Syria is unclear, but clearly Assad’s demise is a significant rupture in the country’s politics. 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 9, Conclusion: Taming the Revolution?, pages 356 to 359)

Conclusion

Taming the Revolution?

Ali Belhouaneʼs Tunisia in Revolt locates revolution in precolonial and colonial histories of lives, sacrifices, emotions, and thought. Collectively, they challenge the prevailing orders and logics of domination. By ontologizing struggles for a free Tunisia, Belhouane adds to the toolkit of social scientists. He deftly switches spatial, temporal, and intellectual registers as if writing his own protestscapes. He moves between canonical events, actors, emotions, imaginaries, and speech acts. His words depict the will to strike back at the colons, despite a wave of repression in the 1940s.

Protestors had marched in the famed April 1938 demonstration to reject the colonizersʼ shrinking of local sovereignty and to call for the creation of a Tunisian parliament. A strike took place that crippled all activity in the Beylicate. It was in response to “a call by the [Neo-Destour] politburo”. More than one million Tunisians took part. “This is a huge number in a country of no more than three million people”. Belhouane captures the sensory experiences of revolution in the courage to face bullets. “As the striking workers in the Sfax train station maintained their picket line, armed forces attacked them in the early morning, without prior warning. They unleashed upon them a barrage of bullets; the workers rushed from everywhere to the battlefield and they waged battle shorn of their weapons, storming the tanks, and capturing from them the machine guns.” Noting their steadfastness, he adds, “Th[e workers] did not retreat until soldiers outnumbered them from all sides. Thirty-three died as martyrs, and one hundred fifty were injured”. Nothing describes the agony of exile, like the colonizer banishing the colonized overseas. Belhouane personally experienced along with Bourguiba the ignominy of revolutionistsʼ imprisonment for six months in the dark and humid dungeons of Marseilleʼs Saint-Nicolas Fort in May 1940. He was in awe of the epic struggle of the people despite the ferocity of colonial violence. Habib Thamerʼs role in bolstering defiance, with the fellagaʼs armed resistance, reflected the resolve of a people “thirsty for freedom”, steadfast in its “self-presence” and “ethos of sacrifice”.

Tunisia in Revolt

The years 1864, 1896, 1907, 1911, 1924, 1938, 1954 all mark some examples of salient dates in Tunisia’s annals of socio-political history and resistance. These synchronies demarcate spatialities of resistance and punctuate temporalities that offer to forecast the future victory of a subjugated people and revolutionary moments. Just as the Beylicate quivered at Ali Ben Ghedhahem’s cry for justice in 1864, so did the French colons at the Khalduniyya group (1896) and the Young Tunisians (1907), both of which quickly rose to embody emancipatory activism advocating greater Tunisian political, civil, cultural, and intellectual rights. In 1924 Mohamed Ali launched Tunisia’s syndicalism, 100 years ago. He dreamed of equal pay, selfpresence, and justice for dockworkers and miners, among others, whose conditions were a living hell. His work and that of others after him represented an emancipatory activity whose spirit was to rule over the agentic, affective, and cognitive energies that defied ignorance, colonialism, and poverty and sought to determine the face of freedom in Tunisia. Ali Belhouane’s (1909–58) book, indicated in the vignette above, is a quintessential example of a historiography that ontologizes “Tunisia in revolt” (Tunis Al-Tha’irah). Belhouane writes a rousing defense of revolution qua war of liberation against the French colonizers, celebrating a phalanx of nationalist revolutionaries from across the intellectual and socio-political spectrum. From the “Fundamental Pact” of 1857 (precursor of Tunisia’s 1861 constitution) to Khayr al-Din’s (Ahmed Bey’s Grand Vizier, 1873–77) reforms, Belhouane finds “traces” of rebirth aplenty. 

The genealogy of rebirth is embedded in traditions of sacrifice, protest, and resistance by singularities and collectivities. Belhouane refuses to allow endless names of freedom fighters and leaders to fade into oblivion. Equally, he celebrates unsung heroes: Ali Bach Hamba (d. 1918), founder of Young Tunisians (Belhouane 1954, 40); Abdelaziz Thaalbi (d. 1944), co-founder of the Destour Party (1954, 42–43); Mohamed Snoussi (d. 1900), vociferous objector against colonialism (1954, 40); Bourguiba’s founding in 1932 of his newspaper “Al-‘Amal Al-Tunisi” (1954, 45); and Mohamed Ali, the father of Tunisia’s trade union movement in 1924 (1954, 80). Belhouane finds revolution, zooming in on the Jallaz uprising (1911). The compelling references to these revolutionaries and emancipatory ethos of Tunisia’s eventual independence in 1956, a revolution by any standards, demonstrate how knowledge, affect, and defiance in the face of colonial subjugation formed part of the inventory of struggle.

Never did such cataclysmic events, within a protracted time-span across 160 years, determine the fate of a colony (1956) and an authoritarian postcolony (2011). If they all belong to the province of revolution, it is thanks to the magnitude of unforeseen and contrived forces, voices, precepts, concepts and emotions that intersect to project moral power into the quest for peoplehood, freedom, and dignity. The revolutionary drama unfurls via uprisings of words, worlds, being, speaking, and thinking. Our protestscape formulation problematizes the profiling, mapping, and parsing of Tunisia’s revolution. It gestures to an “inter-protest”—synchronies, as it were, interwoven temporally by uprisings over a period of a century. Revolution, no matter how fleeting, is transversal. As a disappearing diachrony, it erupts only through a chain of links of spatialites and temporalities populated by embodied experiences of knowing, learning, living, acting, and feeling resistance. The idea of revolution as a wave of protests steeped in such histories, stacked with more than a hundred years of grassroots’ struggles, brands of affect, and cognition, each coded by the meanings, significations, imaginaries, kinship, toil, battles, and sacrifices across time and space, rejects revolution as autonomous. Luminaries who have studied revolution before us, the likes of Moore, Skocpol, and Tilly, aver (each in their own way) its entanglement in economic structures, state arrangements, or power dynamics.

Demos and Rebirth in Protestscapes

Tunisia’s 2011 “revolution” remains misconstrued. It defies neat interpretation, construction, and deconstruction. Writing it in this book has meant assigning agency to protest and protestscapes. By studying revolution through spatiotemporal, situated, and relational lenses and through context-specific formulations, the book addresses questions about imaginings of peoplehood. The dissentscapes re-ontologize Tunisian revolutionaries across spatial and temporal sites of resistance and struggle. While this innovative approach is deployed for the sake of a “panoptic” account, the resignification of revolution in this way, over a long timespan, attempted by focusing the analysis on agency, affect, and cognition, yields only a “partial” reading—in line with Haraway’s “situated knowledges.”

Epistemologically, a rebelscape is a kaleidoscope revealing the active, performative, creative, discursive, affective, and cognitive layers that dynamically construct and reconstruct situated protest. It speaks to the question of how to know revolution. The methods of knowing revolution are multiple. Within this book, “protestscape” is one medium for unlocking revolution’s historically dynamic ontogeny in Tunisia. It is challenging to assume that revolution is not a problematic formulation with a single lifeline. It is not “whole” and complete in itself. It is even more audacious to attempt to study revolution wholly. If revolution is an assemblage, protestscapes allow for situating protest in a single locale at a fixed point of time. It is an exercise of quasi-aggregation of revolution into its constitutive sites of action-emotion-thought, across time and space, to understand how they commonly build-up revolutionary momentum. In protestscapes, Tunisia’s revolution is not a sudden twister of polity, society, economy, culture, or history. It has hundred-year-old roots in all of them.

In this book, revolution is considered within long time scales. Protestscapes bring to life, synchronically and diachronically, the effervescence of struggles that have since 1864 sought to subvert pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial hierarchies. Situated protest, thus, interrogates the cliché of protest and revolution being whole and ahistorical. In it, the reshaping of becoming and being travels through those who resist as knowing subjects whose action, emotion, and cognition are imbricated with past and present struggles that make revolution: deterritorialization and reterritorialization. 

Syndicalists, students, miners, marginalized men and women, all tried to sow the seeds of resistance and renewal, socially, politically, and culturally. In tandem, situated protest opens onto struggles bent on deterritorializing the “Bourguibist complex” with its supportive normative, affective, and cognitive structures that have combined to reproduce authoritarianism. (De/re)territorialization processes are not devoid of thought and of norms. Tunisia’s January 14, 2011 is such an example. Prior protest competencies, learning, knowing, and knowers all collapse into a moment of revolution. Many a January of revolt passed before the one of January 2011. On January 13, 1952 pupils and students protested in Le Cap Bon, Bizerte and Menzel Bourguiba, then across the entire country in the protests of January 26, 1978, January 3, 1984, and of January 14, 2011. Therein dissolve learned and inherited knowing, social doing, and social doers. Moreover, situated protest is made up of knowledge publics. Daifallah records the numerous publications, for example, created by student struggles representing pan- Arabists, leftists, and Destourians: Ibn Khaldun (1957), Jeunesse (1959), Al-Ittihad (1961), Al-Talib Al-Destouri (1962), and Perspectives (1963).