While We Wait : Democratization, State and Citizenship among Young Men in Tunisia's Interior Regions

Abstract: This dissertation has sought to develop new ways of understanding democratization, and by extension democracy, by attempting to capture the experience of democratic transitions. The thesis has investigated the Tunisian democratization processes that followed the overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011. This transition, while on many levels successful, has also been hampered by widespread frustration and disappointment, particularly among the young. More specifically, the study has looked at young men in Gafsa and Kasserine, Tunisia's historically marginalized, interior regions. The study is the result of fourteen months of fieldwork in Tunisia between 2015 and 2019.Building on the work of French political thinker Claude Lefort, the study understands democracy as a destabilizing of certainty on the level of symbolic power. It treats democratization as a heightened experience of this breakdown of symbolic power, and posits that the democratic dissolution of certainty is more visible, pronounced and perilous in transitional periods. Symbolic power comes to be articulated as political imaginaries, which are formed and informed by the past and current relationship between the state and its citizens. During democratization processes, the emergence of a free public space opens up for new political imaginaries. Through participant observation this thesis has sought to capture the quotidian aspects of young men's lives, looking at public space, particularly cafés, as important spaces of waiting. Such waiting, the study argues, makes the expectations of the democratization process visible. The study shows that, for the young men, the Tunisian political imaginaries are informed by expectations of a state that can provide the basics of (male) citizenship, understood primarily in terms of state-employment. The inability of the state to provide, tied to both neoliberal and demographic factors, was a major motivator behind the 2010-2011 Tunisian revolution. These unfulfilled expectations also come to impact the young men’s experience of the democratic transition, centered on a continued demand for “bread and dignity”. Democratization has given rise to vibrant public spaces, spaces that have simultaneously allowed for the articulation of frustrations. The general experiences of democratization that are expressed in these public spaces is one of chaos, loss of personal and economic security, as well as a sense of collapse in national solidarity. Democratization is, in many ways, understood to amplify a neoliberal logic premised on state-retreat, which leaves the young men to their own devices. This has led to a large-scale epistemological crisis, understood as falling away of meaning-making frameworks. This epistemological uncertainty has spawned attempts by the young men to recover a meaningful interpretive framework, whether democratic or not.