‘We don’t want to be governed like this anymore’: protest democracy as an expression of a crisis of governmentality in post-revolution Tunisia

Abstract

This article analyses the political significance of the protests that have arisen in Tunisia since the ʻrevolution' and the establishment of a parliamentary regime. This is what the protests studied have in common: they belong to neglected regions in the country's hinterland; that they mobilise young local populations; they claim rights over their territories' soil and subsoil resources exploitation; they occupy a strategic location for a relatively long period of time; and they set up democratic mechanisms for these locations' self-management, in the form of 'coordinations'. The description of social logics and the way populations resist, as well as the authoritarian rationality of government action and the inability of elected officials to mediate conflicts, reveal differences between protesters who seek autonomy from state control, while others refer to a rent-centred understanding of the claim. It also shows the emergence of a 'protest democracy', itself an expression of a crisis of 'governmentality'. These two phenomena are symptomatic of a demand for integrating populations and new ways of governing that break with the reeks of past authoritarianism and current representative democracy.

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