Spaces of Expectation: Local Politics in Post-revolution Tunisia

In this dissertation, I bring the analytical perspectives of urban and development studies to bear on a set of questions related to democratic transformation. In 2011, a revolution ended the 23-year-long authoritarian reign of Zine El Abideen Ben Ali, inaugurating Tunisia’s Second Republic. My inquiry is situated within this geography and historical conjuncture. I ask: what are the emergent forms of democratizing politics in post-revolution Tunisia? Rather than emphasizing national level dynamics or procedural dimensions of “democratic transition,” I show that the city and the intimate space of the home are privileged sites for understanding how democratic aspirations are structured. Local politics take shape as a result of claims-making and place-making. In other words, I trace a politics that emanates from the rearrangement of the material and spatial relations of urban space. I focus on the local, in its everydayness of city-making and its politics to understand the formation of both spaces in relation to democracy. This dissertation is based on over eighteen months of ethnographic research conducted in Tunisia between 2014 and 2017. My research reflects my position as an Arab citizen and participant in the regional uprisings and revolutions of the period, a development worker, and finally a scholar of the global South, committed to decentering conventional circuits of knowledge production, and producing scholarship anchored in place./nI argue that in Tunisia the citizen-participants of a new democratic order reconstitute municipalities into relational entities that I call spaces of expectation. I demonstrate that rather than bounded institutions of local governance, claims-makers constitute municipalities into porous entities situated between the street and the state, where substantive democracy is continuously put to the test. I define spaces of expectation as the gendered and financialized thresholds of democracy. In one sense, this dissertation is about democracy as it relates to making the urban and building the city. In another sense, it is about the tension between the desire for local-level solutions and the concomitant refusal of the state’s modes of rule; a struggle to redefine state-society relations. In yet another rendition, the dissertation is about municipalization as a multiscalar project of heterogeneous temporalities consolidated at the intersection of debt, participatory democracy and global development imperatives. The six substantive chapters that make up this dissertation explore different regimes of politics with their heterogeneous temporalities which manifest at different scales. Taken together, the chapters show how intimate textures, institutional configurations, and global development prerogatives coalesce to produce urban democratic time in post-revolution Tunisia. This dissertation makes three contributions. The first is to demonstrate that the local is produced in a dialectic multi-scalar fashion, from the intimate space of the home, to the development prerogatives of international financial institutions. The second is to show that women’s labor of building the city from its informal peripheries is a condition of possibility for democratizing politics. The final contribution is to indicate that the institutionalization of protest politics remakes political subjectivities and reconfigures the city. When it is cemented at the local level, it constitutes an opportunity for sustaining the revolution’s radical demands under different forms.

Advisor: Caldeira, Teresa