middle east law and governance 8 (2016) 151-178

brill.com/melg

Discourses of Power and State Formation: The State

of Emergency from Protectorate to Post-uprising
Tunisia

Corinna Mullin
University of Tunis
corinna.mullin@googlemail.com

Brahim Rouabah
City University of New York
brahim.rouabah@hotmail.co.uk

Abstract

Extending the timeframe of analysis beyond the post-uprising period, Corinna Mullin
and Brahim Rouabah retrace the way in which the state of emergency has functioned
as a discourse of power and a modality of governance throughout the colonial and
postcolonial eras. Specifically, the article focuses on how the state of emergency con-
tributes to the reinforcement of dominant narratives about national identity, and the
foreclosure of more radical alternative political, social and economic projects outside
of the colonial-modern norm.

Keywords

state of emergence – colonialism – Tunisia – post-colonialism – state formation –

discourse – power – national identity – Arab uprisings – resistance – nationalism –
Arab nationalism – political Islam – knowledge-production

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/18763375-00802003

152 Mullin and Rouabah

…
Exceptional measures are required to confront these exceptional circum-
stances and circumvent their consequences....This is a special war and there
must be a popular mobilization for it…. Should a similar attack occur, the
state will collapse
Beji Caid Essebssi, July 4, 20151

∵
A week after the tragic Sousse attack on foreign tourists, the Tunisian president
declared a “state of emergency” over the entirety of the nation’s territory. Echo-
ing the politics of fear that came to characterize much of the deposed Zine El
Abidine Ben Ali’s 23 years of rule, President Beji Caid Essebsi stressed the ‘ex-
ceptional’ nature of the socio-economic and security threats facing the coun-
try, requiring an extraordinary response. His emphasis on social movements
in the context of a discussion on the threat of terrorism, combined with the
branding of the majority of the ongoing strikes as “illegitimate”,2 fueled fears
that many of the rights and freedoms enshrined in Tunisia’s newly adopted
constitution might be in jeopardy.
Essebsi’s grounding of his declaration in a 1978 decree3 led many analysts
to draw parallels with the past. At that time, it was not Islamist terrorism that
provided the state with a pretext for repression, but the threat of “anarchy”
sowed by an increasingly restless labor movement in the context of President
Bourguiba’s liberalization (infitah) policies. Yet a longue durée approach dem-
onstrates that the roots of the state’s deployment of emergency provisions
dates back much further, to the 19th century and the inception of Tunisia as a
modern, centralized state. Though the state of emergency has its roots in the
Beylical era, as with the other technologies of Tunisia’s modern state power
dissected by Beatrice Hibou, the modes by which the state of emergency are
instrumentalized today are “much more the legacy of colonization than of

1 Beji Caid Essebssi, “Khitab Ra’is Al-jumhuriya Ila Al-sha‘b Al-tunesi Ithra I‘lanihi Halat
Al-tawari,” YouTube video, 20:12, posted by “Presidence tn,” July 4, 2015, https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=V6_fX757Y-I&feature=youtu.be (translated by the authors).
2 Ibid.
3 Tunisia, Decret n° 78–50 du 26 Janvier 1978 reglementant l’etat d’urgence; French and Arabic
versions available at: www.legislation-securite.tn/fr/node/28159.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 153

the Ottoman beylicate.”4 As such, the state of emergency, as both discourse

and practice, ought to be analyzed primarily through the lens of its colonial
pedigree.
Much of the post-uprising analysis on Tunisia has been confined to a rela-
tively narrow timeframe. Even when considering broader political, social and
economic dynamics, the postcolonial era is often taken as the starting point
of analysis. Parallels with colonial modes of governance are generally over-
looked, assuming a complete rupture with structures of power that predate
the establishment of an independent Tunisian state. Such assumptions im-
pose ontological as well as epistemological constraints, structuring the kinds
of knowledge that can be produced in relation to post-uprising Tunisia. This
article instead recognizes the importance of the pre-independence trajectory
of state-formation to shaping agency and the interactions of different social
forces in the post-colonial era. It seeks to historicize current dynamics and ex-
amine the salience of colonial legacies for a nuanced understanding of con-
temporary modes of governance.
This article will consider elements of both change and continuity within the
various strategies of Tunisian state power, as well as the mechanisms by which
they are normalized. Given its consistent featuring during the various stages of
Tunisia’s state development, the state of emergency provides a pertinent entry
point for an examination of state power in Tunisia. Consulting a wide range of
primary and secondary source texts and discursive genres, this article explores
the various manifestations of the state of emergency in Tunisia’s colonial and
postcolonial history. Specifically, it will focus on how the state of emergency
contributes to the “polic[ing]” of “epistemological boundaries”5 in what con-
stitutes dominant narratives of Tunisian political identity, or Tunsianité. This
article will also consider the broader “regime of truth” within which the state
of emergency and its attendant discourses of tolerance, moderation, order, and
state prestige (haybat al-dawla) are embedded, shaped and imbued with au-
thority. It will conclude by reflecting on the broader effects of emergency as
a mode of governance on shaping socio-political possibilities in post-uprising
Tunisia.

4 Béatrice Hibou, “La formation asymétrique de l’Etat en Tunisie: Les territoires de l’injustice,”
in L’Etat d’injustice au Maghreb: Maroc et Tunisie, ed. Irene Bono et al., (Paris: Karthala,
2015), 127. In this section of her chapter, Hibou discusses military- bureaucracy as a mode of
governance for Tunisia’s hinterlands that relied upon Ottoman beylical distinctions between
the rural (bedeviyet) and the urban (medeniyet).
5 Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 52.

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154 Mullin and Rouabah

Discourses of Power

Discourses entail a realm of symbols and meanings through which subjectivi-

ties are produced and agencies molded. They structure and delimit what can
be thought, said and, to a certain extent, done in a given context. Discourses
acquire authority by tapping into a broader “regime of truth,” encapsulating,
as Foucault argued, “the mechanisms and instances which enable one to dis-
tinguish true from false statements” as well as the “techniques” by “which each
is sanctioned”.6 Colonial, and by extension post-colonial, state discourses of
power have been shaped by a “regime of truth” forged in the context of “mo-
dernity”. Modernity here is understood as the dominant narrative of Europe’s
material and philosophical development whereby a set of ostensibly universal,
Enlightenment derived values and practices would emerge and gain hegemo-
ny, including freedom of belief, individualism, rationality, and secularism.7
The emergence of “orientalism” as a colonial iteration of these discours-
es, contributed to the consolidation of Europe’s self-identity, as Said argued,
through the “ontological and epistemological distinctions” made between “the
Orient’ and ‘the Occident”.8 Entailing an extensive system of representation,
orientalism not only shaped knowledge conditions but also material interac-
tions between “East” and “West” that both enabled and justified the latter’s
economic and eventually military control over the former. In his discussion
of the “orientalist ontology” of liberal discourse, Massad explains how the
“production of despotism and democracy as irreconcilable essences” has func-
tioned as a “justification and causus belli for European universalism, actualized
through imperialism”.9 Brown points out the importance of dichotomous logic
to these discourses, whereby “liberal” values including “autonomy, tolerance,
[and] secularism” of the “West” only gain salience through their juxtaposition
with the “group identity, fundamentalism, and barbarism” of the “East”.10
In Tunisia, such binary oppositions provided important sustenance for
French colonial claims that posited external intervention on the levels of ad-
ministration and the economy, by a duality of state and private interests, as a

6 Michel Foucault, “The Political Function of the Intellectual,” trans. Gordon Colin, Radical
Philosophy 17 (1977): 12–14.
7 Corinna Mullin, “The Discourse on Political Islam and the ‘War on Terror’,” in Arguing
Counterterrorism, ed. Daniela Pisouiu (London: Routledge, 2014), 221–46.
8 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 2.
9 Joseph Massad, Islam and Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015), 109.
10 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006), 194.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 155

necessary prerequisite for Tunisian “progress”. The “modernity” narrative and

the various social processes through which it gained hegemony in most parts
of the world in the 19th century, contributed to the emergence of a perceived
need to “catch up” with the West. Such a sentiment paved the way not only
for increased indebtedness on the part of the nascent Tunisian state forced to
borrow in order to pay for various modernization projects, but also for direct
French control over Tunisia’s land and resources in return.

Defining the Norm (Tunisianité) through Stating the Exception

Though generally associated with authoritarian state practices, most constitu-
tions across the globe today have some provision for the use of “emergency”
laws, designed to give “an extraordinary measure of flexibility and extended
reach to the executive to cope with a crisis”.11 So accepted as a norm within
international law and “liberal” governance standards, the state of emergency
is enshrined as a state’s right within the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, which has been signed and ratified by Tunisia. The first para-
graph of article four of the Covenant sets out criteria for its use:

In times of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation and
the existence of which is officially proclaimed, the States Parties to the
present Covenant may take measures derogating from their obligations
under the present Covenant to the extent strictly required by the exigen-
cies of the situation…12

The executive’s decision to declare a “state of emergency,” is deemed to de-

rive from an objective assessment of whether an event can be handled within
the boundaries of ordinary laws and regulations, or if it requires extraordinary
powers. Yet the “exceptional negation of democratic principles”13 entailed
by the declaration of a state of emergency is an inherently political act. As
Schmitt famously argued, the effectiveness of political power rests upon the
ability of the sovereign to “decid[e] on the exception.”14 A discursive approach
questions the naturalness of claims that the state of emergency is a common

11 Andrej Zwitter, “The Arab Uprising: State of Emergency and Constitutional Reform,” Air
and Space Power Journal Africa and Francophonie 2 (2014): 48.
12 For the full text see: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20999/
volume-999-I-14668-English.pdf.
13 Carl Schmitt, On Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).
14 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge:
mit Press, 1985), 5.

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156 Mullin and Rouabah

sense or technical response to an objective assessment of “crisis”, it instead

considers its political function.
By virtue of Tunisia’s state formation unfolding in the shadow of colonial
expansion, many of its dominant discourses of power have their roots in the
Protectorate era (1881–1956). A notable example has been the discourse around
Tunisian political identity, Tunisianité. The discourse of Tunisian “specificity”
has enabled and managed distinctions between “normal” and “deviant” subjects
and behaviors in ways that regulate the political sphere.15 Tunisian specificity
was evoked early on in the Protectorate to legitimize hierarchies of citizenship
and substantiate distinct indigenous and colonial juridical systems. Hibou
even contends that “The very concept” itself was “invented by the colonizers to
prop up their power”.16 French colonial authorities claimed that “Muslim law”
was by nature discriminatory, requiring the Protectorate to claim extraterrito-
rial jurisdiction to govern over French settlers in Tunisia, and Europeans more
generally. Though economic considerations factored into the establishment of
separate jurisdictions, as Lewis observes, colonial ideology was central:

Alongside beylical taxes and conscription, French authorities had also

maintained the native justice system, whose laws they regarded as in-
commensurate with (not to mention inferior to) their own. The decision
to do so was consistent with the general objectives of the Protectorate: to
rule from a distance, at a lower cost, as much as possible, and to maintain
an ideological distinction between Europeans and natives.17

Whereas, “in theory, native justice and French justice derived from two dis-
tinct sovereignties,”18 in reality this distinction, facilitated by the discourse of
Tunisianité, served to reinforce French superiority in a hierarchy of sovereign-
ties. Over time, Tunisianité has assumed a variety of functions, demonstrating
the “extreme complexity and plurality of logics” at work behind this particular
“consensual myt[h]”.19 While it initially substantiated the subjugation of beyli-
cal rule to French colonial power, in the 1950s it was tapped into to disassoci-
ate Tunisia from radical anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia. In the 1960s

15 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison (London: Penguin, 1991).
16 Béatrice Hibou, The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 230.
17 Mary D. Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia 1881–1938 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2014), 82.
18 Lewis, Divided Rule 82.
19 Hibou, The Force of Obedience, 231.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 157

and 1970s, Tunisianité was deployed to drive a wedge between the country
and broader Arab Nationalist struggles. Over the last three decades, the dis-
course has functioned to exclude a range of “radical” voices from the political
sphere, from Islamists to leftists, and came to signify a “way of managing global
modernity.”20
Such mutations and adaptations over time are by no means unique to the
discourse of Tunisianité. In describing the emergence of sectarianism as a
salient political discourse, or “ta’ifa as nation”, during the early part of Leba-
nese state building, Makdisi explores the dynamic interaction of global and
local forms of power. The discourse of sectarianism, Makdisi argues, “while
originally foreign and European,” over time came to take “on regional permu-
tations and was transformed by local elites” in a way that suited entrenched
interests.21 The argument here is not that history repeats itself verbatim, or
that the structures and technologies of post-colonial state power are identical
to those of the colonial state. Rather, as posited by the historical sociological
approach, contingencies and specific relations of power, as opposed to teleo-
logical forces, shape social and political developments.22 Hidden within the
discursive terrain in which Tunisia’s state of emergency finds sustenance,
reside the fossils of past struggle and resistance. These fossils serve as a re-
minder of the adaptability of power and of its dialectical entanglements with
resistance.
In post-independence Tunisia, Tunisianité as a “legitimizing state discourse”
has worked to mediate what Ayari refers to as, the three “horizons of expecta-
tions” for Tunisian state identity, anchored in the Tunisian nationalist elite’s
“realm of experience” and perceived possibilities: Occidentalism, Arabism
and Islamism.23 As with other discourses of power, the grammar, meaning
and significance of Tunisianité have altered in response to specific historical
conjunctures. For the most part, however, the “Occidental”- read “secular” and
“modern/ist”- dimension of this “myth” has predominated in so far as it has
resonated with specific socio-political projects, the inclinations and choices of
post-independence leaders, and, externally, with geopolitical realities.

20 Hibou, The Force of Obedience, 229.

21 Usama Makdisi, “The Modernity of Sectarianism in Lebanon: Reconstructing the Nation-
State,” Middle East Research and Information Project 26 (1996).
22 Ibid.
23 Michaël B. Ayari, “Du Discours de Légitimité de L’État Aux Mots De La Contestation: Per-
spectivistes Et Islamistes Des Années 1960 Aux Années 1980,” in Après L’Indépendance:
Parcours Et Discours, ed. Michael B. Ayari and Sami Bargaoui (Tunis: Laboratoire de Re-
cherche Diraset, 2010), 38–57.

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158 Mullin and Rouabah

A mixture of all three factors can account for continuities with colonial
inflections in the significance ultimately attributed to Tunisianité by the
Neo-Destour party24 and one of its founding leaders, Habib Bourguiba. This
continuity may in part be attributed to material realities, though ideology un-
doubtedly also figured prominently. Bourguiba’s transition away from a revo-
lutionary approach to independence was, partly, a result of the violent repres-
sion of the Neo-Destour leadership at the hands of the French. Yet it was the
Neo-Destour leadership’s education and socialization in the Sadiki school that
put them at epistemological loggerheads with the original Destour leadership,
schooled in the more traditionally oriented Zitouna.25 Had the latter prevailed,
it is quite possible that the “Occidental” dimension of Tunisianité would have
been marginalized. These differences between the “old” and “new” strains of
Tunisian nationalism were reinforced with the collapse of the Destour, and
further hardened with abolition of the Beylicate and the establishment of
Tunisia as a Republique. The political and social tendencies associated with
the Beylicate, “a relic of the Ottoman Caliphate,” whose legitimacy, at least in
theory, was underpinned by religious claims, came to be construed as a threat
in the context of Bourguiba’s secular Republic.
Differences over the Arabist component of Tunisianité were crystallized
through the Bourguibist-Youssefist rivalry. The triumph of the Bourguibist
strand of Tunisian nationalist identity over the Arab-Nationalist oriented ver-
sion of his rival Salah Ben Youssef,26 was further reinforced by the defeat of
Arab states in the 1967 War and the decline of Arab Nationalism as the domi-
nant normative power in the region. Though by the late 60s the government

24 Neo-Destour was the successor to the Al-Ḥizb Al-Ḥurr Ad-Dustūrī (Constitutionalist-

Destour Party).
25 Jean-Francois Martin, Histoire De La Tunisie Contemporaine : De Ferry à Bourguiba, 1881–
1956 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 171; Al-Ma‘had Al-Sadiqi was established in 1875 by the
reformer Khayr al-Diyn Pacha al-Tunusi to provide a bicultural, bilingual education for
future cadres in the government administration. Zitouna was founded in 737 and claimed
to be the oldest teaching establishment in the Arab world. The modern Zitouna Univer-
sity was established upon independence in April 26, 1956.
26 Born in Djerba, southern Tunisia, Salah Ben Youssef was the Secretary General of the
Neo-Destour from 1948–1955. Ben Youssef represented the “radical wing” of the Tunisian
anti-colonial movement and had closer ties to Arab nationalist leaders, including Gamal
Abdel Nasser. It was Ben Youssef’s rejection of internal autonomy versus support for full
independence and complete evacuation of French military presence that prompted the
French government to ultimately back his rival, Habib Bourguiba. Ryo Ikeda, The Imperi-
alism of French Decolonisation: French Policy and the Anglo-American Response in Tunisia
and Morocco (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 159

decided to embark on a process of “Arabization” it was in fact never fully im-

plemented as a political project and rather promoted “only to the extent that
it served the interests of the politico-economic ruling elite”.27 At best, it was
“bilingualism and biculturalism” that was achieved, though the political and
economic elite for decades after independence continued to operate largely
within a francophone context. For Bourguiba, “the cultural revolution would
be achieved through education, with the French language as its vector”.28 Bour-
guiba sought to transform “backwards” and “underdeveloped” components of
Tunisian society with the “West as a model”, promoting values of “rationalism
(quasi-positivism), efficacy and adaptability to the times (‘modernism’)”, to
make it easier, in Bourguiba’s words, for Tunisians “to catch the caravan of civi-
lized nations”.29
The 1980s insurgency of self-proclaimed Youssefites in Gafsa who were al-
leged to have been trained and financed by Libya’s Ghadafi30 sealed the secu-
ritized fate of the movement and further contributed to the marginalization of
the Arabist horizon of expectation. Tunisia’s firm positioning in the “Western”
camp during the Cold War, the first and second Gulf wars, the “war on terror”,
and within a more generalized global context of liberal capitalist expansion,
are all factors that contributed to the sidelining of Arabist strains within domi-
nant Tunisian identity discourse and to the concomitant predominance of the
“Occidental” dimension.
Building on the old Destourien and Zeytouni traditions, Tunisia’s post-
colonial Islamist movement, from which the current Nahdha party hails, has
at times posed an epistemological challenge to dominant Occidentalist read-
ings, though still with hues of Tunisian specificity. As Merone has argued, the
Islamist conception “differs from the modernist, nationalist and Western-
looking one” subscribed to by Bourguiba, “because in accepting pluralism and

27 Mohamed Daoud, “Arabization in Tunisia: The Tug of War,” Issues in Applied Linguistics 2
no. 1 (1991): 8.
28 Driss Abbassi, Entre Bourguiba et Hannibal: identité tunisienne et histoire depuis
l'indépendance (Paris: Karthala, 2005), 88.
29 Hédi Chérif, “Réformes et Islam chez Bourguiba,” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 33 (1994),
62.
30 So closely aligned were Tunisian and French security interests at the time that the French
government allegedly sent helicopters and military planes as well as warships to reinforce
the Tunisian military response. See Noureddine Aloui, Damu El-Ikhwa: Gafsa 1980 (Ariana:
Mediterranean Publisher, 2015), 95. France’s initial reaction to the 2010–2011 uprising, in
which an offer of security assistance was made, was reminiscent of this earlier neocolo-
nial security arrangement.

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160 Mullin and Rouabah

modernity Islamism finds its roots in the religious tradition of the country and
not in what it believes are French-imported notions.”31
However, several post-colonial shifts in domestic, regional and internation-
al political contexts, and their dynamic interaction with one another, ensured
these kinds of challenges would be confined to the margins of the discourse’s
hegemonic iteration. These included the symbolic closure of Zitouna Univer-
sity in 1961, which weakened the more traditionalist ulema (religious scholars)
and deepened societal cleavages already emergent at the time of indepen-
dence. Several of Bourguiba’s now notorious statements further exacerbated
these cleavages, including his issuing of a “fatwa”, which declared as unneces-
sary fasting during the holy month of Ramadan as such devotion “reveal[ed]
itself to be incompatible with the effort [against under-development]” and
therefore at odds with the state’s developmentalist aims.32 Though in the ear-
ly days of his nationalist activism Bourguiba supported women’s donning of
hijab as an expression of Tunisianité, he would later refer to the veil as a “rag”
with no connection to Islam, as well as a sign “of servitude, of decadence, and
of slavery”.33 These divisions were to be deepened further by the post 1967
ascendency of political Islam as an epistemological and political challenge to
the secular nationalism that had previously dominated the post-colonial Arab
political and public spheres, as well as by the Islamist rivalry that emerged in
the 70s and 80s and that came to assume a regional dimension in the 1990s,
and a global dimension from the increasingly hegemonic, western-supported
neoliberal Islamism to the Gulf sponsored salafism and violence of ISIS.
As a central feature of European liberal discourses, the “othering of Is-
lam” has relied upon the dichotomous juxtaposition of the norm of “moder-
nity”, represented by the West or Western orientation, with the deviation of
“tradition”, represented by an array of “Arab and Islamic practices of religious
authority, intolerance, the community, subjection, and despotism”.34 Notwith-
standing the fact that Tunisianité has often been a site of contestation, the
ultimately dominant articulations required a certain degree of adherence to
this set of western liberal discourses and their underpinning dichotomies.

31 Francesco Cavatorta and Fabio Merone, “Post-Islamism, ideological evolution, and ‘la tu-
nisianité’ of the Tunisian Islamist party al-Nahda,” Journal of Political Ideologies 20, no. 1
(2015): 27–42, 34.
32 Chérif, “Réformes et Islam chez Bourguiba,” 65.
33 Lamia B. Y. Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and
Ideology (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2005), 101.
34 Ibid.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 161

Forming part of the broader “regime of truth” of modernity, these discourses

molded the parameters for what is possible and imaginable in political and
social relations in a way that also reinforced the Occidental component of
Tunisianité.35 The state of emergency in this sense can be seen to function as a
norm regulator, discursively and materially empowering the state to (re)articu-
late and enforce the Occidentalist rendering of Tunisianité in instances where
it has been perceived to be under “threat”.

State(s) of Emergency: Restoring the Norm

If the composite discourses of Tunisianité have functioned to delineate the

“norm” in both the colonial and postcolonial Tunisian state, it has been the
discourse of the “state of emergency” that has been called into action to
steer the country back when on the brink of “disorder.” Various political theo-
rists including Schmitt, Benjamin and Agamben have theorized the “state of
emergency” as a “political technique of sovereignty”.36 Transformations in
its application over time are a reminder of how this technique of power has
not gone uncontested. During the Protectorate era, martial law was invoked
as a means of protecting the liberal façade of French rule, while at the same
time reinforcing the hierarchy of sovereignty established by the Bardo treaty
(1881) and La Marsa convention (1883). During the Bourguiba era, the “state of
emergency” served a similar function. It enabled the state to claim an overall
adherence to a liberal “rule of law”, while facilitating more “effective” modes of
power when the “norm” was deemed under threat. Under Ben Ali, sovereign
power was reinforced through what Hibou has referred to as “states of emer-
gency”, or institutionalized forms of arbitrary rule. Although seemingly dis-
tinct from modes of “emergency” rule, in reality there have been many areas
of overlap.
In his Jurisprudence of Emergency Law, Hussein demonstrates how the
state of emergency reveals the “constitutive relation between modern law and
sovereignty”.37 It has been a salient feature of state-building and moderniza-
tion projects, often precipitated by a mixture of internal and external forces.

35 Brown, Regulating Aversion, 204.

36 Stephen Morton, States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2013), 35.
37 Nasser Hussein, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Michi-
gan: Michigan University Press, 2003), 31.

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162 Mullin and Rouabah

Perhaps the first example of its deployment in the Tunisian context was in
response to the 1864 revolt against the Husaynid dynasty by the Sahel region’s
landed elite.38 Though the immediate cause was the government’s decision
to increase the mejba (head tax), its transformation into popular contesta-
tion entailed a much broader set of grievances, mostly linked to the numer-
ous economic concessions and preferential treatment given to Europeans at
the expense of the indigenous population.39 With military backing from the
French, Italians and British, who feared the consequences of the insurgency
for their local interests, the Bey implemented harsh emergency measures.40
Enacting a campaign of violence and repression, the Regency suspended the
newly adopted constitution and its legal protections. Though the revolt was
eventually quelled, its underlying causes were far from resolved. These in-
cluded increased indebtedness to European governments and banks, which
had funded the Bey’s modernization projects, as well as the growing percep-
tion and experience of inequality on the part of indigenous Tunisians. Such
indebtedness facilitated further colonial encroachment, resulting in Tunisia’s
‘Protectorate’ status in 1881.41
The deployment of the state of emergency demonstrated how, far from be-
ing an arbitrary exercise of power, colonial rule is one that is “lawful, as it lays
claim to legitimacy through law, but also one that is literally full of law, full
of rules that hierarchicalize, bureaucratize, mediate, and channel power”.42
The state of emergency provides “modern law with its constitutive negative- to
posit law, nation, and civilization in contrast to custom, tribe, and savagery”.43
Like other instances of colonial rule, the state of emergency enabled the gap to
be bridged between the often arbitrary and illiberal practices of colonial sover-
eign power, and the discourse of “rule of law” that was so central to the liberal
state-building project. The state of emergency, in other words, functioned as
the exception that was meant to prove the “rule” – of colonial law.

38 Khalifa Chater, Insurrection et Repression dans la Tunisie du XiXe Siecle: La Mehalla de Zar-
rouk au Sahel (1864) (Tunis: Publications de L’Université de Tunis, 1978), 19.
39 Ibid.
40 Antonello Battaglia, “The First Tunisian Crisis (1864)”, in Empires and Nations from the
Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, vol. 2., ed. Antonello Biagini and Giovanna Motta
(Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 12–18.
41 Hussein, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, 32.
42 Hussein, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, 32.
43 Ibid., 28.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 163

The Protectorate: Restoring the Norm of Racialized Hierarchies

The “state of emergency” during the Tunisian Protectorate provided discursive
and material power to the Protectorate to restore the “norm”, in this case a ra-
cialized hierarchy of sovereignty and citizenship, as enshrined within the Bardo
and Marsa agreements. The colonial administration’s reaction to the 1911 Jellaz
cemetery protests brought this hierarchy into sharp relief, demonstrating the
strength of its hold not only in matters of interest to the colonial state, but also
in regards to the interests of European capital. Though the protests began in re-
action to rumors that the French authorities sought to “register” land in a portion
of Tunis’s Jellaz cemetery to make way for a branch of the tramline belonging
to the Compagnie des Tramways de Tunis, they assumed nationalist hues in the
face of repression. The protests took a violent turn, with some accounts claim-
ing an “Italian was the first to fire a gun in the Jellaz melee”.44 Certainly the
Tunisians would pay the biggest price for this turn, with thirty-five sentenced
by the Tunis criminal court, including seven sentenced to death.45 The Italians
involved, on the other hand, went “virtually unpunished.”46 As the protests
spread, so too did anxiety across the European community. Martial law was de-
clared to restore “order” on 7 November 1911. Symptomatic of the hierarchy of
differentially valued lives implicit in colonial rule, was the following telegram
sent by an exasperated landowner in Bizerte to the French authorities in Tunis:

rebellion characterized not as scuffle or fight. immediate and

exemplary repression otherwise you sacrifice the colons [euro-
pean settlers]47

The state of emergency was affirmed and prolonged in 1914 in the context of
World War I and would remain in place until 1921,48 with many of the individu-
als involved in the Jellaz protests going on to form the Destour party.
The state of emergency overcomes one of its underpinning paradoxes- of
maintaining “rule of law” by its suspension- through its construction of the

44 Lewis, Divided Rule, 108.

For the Italian version of the events see: L’Unione, “La Sommossa di Stamane: I musul-
mani protestano violentemente per la questione del cimitero,” November 7, 1911, Tunisian
National Archives, J 212.
45 Martin, Histoire De La Tunisie Contemporaine, 119.
46 Lewis, Divided Rule, 108.
47 Leon Moncelon’s Telegram addressed to Blanc Secrétaire General in Tunis, Tunisian
National Archives, Collection fpc/e/0565/Dossier 0001/Document 0002 (translated by
the authors).
48 Martin, Histoire De La Tunisie Contemporaine, 119.

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164 Mullin and Rouabah

“exceptional” threat. Such a construction entails a depoliticization of the un-

derpinning claims of whatever movement or action is deemed to threaten the
“norm”. In discussing representations of anti-colonial peasant insurgency in
South Asia, Morton demonstrates how the agency of the peasant insurgent was
“typically denied” by the British colonial regime, and it was “suggested instead
that acts of insurgency are spontaneous rather than the rational outcome of
organized political resistance.”49
A similar colonial logic appears to have underwritten the securitized re-
sponse to the 1933–34 Muslim burial rites protests. Tens of thousands of Tu-
nisian Muslims had participated in this protest movement against an alleged
Protectorate-backed fatwa declaring that Muslims who became naturalized
French citizens could be buried in Muslim cemeteries.50 This rumor fed into
a growing nationalist sentiment that had been captured and fostered by the
(Neo)Destour. Once again, perceiving the French colonial sovereign “order”
was threatened, the French government responded with a state of emergency.
On May 6th 1933, the administration issued a decree demanding “any Tunisian”
who had committed “hostile acts” against the Bey, the royal family, the protect-
ing nation, or its administration, as well as for “religious or political propa-
ganda” or “movements of a nature threatening to general security,” to be placed
under surveillance.51 The French and Arabic national press was shut down and
the Destour Party was proscribed. Despite the clear expression of nationalist
sentiment, in referring to them dismissively as “religious fanatics” colonial au-
thorities sought to depoliticize the protesters’ grievances.52 Yet harsh repres-
sion did not stop the protest movement and they eventually succeeded in their
demand for separate cemeteries.
After a period of detente following the election of a socialist government
in France, relations began to deteriorate once again in 1938. In early April of
that year, several Neo-Destour leaders were arrested for inciting civil disobedi-
ence, as well as calling for a boycott of French products and sabotage of phone
lines and railways.53 Tensions climaxed on the 9th of April with the police

49 Morton, States of Emergency, 19.

50 Martin, Histoire De La Tunisie Contemporaine, 123–4.
51 Lewis, Divided Rule, 151.
52 Quoted in Lewis Mary Lewis, “Necropoles and Nationality: Land Rights, Burial Rights,
and the Development of Tunisian National Consciousness in the 1930s,” Past and Present
1 (2009): 105–141.
53 La Depeche Tunisienne, “Trois membres du Neo-Destour sont arrêtés: Mahmoud Bour-
guiba, Saleh Ben Youssef, et Hedi Nouira son placés sous mandat de dépôt,” April 7, 1938.
See also: Le Petit Matin, “L’arrestation a Souk El Arba d’un agitateur,” April 4, 1938, Tunisian
National Archives, Collection fpc/mn/Dossier 0042/Documents 253 and 235.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 165

repression of hundreds of protesters outside of the courthouse where two of

the arrested Neo-Destour leaders were being tried. The ensuing violence re-
sulted in the death of twenty-two Tunisians, though nationalists claimed that
the number of Tunisian deaths was nearly ten times higher. Resorting to the
draconian measures of his predecessor, the French General Resident pro-
claimed a state of emergency, banned the Neo-Destour, shut down its offices,
seized its documents, and arrested twenty-nine of its Leaders for “conspiracy
against state security”.54 In post-independence Tunisia, the anniversary of the
9 April bloodshed became an official holiday — National Martyrs Day.

Restoring the Norm in Post-Colonial Tunisia: “State Prestige” and

“Public Order”
With the centralization of power and state building well underway by the time
of Tunisia’s independence, Habib Bourguiba focused the energy of patrimonial
governance on replacing “colonial hegemony” with “an indigenous hegemony,”
entailing the “banning [of] rival centres of power”. As Sadiki has noted, Bour-
guiba’s rule left little room for competing visions and alternative socio-eco-
nomic, political or identity projects.55 By the early 1960s, with his presidential
power consolidated, Bourguiba emphatically responded to a reporter’s ques-
tion regarding Tunisia's political system: “The system? What system? I am the
system!”56 Indeed, Bourguiba later affirmed this stance by declaring himself
president for life. Over the succeeding years he proved his political adroitness,
establishing firm control over the party and state bureaucracies by “co-opting
and manipulating clientele networks in ways that would concentrate power in
his own hands without alienating his bases of support.”57
Similar to other instances of post-colonial state building projects, the tech-
nologies of power employed under Bourguiba did not differ greatly from those
used by the French. The state of emergency would feature prominently in
his three decades of rule, as would the various normalizing discourses that
provided legitimacy and authority to the state even as it suspended its “social
contract”. Cherif has described this style of governance as a unique form of

54 Tunis Soir, “L’affaire du Neo-Destour,” March 4, 1939, Tunisian National Archives: Collec-
tion fpc/mn/Dossier 0042/Document 93.
55 Larbi Sadiki, “The Search for Citizenship in Bin Ali’s Tunisia: Democracy versus Unity,”
Political Studies 50 (2002): 502.
56 Eric Pace, “Habib Bourguiba, Led Tunisia to Independence From France,” New York Times,
April 7, 2000, https://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/bourgnyt.htm.
57 Christopher Alexander, “Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Tunisia: Back from the
Democratic Brink,” Middle East Research and Information Project 27 (Winter 1997).

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166 Mullin and Rouabah

“self-regulation”, enabling, during times of crisis, a “state that intervenes to re-

store order and prosperity.”58
Although declared on two previous occasions (1957 and 1977) the most no-
torious state of emergency, and the one with the most far reaching political
reverberations, was that declared in January 1978 in response to Bourguiba’s
standoff with Tunisia’s largest trade union. Considered one of the most formi-
dable trade union organizations in the Maghreb, the Union Générale Tunisi-
enne du Travail (ugtt) had played a key role in the anti-colonial struggle and
has at times posed a formidable resistance to the attempts of both the state
and private interests to limit labor activism.59 By 1977, labor contestation of
the Nouira government’s economic liberalization (infitah) policies coupled
with the government's intransigent refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of
their demands, signaled a looming confrontation. Tapping into the discursive
terrain of both haybat al dawla and moderation, the then Minister of Interior
Tahar Belkhodja addressed parliament in late December 1977:

The disorders that are occurring sporadically are mostly the doing of
young elements, very young even, recruited especially from among drop-
outs from schools, the unemployed, the vagabonds, the anguished…The
prestige of the state is, above all, moral…. Tunisia is a land of moderation,
careful weighting and not of unreasonableness about everything and
nothing60

Tensions came to a head in January 1978, with Bourguiba’s political hegemony

threatened by an increasingly powerful ugtt that had managed to harness
and channel burgeoning discontent with the government’s economic orien-
tation. As a sign of these deteriorating relations, which included attempts by
the government to “change a union leadership judged to be too oppositional
and too powerful,”61 Secretary General Habib Achour resigned from the rul-
ing party’s Political Bureau in January 1978. Upon doing so, Achour publicly

58 Ibid.
59 Héla Yousfi, “The Tunisian Revolution: Narratives of the Tunisian General Labour Union,”
in Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring: Rethinking Democratization, ed. Larbi Sadiki
(London: Routledge, 2015), 319–31.
60 Tahar Belkhodja, Les trois Décennies Bourguiba. 3rd Edition (Tunis: Sotepa Graphique,
2010), 144–45 (translated by the authors).
61 Mohamed S. Omri, “Trade Unions and the Construction of a Specifically Tunisian Pro-
test Configuration,” OpenDemocracy, September 24, 2011, https://www.opendemocracy
.net/mohamed-salah-omri/trade-unions-and-construction-of-specifically-tunisian
-protest-configuration.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 167

denounced the infitah policies as “favoring foreign capital to the detriment of

the national interest”.62 As the ugtt veteran Kheireddine Bouslah claimed:
“Bourguiba had a choice between responding to the demands of the general
strike and persecuting the unions - and he chose the latter”.63 The government
responded with violence and severe repression, resulting in “the worst setback
in the union’s history” since the assassination of its founder in 1952.64 By evok-
ing the state of emergency, through Decrees № 78–49 and № 78–50, Bourguiba
effectively undermined the political substance of the union’s claims, instead
transforming them into a questions of “security” and “order”.
The state of emergency was evoked as a necessity to restore “public order”
and to counter, what the ruling party’s mouthpiece (Al‘Amal) deemed to be,
acts of “anarchy”,65 “rebellion”,66 and “terrorism”.67 Demonstrating the depo-
liticizing tendencies of such discourses, the Prime Minister referred to the or-
ganizers of the protests as having “criminal and insurrectional intentions”.68
The decree established a juridical framework granting expansive powers to the
Executive, embodied in the Interior Ministry and local governors. It enabled
authorities to prohibit and repress any activities deemed to “undermine public
order”, granting the right to search shops and personal property, as well as to
censor the press, radio broadcasts, and other activities, without requiring prior
judicial permission.69 It was in the context of these protests that Zine El Abi-
dine Ben Ali was appointed to the Interior Ministry as head of State Security
to suppress the revolt, a task for which the future president did not disappoint.

62 Gregory White, Comparative Political Economy of Tunisia and Morocco: On the Outside of
Europe Looking In ( New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 118.
63 Chris Toensing, “Tunisian Labor Leaders Reflect Upon Revolt,” Middle East Research and
Information Project 41 (2011).
64 Ibid.
65 La Presse, “Face aux actes d’anarchie et a la violence: l’etat d’urgence,” January 27, 1978,
Tunisian National Archives, Collection J 148, first Quarter 1978. See also: Al‘Amal, “Al sha‘b
yaqul ‘la’ li du‘et al-fawdha wa al-idhrabet,” January 25, 1978, al-hayat al-qawmiyya section,
Tunisian National Archives, Collection ‫ج‬92, first Quarter 1978.
66 Al‘Amal, “Fashalu fi al-idhrab… Fa ‘amadu ila al-tamarrud,” January 27, 1978. See also
Al‘Amal, “La ma‘na li tamarrudihim siwa al-neil min istiqlal tunes wa fateh al-abweb li
men yatarassad laha,” February 1, 1978.
67 Ibid., “Dar Al Ittihad Am… Al Irhab”; Al‘Amal, “Khutta mudabbara li tarwi‘ el-muwatinin
wa ihraq Tunes bi akmaliha,” January 28, 1978.
68 La Presse, “Une veritable intention criminelle et insurrectionnel,” January 27, 1978,
Tunisian National Archives, Collection J 148, 1st Quarter 1978.
69 Decret n° 78–50 du 26 Janvier 1978 reglementant l’etat d’urgence. www.legislation
-securite.tn/fr/node/28159.

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168 Mullin and Rouabah

Ensuing protests were repressed by the army, with dozens killed and hundreds
injured, in what came to be known as “Black Thursday”.
The union’s leadership, including Achour, were arrested, jailed and re-
placed by regime loyalists. By the late 1970s tensions had eased as Bourguiba’s
campaign of repression subsided in the face of a well contained trade union
movement and positive growth rates enabling Bourguiba to “buy social peace”.
This context would shift once again by the mid-1980s as the distorting social
and economic effects of the infitah policies took root. With Bourguiba now
“less tolerant of labor’s wage demands” the president “cracked down hard on
the union in 1984–1985”.70 Although the union was formally detached from
Ben Ali’s ruling Le Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique party (Con-
stitutional Democratic Rally, or rcd) it would come to be incorporated into
the state’s corporatist structures through a combination of incentives and
repression.71

Ben Ali’s “States of Emergency”: Restoring “Moderation” and

“Tolerance”
The assumption of power through a bloodless coup in 1987 by Ben Ali, Bour-
guiba’s former Interior Minister, signified a shift in the mechanisms and legiti-
mating discourses upon which authoritarian rule in Tunisia rested. However,
the changes represented by Ben Ali’s governance were largely ones of style
rather than substance. The new president’s “National Pact” intended to signify
a political opening based on consensus between different political forces, rhe-
torically building upon the underpinning myths of Tunisianité. Indeed, Ben Ali
initially adopted several measures that seemed to signify an opening, includ-
ing amnesty for thousands of political prisoners, “the abolishment of the state
security court and the presidency for life”, as well as “new legislation that made
it easier to form associations and parties.”72 However, these measures were
soon reversed by the “ruthless campaign” of repression that followed, target-
ing the opposition and independent political and civil society more broadly.
Resulting in the arrest of thousands of activists, this campaign entailed mass
surveillance, “threats against family members, passport confiscations, beat-
ings and even assassinations.”73 Such measures demonstrated that Ben Ali’s
reformism operated more at the level of “official discourse”, than actual policy.

70 Alexander, “Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Tunisia”.

71 Emma Murphy, Economic and Political Change in Tunisia: From Bourguiba to Ben Ali
(London: MacMillan Press, 1999).
72 Alexander, “Authoritarianism and Civil Society in Tunisia”.
73 Ibid.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 169

In other words, it played on “the being and the appearance of power, what it is
and what it would like people to believe that it is”.74
Though it is noteworthy that over his 23 years of rule, Ben Ali never formally
declared a state of emergency, his rule through “states of emergency”75 demon-
strate the extent to which the discourse had already become a central feature
of Tunisia’s post-colonial governance. As Hibou explains:

What dominat[ed] in Tunisia is the non-respect for laws and the

way they are violated, the reversibility of regulations, and their applica-
tion, the absence of practical mechanisms for the implementation of
laws, the frequent overturning of the hierarchy between laws, decrees,
circulars and speeches, the application of laws to individuals, their re-
lations, their connections and the degree of their social integration,
their lifestyle, too, and the way they think, and the arbitrary decisions
made possible by redundant, superfluous and sometime contradictory
laws.76

Through the use of everyday forms of exceptional measures, or the “reign of ta-
limet” (instructions), Ben Ali perfected arbitrariness as a mode of governance.77
In 2003, in line with a us – sponsored, globalized trend, the Ben Ali govern-
ment passed anti-terror legislation that effectively institutionalized a state of
emergency by enhancing executive powers and criminalizing a range of non-
violent political behavior. According to the un’s former Special Rapporteur
on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms
while countering terrorism, the 2003 law “did not provide the Tunisian people
with more security, but was widely abused as a tool of oppression against any
form of political dissent.”78 Ironically, and contrary to the assumptions under-
writing the Special Rapporteur’s position, by adopting this legislation Ben Ali
affected a shift in governance style away from “authoritarian” tendencies. By
institutionalizing the state of emergency, and cloaking it with a legal garb, Ben
Ali effectively brought Tunisia in line with dominant “liberal” global security
governance practices.

74 Hibou, The Force of Obedience, 216.

75 Italics are the authors’ own.
76 Hibou, The Force of Obedience, 284.
77 Ibid., 285.
78 Human Rights Watch, “Tunisia: Amend Draft Counterterrorism Law,” July 7, 2014, News sec-
tion, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/07/tunisia-amend-draft-counterterrorism-law.

middle east law and governance 8 (2016) 151-178

170 Mullin and Rouabah

Ben Ali’s rule relied in large part upon juridical and security power as a
means of maintaining societal discipline and control. Yet equally important
were the discursive and symbolic systems that functioned to normalize an
otherwise intolerable power. Building on colonial and postcolonial discours-
es, reference was often made to the threat of “religious fundamentalism.”79
Ben Ali accused those who “attempt to exploit religion for exclusively po-
litical ends”80 of being at odds with Tunisia’s identity, characterized by
“tolerance, openness and moderation”.81 His discursive approach in this re-
gard represented a continuation of Bourguiba’s foregrounding of the Oc-
cidental dimension of Tunisianité, reflected in an institutional framework
that excluded religion from public life and banned parties with a religious
platform.
Despite Bourguiba’s apparent “laic” orientation, Article 1 of the 1959 con-
stitution declared Islam as the national religion. Bourguiba also established a
Ministry of Religious Affairs to oversee religious buildings that became state
properties and clerics who became state employees. This continued under Ben
Ali, who also added the task of training imams at Zitouna University to the
mandate of the Ministry of Religious Affairs.82 Rather than asserting a clear
separation of religion and state, Bourguiba’s policies represented the extension
of state control over religion, with a particular version of Islam promoted at
the expense of alternative religious expressions and interpretations that were
deemed to potentially undermine “public order”.83 Not only did this approach
result in the criminalization of deviating practices in public and political spac-
es, but also, and by extension, reinforced the marginalization of the Islamic
aspects of Tunisianité.
With the advent of the U.S.-led “war on terror”, an expansive repertoire of
orientalist tropes was made available to states like Tunisia insofar as there was
geopolitical and conceptual alignment. By institutionalizing the state of emer-
gency Ben Ali acquired legal sanction for the exclusion of his political oppo-
nents, in particular the Islamists, from the political sphere. It also provided a

79 “Interview: Zine El Abidine Ben Ali,” interview by Georgie Anne Geyer, Washington Quar-
terly 21, no. 4 (93–106, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/INTERVIEW%3A+ZINE+EL+ABIDI
NE+BEN+ALI.-a053344934.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
82 Jocelyne Cesari, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
83 Ibid., 145.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 171

pretext for the further securitization of marginalized communities, the victims

of years of economic development underwritten by a process of “accumula-
tion through dispossession.”84
In a series of speeches made in the days leading to his escape, Ben Ali
tapped once again into the discursive terrain of Tunisianité with reference to
the country’s reputed “moderation” as a means to de-legitimize the actions of
the protestors. In one speech in which he singled out youth as a problematic
category, Ben Ali exhorted parents “to protect their children from these mis-
chievous hooligans and to orient them and raise their awareness against their
recruitment and manipulation by these extremist groups.”85 On the eve of his
deposal, Ben Ali, in a characteristically paternalistic tone, reminded the Tu-
nisian public: “Destruction is not a Tunisian tradition, Tunisians are civilized,
Tunisians are tolerant. Violence is not a trait of ours, neither is it a behavior we
engage in.”86
As with all forms of hegemony, this rendering of Tunisian identity has never
been complete. “Beyond the incantatory invocation and imitation”, Nadia Mar-
zouki draws attention to the possibility that its narrow definitions of “moder-
nity, the nation, secularism, woman (always singular)” hold neither the same
appeal nor significance for Tunisians in “marginalized areas, the unemployed,
youth…”.87 Indeed, the uprising itself demonstrated the precariousness of the
discourse and its inability to maintain coherence and authority in the face of
contestation. As Charles Tripp has argued, it is the “subaltern” who are often
the “targe[t]” of the state’s symbolic power and who “may ironically create the
space needed to transform such myths into a repertoire of resistance rather
than acceptance.”88

84 David Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” The Socialist

Register 40 (2009): 63–87.
85 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, “Khitab Ben Ali 10 Janfi 2011,” Youtube video, 12:44, posted by
“sica2012”, January 9, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKg0PN12xZ8 [Translated
by the authors].
86 Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, “Tunisian Dictator’s Final Speech (English Translation),”
Youtube video, 9:10, posted by “Muirr025,” January 2011, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Ou6Oqnz4O4I [Translated by the authors].
87 Lina Kennouche, “L’héritage de Bourguiba face aux soubresauts de la transition tunisi-
enne,” L’Orient Le Jour, July 25, 2015, Actualités section, http://www.lorientlejour.com/
article/936007/lheritage-de-bourguiba-face-aux-soubresauts-de-la-transition-tunisienne
.html (translation by the authors).
88 Charles Tripp, “Performing the Public: Theatres of Power in the Middle East,” Constella-
tions 2 (2013): 1–28.

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172 Mullin and Rouabah

Post-Uprising Tunisia and the “State of Emergency”: Between

Revolution and “Haybat Al Dawla”

During the three years of Troika government89 following the first democratic
elections in November 2011, the state of emergency declared on January 15th,
2011 remained on paper but was rarely evoked discursively by the state to jus-
tify limitations to civil liberties or basic human rights protections. This was
almost the inverse of the legal-discursive arrangement that characterized Ben
Ali’s rule. One notable exception was the government’s response, in February
2013, to mobilization around the assassination of Chokri Belaid, whose death
was blamed by the protesters, at least in part if not entirely, on the government.
The government invoked “security” concerns in the lead up to the protest, fol-
lowed by a harsh police response.90 However, when confronted by mobiliza-
tion that might have been perceived as a serious challenge to government
authority, for example the 2013 sit-in movement (Errahil),91 which called for
the government’s departure, the Troika agreed to resign rather than escalate
tensions. This decision, undoubtedly influenced by powerful global actors, paved
the way for a caretaker “technocrat” government to assume power and oversee
the holding of new legislative and presidential elections.
Paradoxically, it was the language of the opposition, some of whom had ties
to the deposed government, who evoked the notion of “emergency”. In doing
so, they demonstrated the extent to which this standoff not only expressed a
difference over governance, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a contes-
tation over the meaning and content of Tunisianité. In particular, it demon-
strated the extent to which the self-identified secular opposition felt that the
norm of Tunisianité, established during the Protectorate and preserved under
the post-colonial rule of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, was under threat by a surge
from the claimed bearers and advocates of both the Islamic and Arabist di-
mensions of Tunisianité. This fear was often expressed as a desire to restore
“state prestige” (haybat al dawla).92 In a critique of Marzouki’s presidency, for

89 The first democratically elected government following the uprising, in addition to the
dominant “moderate” Islamist Nahdha party, the Troika was comprised of the nationalist-
leftist cpr, as well as the center-left Ettakatol.
90 bbc News, “Tunisia Mourns Murdered Politician Chokri Belaid,” February 8, 2013, Africa
section, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-21381617.
91 Khawla Euchi, “fa bihaythu… i‘tisam errahil,” Nawaat, November 12, 2014, Politics section.
http://nawaat.org/portail/2014/11/12/�‫ أ‬-‫الرهاب‬- ‫ضدّ إ‬-‫احتجاجات‬-‫الرحيل‬-‫عتصام‬
ّ ‫ا‬/.
92 Abdelhamid Riahi, “Beji Caid Essebssi: Za‘im… Qadim min zaman al-za‘im,” Alcho-
urouk,  Octo­ber 26, 2013, Politics section, http://www.alchourouk.com/24253/151/1/
‫الزعمي‬-‫زمن‬-‫من‬-‫قادم‬-...‫زعمي‬:‫السبيس‬-‫قايد‬-‫البايج‬.html.

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Discourses of Power and State Formation 173

example, one columnist wrote: “Through his contradictions, his actions and
reactions, Moncef Marzouki has greatly contributed to the deterioration of the
prestige of the state and the position he occupies.”93
Whereas both Bourguiba and Ben Ali used national security to promote Oc-
cidentalism as the dominant feature of Tunisianité against alternative render-
ings (leftist, Islamist, Arab nationalist, etc.), an Islamist-nationalist led coali-
tion government ultimately chose not to upset the balance by pushing forward
a national debate on Tunisian identity. Leaving in place the tenuous balance
of the three “horizons of expectation” underpinning Tunisianité, the Troika’s
leading party, Nahdha, may have sacrificed an important identity component
of its political project. On the other hand, and demonstrating the nuanced
ways in which discourses interact with political identities, many Nahdha sup-
porters may today see themselves as “forming part of the Bourguiba legacy
and highlight[ing] the same values ​​of modernity and national unity”.94 Iden-
titarian considerations aside, the adoption of this stance had important ma-
terial implications for the party. Most importantly, it seems to have secured
acceptance, perhaps precarious, within influential western capitals as well as
Tunisia’s political and economic spheres,95 where the discourse of Tunisianité
continues to mold and delimit the boundaries of acceptable politics. Though
they had been accused by the self-proclaimed secular opposition of politiciz-
ing religion, it was, ironically, under the Troika government that the religious
sphere was provided greater autonomy, or what Agrama has referred to as an
“asecular space.”96
Given this context, it is still unclear why the Troika government felt it nec-
essary to maintain the juridical status of the state of emergency that was put
in place on 15 January 2011, the day after Ben Ali fled the country in the face of
persistent protests. A lack of public documentation makes it difficult to ascer-
tain the various arguments and forces (internal and external) that may have
contributed to this decision. Equally mysterious, considering the lack of trans-
formation in the political or “security” context at the time, was the reasoning

93 Marouen Achouri, “Moncef Marzouki, le faux chantre du prestige de l’Etat,” Businessnews,

May 17, 2013, Actualités section, http://www.businessnews.com.tn/Moncef-Marzouki,-le
-faux-chantre-du-prestige-de-l%20Etat,519,38165,1 (translated by the authors).
94 Kennouche, “L’héritage de Bourguiba.”
95 Fabio Merone, “Enduring Class Struggle in Tunisia: The Fight for Identity beyond Political
Islam”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 1 (2015): 74–87.
96 Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in
Egypt. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

middle east law and governance 8 (2016) 151-178

174 Mullin and Rouabah

behind former President Marzouki’s decision to lift the state of emergency on

6 March 2014.97

The “State of Emergency” in Transition: “Moderation” and “Order”

Versus Structural Reform
Though Mehdi Jomaa’s caretaker government was presented as the product of
a grand compromise made by Tunisia’s central political forces, as represented
by the Quartet,98 in effect the government of “technocrats” came to signify a
return to familiar practices and discourses. Most prominently, the threat of
“religious extremism” was evoked to (re)assert state control over religious insti-
tutions, with the “technocrat” government closing by executive decree numer-
ous mosques and religious organizations deemed to be “outside of government
control”.99 Jomaa’s government also closed several religious media outlets,
which it said had “turned into platforms for takfiris and jihadis,” despite criti-
cism from the independent media regulatory body (haica) that this was un-
constitutional.100 Domestic and international rights organizations criticized
elements of Jomaa’s counter-terror strategy for “undermin[ing] fundamental
freedoms” and exhibiting a lack of democratic consultation and oversight.
Religious institutions continued to be a site of contestation after the
December 2014 elections, with the “religious fundamentalism” resurfacing as
a central concern within official discourses. Soon after his appointment in
February 2015, Prime Minister Habib Essid of the ruling Nida Tounes party
said he would close an additional 187 mosques, designated by the Ministry of
Interior as “beyond the control of the state.” In March 2015, Tunisian authori-
ties “regained control” of the historic Zitouna Mosque. Some observers have
pointed out a return to the past with the government’s decision to appoint as
Minister of Religious Affairs Battikh Othman, who under Ben Ali held the post
of Grand Mufti of Tunisia, the most senior Muslim religious position in the

97 bbc News, “Tunisia’s Moncef Marzouki lifts state of emergency,” March 6, 2014, Africa sec-
tion, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26469497.
98 The quartet was composed of Tunisian General Labor Union (ugtt), Tunisia’s employers’
organization (utica), the Tunisian League of Human Rights (ltdh) and the Tunisian
Bar Association.
99 Corinna Mullin and Brahim Rouabah, “Requiem for Tunisia’s Revolution?” Jadaliyya,
December 22, 2014, Maghreb section, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/20334/
requiem-for-tunisia’s-revolution.
100 Al Jazeera, “Tunisia Shuts ‘Unlicenced’ Media Outlets,” July 20, 2014, Politics section,
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/07/tunisia-shuts-unlicensed-media
-outlets-2014720153314788461.html.

middle east law and governance 8 (2016) 151-178

Discourses of Power and State Formation 175

country. Othman has “replaced several senior Ennahda appointees to the min-
istry, and handed the oversight of mosques largely to the police.”101
Under the technocrat government, national security was evoked to restore
the norm of Tunisianite in the face of perceived epistemological challenges to
its Occidentalist dimensions. With the post-election return of many Bourguiba
and Ben Ali era figures, the state of emergency has been deployed as a means
of implementing what is perceived as the government’s mandate to restore the
pre-uprising state identity, expressed in terms of haybat al dawla, as well as its
underpinning material practices.
On 4 July 2015, only seven months after assuming office, President Beji Caid
Essebsi declared another state of emergency. Though ostensibly directed at re-
storing “order” in the face of a surge in political violence in the form of two
terrorist attacks against foreign tourists, as well as sustained attacks against
military personnel outside of the capital, the speech suggested that additional
political considerations may have been at play:

This is a special war and there must be a popular mobilization for it…
We must respect freedom of speech and press … as these are among the
gains of the revolution, but in such exceptional circumstances, whoever
exercises their freedom of speech and press must take into consideration
the situation in which the country finds itself, in order for them to avoid
creating an atmosphere that is inconducive to fighting these social dis-
eases, which we are fighting102

Essebsi’s comments betrayed the tensions inherent in the modern liberal state
between the rule of law and sovereign power, which the state of emergency is
designed to ease. Demonstrating continuities with colonial-era discourses of
power, Essebsi’s speech bore a strong resemblance to that of the French Gen-
eral Resident in 1936–8 as he elaborated the remit of an earlier state of emer-
gency: “Freedom of press and assembly, should not degenerate to freedom of
agitation…Meetings that are dangerous to public order shall be prohibited”.103

101 Carlotta Gall, “Tunisia’s Secular Government Cracks Down on Mosques in After-
math of Massacre,” New York Times, July 23, 2015, Africa section, http://www.nytimes.
com/2015/07/24/world/africa/rift-widens-in-tunisia-as-government-cracks-down-on
-mosques.html?_r=0.
102 Beji Caid Essebssi, “khitab ra’is al-jumhuriya ila al-sha‘b al-tunesi ithra i‘lanihi halat al
-tawari’,” Youtube video, 20:12, posted by “Présidence tn,” July 4, 2015, https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=V6_fX757Y-I&feature=youtu.be (translated by the authors).
103 Martin, Histoire De La Tunisie Contemporaine, 176–77.

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176 Mullin and Rouabah

Many activists took umbrage with Essebsi’s framing of the state of emer-
gency, expressing a fear that “it is not necessarily aimed at fighting terrorism,
but at the repression of social movements”, and that its purpose is — “to quell
every reaction, every movement… to oppress people.”104 Indeed, the govern-
ment’s first deployment of the emergency laws was to quell a month-long sit-in
by a movement of the unemployed in Gabes.105 In a further sign of its politi-
cal function in protecting the norm and proscribing deviant behavior, activists
in Kef involved in the Menich Msemah (I do not pardon)106 protests against
the proposed economic reconciliation or “amnesty” law were accused of “fo-
menting trouble and breaking the emergency law.”107 Additionally, President
Essebsi attempted to delegitimize another popular movement, winou el petrol,
which organized around questions of accountability, transparency, distribu-
tion and governance of Tunisia’s natural resources, by implicitly linking it to
terrorism.108
As in the past, the deployment of the emergency law under the western-
backed Nida Tounes government has functioned to limit radical claim-making
on the state. It has also provided the government with a convenient justifica-
tion for the lethargic pace of structural reform, as national security arguments
are often evoked at crucial moments in discussions around the restructuring
or independence of key institutions, in particular the judiciary. Whereas under
the Troika, focus had been on the complicity of the judiciary in authoritarian
governance, with proposed reforms centered on the need for judicial inde-
pendence and integrity, in the current securitized debate the critique high-
lights an alleged laxity and leniency on the part of the courts vis-à-vis national

104 Daniel Levine-Spound, “Tunisia's Defense Against the Islamic State Is Sparking Fears of a
Police State,” Vice News, September 18, 2015, Africa section, https://news.vice.com/article/
tunisias-defense-against-the-islamic-state-is-sparking-fears-of-a-police-state.
105 Assabahnews, “ba‘da i‘lan halet al-tawari’.. fek i‘tisam ‘atilin ‘an al-‘amal ‘attalu
naql al-fusfat bi gabes,” July 5, 2015, http://www.assabahnews.tn/article/106682/
‫بقابس‬-‫الفسفاط‬-‫نقل‬-‫عطلوا‬-‫العمل‬-‫عن‬-‫عاطلني‬-‫اعتصام‬-‫فك‬-‫الطوارئ‬-‫حاةل‬-‫�إعالن‬-‫بعد‬.
106 This movement began in late August 2015 in opposition to the government’s proposed
“Economic Reconciliation” legislation, which, if passed, would abrogate the constitution-
ally derived jurisdiction of the Truth and Justice Commission.
107 Human Rights Watch, “Tunisia: Crackdown on Peaceful Protests,” September 10, 2015, News
section, http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/09/10/tunisia-crackdown-peaceful-protests.
108 Beji Caid Essebssi, “khitab ra’is al-jumhuriya ila al-sha‘b al-tunesi ithra i‘lanihi halat
al-tawari’,” Youtube video, 20:12, posted by “Présidence tn,” July 4, 2015, https://www
.youtube.com/watch?v=V6_fX757Y-I&feature=youtu.be (translated by the authors).

middle east law and governance 8 (2016) 151-178

Discourses of Power and State Formation 177

security cases.109 This is made stark in the oft-repeated mantra among security
forces: “we arrest, and they release.”110
Similarly, though the security apparatuses, which formed the backbone of
repressive rule under both Bourguiba and Ben Ali, were singled out for radical
reform in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, under the current govern-
ment legislation has been proposed that would accumulate greater powers
and ensure impunity for security personnel.111 The state of emergency has also
been invoked to discipline journalists, and to protect the government’s nation-
al security policies and practices from investigation and censure.112 The aggres-
sive police response to journalists covering the recent presidential guard attack
led the National Union of Tunisian Journalists (snjt) to warn against “the in-
strumentalization of the war against terrorism to restrain journalistic work.”113

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated the importance of systems of representation to

the way power has been conceived, structured, practiced, and institutional-
ized throughout the various stages of Tunisia’s state-building, development,
and transformation. In re-conceptualizing the temporal framework in the

109 Fatima Jelassi, “Itlaq Sarah Intihari Mohamed el Khames… Al Naqabat Al Amniyyah tata-
him… wa al qadha’ ya‘kis al hudjum,” Assabah, November 28, 2015, http://www.assabah
‫أ‬
.com.tn/article/111239/‫الهجوم‬-‫والقضاء»يعكس‬-‫تهتم‬-‫المنية‬-‫النقاابت‬-»‫اخلامس‬-‫محمد‬-‫نتحاري‬ ‫رساح»ا‬-‫»�إطالق‬.
110 Hussem Ben Makhlouf, “Kasr al ‘adhm bayna al amn wa al qadha’ yu’adjil al harb ‘ala al
irhab,” Al-Akhbar, November 29, 2015, http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/248145.
111 Heba Saleh, “Tunisian law raises fears of security state return,” The Financial Times,
May 13, 2015, Middle East and North Africa: Politics and Society section, http://www.
ft.com/cms/s/0/ac71f594-f89b-11e4–8e16–00144feab7de.html#axzz3vjmuIhW P.
See also Emna Guizani, “New Law to Ban Attacks on Armed Forces Sparks Out-
cry,” Tunisia Live, April 22, 2015, http://www.tunisia-live.net/2015/04/22/new-law-to
-ban-attacks-on-armed-forces-sparks-outcry/.
112 “Need to Combat Terrorism Does Not Justify Attacks On Reporters,” Reporters Without
Borders, November 25, 2015, http://en.rsf.org/tunisie-need-to-combat-terrorism-does-
not-25–11–2015,48575.html. See also: “Police Harrass Inkyfada Journalist Over Security
Coverage,” Reporters Without Borders, December 14, 2015, http://en.rsf.org/tunisie-police-
harass-inkyfada-journalist-14–12–2015,48644.html.
113 Press Communiqué, National Union of Tunisian Journalists (snjt), November
24, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/snjt.tunisie/photos/a.1493788990895124.107374182
9.1491834994423857/1634230043517684/?type=3&theater. See also Zeineb Marzouk,
“State of Emergency Extended as im [ministry of interior] Ramps Up Security Op-
erations,” Tunisia Live, December 23, 2015, http://www.tunisia-live.net/2015/12/23/state
-of-emergency-extended-as-im-ramps-up-security-operations/.

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178 Mullin and Rouabah

context of which Tunisia’s modern modes of governance have been forged to

include both the pre and post-colonial eras, continuities as well as the ways in
which power adapts to evolving realities are made apparent. The article has
focused in particular on how modernity as a “regime of truth” and its attendant
liberal discourses of moderation, tolerance, order and stability have molded
and delimited on the types of political discourses and identities permissible
from the colonial to the current post-uprising period. In enabling the state to
rearticulate and reinforce the “norm” at moments when it is perceived to be
under threat, the state of emergency has played a central role in ensuring the
continued dominance of a particular rendering of Tunisianité, one which has
historically marginalized alternative political, economic and identity projects
including Arab nationalist, radical leftist and Islamist. In that sense, it has
served a regulatory function, calibrating the Tunisian political space so that a
(neo)liberal economic and pro-Western foreign policy orientation appear not
merely as rational, but as the only option for the Tunisian polity.
In arguing the above, this article has sought to contribute to the growing
body of critical literature that questions the prevalent tendency with analy-
ses of Tunisia’s post-uprising experience to overstate what is different about
this political moment. The groundswell of energy that emerged in the weeks
leading up to Ben Ali’s departure, itself building upon years of diverse forms
of labor, youth, Islamist, and human rights oriented activism, would indeed
produce a rupture in which “new possibilities”114 could be imagined. Yet the
idealism of the Tunisian uprising was quickly confronted by the reality of a
state whose discursive and material infrastructure from the very beginning
had been designed to control rather than empower the population.
Tunisia’s history, as with all histories of state building and consolidation, is
a product of interaction between sedimented structures of power and more
dynamic social forces. By recognizing these contingencies it becomes possible
to “break out of deterministic claims about the so-called failure of state build-
ing” and instead to imagine a future in which the state is “responsive to the
needs of a majority of the population,”115 rather than to those of a small elite
that have historically benefited from the discourses and practices of the state
of emergency.

114 Alain Badiou, “Alain Badiou on the Arab Spring,” Verso, December 2, 2013, Blog section,
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1471-alain-badiou-on-the-arab-spring.
115 Jadaliyya Interview, “Then and Now: lcps Interviews Jadaliyya Co-Editor Ziad Abu-Rish
on State Institutions in Lebanon,” Jadaliyya, May 19, 2015, Interviews section, http://www.
jadaliyya.com/pages/index/21665/then-and-now_lcps-interviews-jadaliyya-co-editor-z.

middle east law and governance 8 (2016) 151-178