In Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia, Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh present an interdisciplinary analysis of Tunisia’s rich history of protest, arguing that popular resistance has long shaped the nation’s identity. According to Elena Korosteleva, the book’s nuanced theoretical framework and human-centred narrative sheds important light on the power of “peoplehood” as a grassroots force driving political change.
Like a Cave of Wonders that reveals its hidden treasures to inquisitive seekers, Sadiki and Saleh’s Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia (2024) has its hidden depths. Under a simple title, it unveils the mesmerisingly complex journey of the Tunisians towards their democracy-in-the-making. The authors argue that the process of democratisation is ongoing and will be achieved through “peoplehood” or hirak, which in Arabic denotes “movement” – that is, “a bottom-up groundswell of protests that strikes back against the authoritarian state” (40). Peoplehood thus comprises the agentic, affective, and cognitive struggles against the authoritarian domination, reflecting how a ‘people’ come into being. Sadiki and Saleh’s carefully crafted narrative reveals the components that unlock for readers a more nuanced understanding of how political change occurs, including through a revolution, in the country which is still in the process of transformation.
Sadiki and Saleh’s carefully crafted narrative reveals the components that unlock for readers a more nuanced understanding of how political change occurs
As the authors argue, this revolution, which saw the overthrow of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a Tunisian President for nearly 25 years, was not merely an embodiment of a single action. which encapsulated the courage and the sacrifice of the Tunisian people in their desire for freedom. Rather, it was the culmination of a centuries-long struggle for democracy in Tunisia, that unlocked the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as a whole, inspiring a wave of similar protests known as the Arab Spring (see, eg Sadiki 2015 and 2019 or Bouris et al 2022). As Sadiki and Saleh observe, this struggle started through a series of protests going back to 1864 (see full protest cartography on page 233), with a move against “the colons” (French settlers) and an outcry for justice by Ali Ben Ghedhahem (see references to further reading 271-75), and it continues to this day.
This (r)evolutionary process is recounted by the authors as both synchronic and diachronic, connecting stories and memory (makhzun) of a hitherto “non-“ or “absent people”, with no rights or voice, to becoming “a people” through their awakening driven by their sacred imaginaries (milhyal) of freedom. This book assembles a compelling theoretical framework to explain what we miss from a western perspective. More than theories and concepts, the authors ground the work in the life experiences of ordinary people who make change possible (but whose voices are often missing from the record) through interviews and oral history, observations, archival material, online sources, Tunisian historiography and sociological scholarship.
The book begins with two conceptual chapters, the first focusing on conceptualising “the missing people” or people with no voice (40-41), and an analysis of western scholarship which the authors term “conversations with metropolitan revolution” to highlight the mismatch in understanding the nature of the revolution. It then proceeds to identify the “peoplehood” as a vehicle of change and a sure sign of democracy-in-the-making, both in Tunisia and the region more broadly.
Based on their collection of real-life data and exposure to both Western and Arab scholarship, the authors develop their own apparatus of concepts with which to grasp Tunisia’s unique situation
The authors point out “a relative negligence of non-Western and especially Arab experiences” (6) when some generalisable models from “the modern urban-industrial world” are being applied to explain the Arab transformations – see, for example, a section on “Great” Western blind spots in the book (5-13). More importantly, based on their collection of real-life data and exposure to both Western and Arab scholarship, the authors develop their own apparatus of concepts with which to grasp Tunisia’s unique situation: protestcape, dissentscape, social intergenerational memory linked to the imaginaries of “the good life” (makhzun and mikhyal respectively), democracy learning loops, and peoplehood. Such terminology seems fitting to provide an “alternative” (and more affirmative) vision for what is arguably a misconstrued revolution. Protestscape is a particularly rich lens for understanding the character of rebellious flows which the authors refer to as a “free play of the unfree”. These ideas blend “old” knowledge with new, to “re-adapt” or even “subvert” “pre-constructed notions and imaginings of self-groups, rights, obligations, and entitlements, to support the reconstruction of affect, experiences, practices and knowledge of life-worlds” of the Arab Revolution (15).
The authors look at workers’ syndicalism, student activism, miners’ protestscapes, women’s voices and regional divergences of a revolutionary diachrony as ‘carnival’ using Bakhtin’s language.
This is when all these perspectives “melt into the crucible of hirak – as a moment of self-organisation and self-determination – that transform a crowd of passionate voices into a powerful peoplehood, demarcating a point of no return and change towards “democracy-in-the-making”. Using the three dimensions of peoplehood (agency, affect and cognition), the book then goes on to explore various case studies – or what the authors call “the clamor of peoplehood”. The authors look at workers’ syndicalism, student activism, miners’ protestscapes, women’s voices and regional divergences of a revolutionary diachrony as “carnival” using Bakhtin’s language. Sadiki and Saleh draw parallels with Bakhtin’s imaginings of a “feast of becoming, change, and renewal” stripping social order of “all hierarchal ranks, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (235), thus wrecking “inside-out” havoc to induce radical change.
This is a particularly powerful section: it speaks to everything that is presently happening not just across the Arab world, but also other parts of the world: from the Belarus uprising in 2020 (Korosteleva and Petrova 2021; Korosteleva et al 2022), and protests in Russia and post-Soviet space which, following Sadiki and Saleh’s argument, are interconnected; to the war in Ukraine, and al hirak in Georgia, Central Asia, and Venezuela at the time of writing. All these occurrences of the people bravely raising their voice, when seen, can no longer be unseen as the signs of democracy-in-the-making and a transformation of the hitherto ‘missing people’ into a change-sweeping peoplehood, as I observe in my work on Nurturing Resilience in Central Eurasia: The age of complexity and the Anthropocene (OUP, forthcoming).
The book re-ontologises for us the sites of resistance not just from Tunisia, but across the world, to reaffirm a democratic future-making.
Sadiki and Saleh’s depiction of Tunisia’s revolutionary drama in 2011 unpacks an uprising of words, worlds, beings, speaking, thinking (through new concepts) and becoming. Their framework could be applied across space and time, geographies and cartographies of future change, as a sure sign of what is yet to come. In the conclusion, the authors note that “by studying revolution through spatio-temporal, situated, and relational lenses and through context-specific formulations, the book addresses questions about imaginings and peoplehood” (358). This accurately describes the contribution this work makes to scholarship on political change and democracy. The book re-ontologises for us the sites of resistance not just from Tunisia, but across the world, to reaffirm a democratic future-making. No matter how hard dictatorships may persist, they always live on a borrowed time, once an “iconic and … a moral flame” of peoplehood is ignited.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: Tunisians demonstrate for peace, freedom of speech and for a secular state. in the wake of the 2011 revolution and ahead of parliamentary elections © European Parliament on Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
