Conflictual Democracy: Urban politics, gender and local governance in post-revolution Tunisia

ended

The 2011 Arab uprisings were extraordinary events. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has long been understood as the bastion of authoritarianism, stifled markets and Islamic fundamentalism. The protestors who filled streets and city squares in 2011 disrupted these narratives. A decade after the uprisings, I propose to investigate whether politics leads to the weakening of democracy. In a context of deepening socio-economic inequalities, I explore this question from Tunisia, the country celebrated in foreign policy circles as ‘the only hope’ of the Arab revolutions. The hypothesis I aim to test is whether a conflictual democracy is being consolidated at the local level, where ‘the state’, the space of institutionalized politics, meets the street, the space of contestation. Through this fellowship, my research attends to whether and how conflictual democracy in post-revolution Tunisia which manifests at the intersection of municipalities as spaces of encounter, the gendering of these local governments, and the legal battles these decentralized entities have waged against the deconcentrated state. My research engages with three bodies of literature: the urban studies literature on the political, feminist theories of the space, and the political geography literature on scale and topologies of power. The conceptual innovation of this project lies in bridging political theory, urban studies, and feminist studies to theorize the dynamics of an unfolding conflictual democracy while being attentive to questions of gender, the perceived threat of political Islam and the legal aspects of politics. In addition to its theoretical rigor, I aim to build on my professional experience in policy circles and my knowledge of Tunisian politics to develop policy briefs about decentralization reforms, and teach-ins modules aimed at increasing female political participation in local governance.