Introduction
After 23 years of repressive rule it took just four weeks of protests and popular uprisings in January 2011 to topple Tunisia’s dictator, Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali. Subsequent research on the “Arab Spring” has privileged the analysis of the sources and dynamics of popular social mobilization. By contrast, this three-year project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, provided a comprehensive historical analysis of the revolution by focusing on the country’s security sector.
Specifically, the project suggested that the puzzle lies in the incapacity of the security apparatus to anticipate and quell popular uprising. Its premise was that the same conditions that made possible the sudden demise of such a deep-seated authoritarian ruler also enable us to:
- understand the dynamics of rising insecurity in Tunisia since the beginning of the uprising and in light of armed violence in Libya; and
- identify the main factors that have affected Tunisia’s political transition.
Existing research on Tunisia and other countries in the region has tended to privilege the question of liberalization and the robustness of authoritarian regimes by focusing on elections, political parties, civil society, and/or the private sector. The impact of the security and armed forces on the formation and transformation of the postcolonial state in the Arab world, however, has largely been neglected.
To address this gap, the conceptual framework of this project postulated that the unfolding of the uprisings (i.e. popular mobilization and the success or failure of regime overthrow) and the dynamics of the ensuing revolutionary transition are shaped by a highly complex relationship between the security sector and state institutions, the political process, and society.