Abeyance networks, contingency and structures

ABEYANCE NETWORKS, CONTINGENCY AND STRUCTURESHistory and origins of the Tunisian revolutionChoukri Hmed et Sarah-Louise Raillard Presses de Sciences Po | Revue française de science politique (English) 2012/5 - Vol. 62pages 31 à 53

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ABEYANCE NETWORKS,

CONTINGENCYAND STRUCTURES

HISTORY AND ORIGINSOF THE TUNISIAN REVOLUTION

Choukri HmedTranslated from French by Sarah-Louise Raillard

“Here is the image, here is the gesture: a clear gesture that contains many other gestures”.1

“If Ben Ali had been a little smarter, he would have remembered what Bourguiba said: ‘One mustnot starve nor sate the inhabitants of Sidi Bouzid’.”2

The Tunisian revolution represents unlooked-for new terrain for the political scientist,one which is not too distant and in which the mobilizations3 inherent to emergentpolitical crises can be observed; it also permits an investigation of the texture of

revolutionary processes. The existing literature on the subject of revolutions is largely focusedon institutional changes engendered by the transfer of sovereignty and legitimacy. It tendsto somewhat overlook analyses of the protest dynamics which breed and orient these changes;or documented reviews of revolutionary configurations, coalitions and interactions.4 In thecase of the “Arab Spring”, this impression was bolstered by the results of the differentelections provoked by revolutionary processes in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt, and whichwere marked in 2011 by the success of political Islam in its various guises. A similar andequally prevalent approach attempts to isolate a series of structural and macro-sociologicalfactors in order to explain how people are moved to take part in protest action. The epis-temological and methodological measures formulated by the vast numbers of studies onsocial movements over the last thirty years go out of the window when one tries to accountfor revolutionary commitment. This has been demonstrated by the central role allocated toMohamed Bouazizi’s actions in the majority of studies, along with the concept that “peaceful”

1. Javier Cercas, Anatomie d'un instant (Paris: Actes Sud, 2010), 8.2. Interview with Mourad Achraf, high school student, 18 years old, Menzel Bouzayane, 22 April 2011. The namesof all the persons interviewed have been changed to protect their anonymity.

3. Hélène Combes, Choukri Hmed, Lilian Mathieu, Johanna Siméant, Isabelle Sommier, “Observer les mobilisa-tions. Retour sur les ficelles du métier de sociologue des mouvements sociaux”, Politix, 93, 2011, 7-27.

4. Charles Tilly, Les révolutions européennes, 1492-1992 (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 43. In 1985, François Chazel likewiselamented “the lack of sufficient, if any, attention paid to revolutionary processes” found in the major studiesin the field, adding that “it is certainly in this vein that there is the most work to be done and the most progressto be made”. François Chazel, “Les ruptures révolutionnaires”, in Madeleine Grawitz, Jean Leca (eds), Traité descience politique (Paris: PUF, vol. 2, 1985), 646, author's emphasis. See also Michel Dobry's recent overview“Le politique dans ses états critiques: retour sur quelques aspects de l'hypothèse de continuité”, in Marc Bessin,Claire Bidart, Michel Grossetti, (eds), Bifurcations. Les sciences sociales face aux ruptures et à l'évènement(Paris: La Découverte, 2010), 64-88.

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and “spontaneous” protests preceded more organized activities led by political groups.1 Thisspontaneous and rather spasmodic interpretation of collective action2 is even more significantbecause the actors concerned seem to confirm it when speaking about themselves, as seenin the case of this young unemployed man who participated in the first demonstrations inSidi Bouzid:

“Every night, the whole neighborhood would get riled up. People were angry, upset that MohamedBouazizi's rights hadn't been respected, that a policewoman, Faïda Hamdi, had slapped him in theface. I was coming home from work at that time and I was told that ‘some guy set himself on firein front of the governor's office, they transferred him to Sfax or Sousse’... Ever since then, protestshave raged on in front of the governor's office. Some people from the opposition came and tookpictures, and all of a sudden, Facebook was part of the picture. Photos and videos circulatedeverywhere. Then everything took off really quickly, especially in the Al-Khadra projects. Becausethey're projects, it's a neighborhood where things are really horrible. People are starving to death,so they had nothing to lose. The young people would say, ‘I can do that, [rise up], maybe this willmake things change’. You see, [it looks like] they're living, but they're not living. [They said tothemselves] ‘If I do this, [I get involved] I don't give a fuck, I've got nothing to lose, nothing'shappening in my life anyways’.”3

I propose examining the origins of the revolutionary process in Tunisia and consequentlymoving away from the hold of the media and the academic tendency to focus on the resultsof these breaks in allegiance,4 rather than on how series of events are ordered in space andtime. In response to such globalizing interpretations, it is important to recall, as did TimothyTackett when analyzing 1789, that it “may be useful to shift the principal thrust of inquiryaway from the broad analysis of the origins of the French Revolution in general, and tofocus rather on the Revolutionary experience of the specific individuals who took part inand embodied that Revolution”.5 From this point of view, this article follows CharlesKurzman in making his case for “anti-explanations”, which he defines as “an attempt tounderstand the experience of the revolution in all its anomalous diversity and confusion,and to abandon the mirage of retroactive predictability. Anti-explanation begins by compa-ring the lived experiences of the event with the main explanations offered by studies ofrevolution”.6 The emphasis placed on lived revolutionary experiences does not mean ignoringor underestimating the role played by the structural dimensions of mobilizations, their

1. Different versions of the spontaneity creed can be found in the following works: Hamit Bozarslan, “Réflexionssur les configurations révolutionnaires tunisienne et égyptienne”, Mouvements, 66, 2011, 11-21 (13-14); Jean-Pierre Filiu, La Révolution arabe. Dix leçons sur le soulèvement démocratique (Paris: Fayard, 2011), 35 and 92;Ted Robert Gurr, “Introduction to the fortieth anniversary paperback edition of Why Men Rebel”, in Why MenRebel (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2011), ix-xix; Béatrice Hibou, “Tunisie. Économie politique et morale d'unmouvement social”, Politique africaine, 121, 2011, 5-22; Pierre Vermeren, “Préface inédite”, in Maghreb, les ori-gines de la révolution démocratique (Paris: Fayard, 2011), i-xviii.

2. E. P. Thompson formed a particularly pertinent critique of this monocausal explanation for collective, popularaction, which more broadly implies a “spasmodic vision of popular history”, at the expense, in fact, of everythingthat should be described, understood and explained. E. P. Thompson, “L'économie morale de la foule dansl'Angleterre du 18e siècle”, in Florence Gauthier, Guy-Robert Ikni et al., La guerre du blé au 18e siècle (Montreuil:La Passion, 1989), 31-92.

3. Interview with Hani Samsar, 37 years old, Sidi Bouzid, 10 April 2011.4. Boris Gobille, “Mai-Juin 68: crise du consentement et ruptures d'allégeance”, in Dominique Damamme, BorisGobille, Frédérique Matonti, Bernard Pudal (eds), Mai-Juin 68 (Paris: L'Atelier, 2008), 15-31.

5. Timothy Tackett, Par la volonté du peuple. Comment les députés de 1789 sont devenus révolutionnaires (Paris:Albin Michel, 2nd edn, 1997), 15.

6. Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5-6.

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organization or material infrastructures, but rather giving the event back its social and tem-poral thickness, by paying “attention to those long-term change processes that condition theprospects and social structural bases of mobilization, as well as the shorter-term temporaldynamics that shape the unfolding of an active protest or revolutionary cycle”. For, by“ignoring other temporal rhythms students of social movements and revolutions have paintedan incomplete and overly deterministic portrait of popular contention”.1

With regard to Tunisia, the first important temporal rhythm was shaped by what I proposecalling the first revolutionary situation.2 This incorporates the 28 days between 17 December2010 at roughly 11:30am – the moment when a series of local and national protests spreadoutwards from Sidi Bouzid and its environs – and 14 January 2011, at 5:30pm, when thepresident of the Republic, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and his family fled to Saudi Arabia.3 Sectoralprotests, workplace demands and social movements did not stop – far from it – after 14 January,nor even after the election of a constituent assembly on 23 October 2011. We are thereforeinvestigating ongoing political events and crises. But does this mean that social scientists shouldbe forbidden from focusing on these moments and places of structural uncertainty where nodurable institutional outcome exists; in short, from acting as the socio-historians of what seemsto be the beginning of an as-of-yet unfinished turning point?4 In moving from “causes to theevent”,5 as Abbott says, such scholars may allow themselves to formulate a thorny researchquestion: how to understand and describe the series of protests that led to the regime’s down-fall, in a national and international context characterized simultaneously by great uncertainty6

and a latent but enduring conflict between legality and legitimacy?

The unpredictable nature of these movements does not mean that they appeared in a socialand political vacuum. It is true that the mobilization against the regime which followedBouazizi’s desperate act marked one of the ruptures in the protest cycle, which, as is oftenthe case with revolutions and social movements, “leads to a major expansion of the numberand variety of organizations seeking change, of the programs for change they offer, and ofpublic demonstrations, meetings, and incidents of disorder”.7 Nevertheless, much like theHautefaye drama of the late nineteenth century described by Alain Corbin, we may say,mutatis mutandis, that the first revolutionary situation that took shape in Sidi Bouzid on 17December 2010 “is not an eruption, an unexpected fissure which allows for primitive forcesto be unleashed. Because of its goals and the form of its development, if not by its excesses,[it] follows the logic of previous behaviors”.8 What structures and networks – underground,sleeper, or hidden to varying degrees – did they make use of, which practical and discursivemodes of protest were invented or reused, what kind of resources were drawn on to enable

1. Doug McAdam, William H. Sewell Jr., “It's about time: temporality in the study of social movements and revo-lutions”, in Ronald Aminzade et al., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001), 89-125 (100).

2. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978).3. For a tentative but well-documented account of this “day”, cf. Pierre Puchot, La révolution confisquée. Enquêtesur la transition démocratique en Tunisie (Paris: Sindbad, 2012), 21-66.

4. On the subject, let us recall that “neither the beginning nor the end of a turning point can be defined untilthe whole turning point has passed, since it is the arrival and establishment of a new trajectory [...] that definesthe turning point itself”. Andrew Abbott, Time Matters. On Theory and Method (Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 2001), 250.

5. A. Abbott, Time Matters, 183.6. Specifically on the role played by uncertainty in the Arab uprisings of 2010-2011, see Laurent Jeanpierre'sinteresting analysis in “Points d'inflexion des révoltes arabes”, Les Temps modernes, 664, 2011, 63-84.

7. D. McAdam, W. H. Sewell Jr., “It's about time”, 98.8. Alain Corbin, Le village des cannibales (Paris: Aubier, 1990), 55.


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fear to “change sides” and become a mobilizing force? Beyond the sentiment of “frustration”(relative or absolute) felt by many Tunisians, the more general question is knowing howgroups, politicized in different ways and engaging independently in protests against an autho-ritarian regime, were able to “break the silence” together for a certain length of time, to“reverse the feeling of fear”, to abandon party loyalty and move towards political expression,all while facing repression and surveillance operated by a state that had hitherto been consi-dered unshakeable. It is thus less a matter of identifying the causes of social discontent thanthinking about the way protest processes endow some but not all of these causes with rebel-lious enthusiasm, all without predicting the end or the result of the mobilization.1

Drawing on the results of an ethnographic study conducted during 2011 in the region of SidiBouzid (see the methodological appendix), this article will first show that the street, as a publicspace which was gradually and completely conquered and then occupied by protestors, simul-taneously represents the framework, the stakes and the main resource of the movement.2 I willthen examine the practical devices of the transgressive politicization of the event and of desec-torization,3 while studying the relationship between the protest elites, whose formation precedesthe protest movements, and the social groups that are generally kept away from such events.Finally, I will analyze the modes of action which were specific to this first revolutionary situa-tion by considering the respective roles of political and trade union activists and militantnetworks in this process, while emphasizing the key importance of contingent factors.

The street as site of protest

Around 11:30am on 17 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, following an altercation withmunicipal police officers and a complete stonewalling by the governor, a young fruitvendor by the name of Tareq Mohamed Bouazizi, nicknamed Basbus, poured paint

thinner all over himself on Habib Bourguiba Avenue, in front of the governor’s mansion (Pho-tograph 1) and set himself on fire. The protests, marches, sit-ins, gatherings and clashes withthe forces of law and order that ensued in Sidi Bouzid and its environs did not emerge exnihilo: they were the end product of small, daily acts of defiance conducted by the pennilessagainst the legal authorities throughout the past decade, and which escalated in the immediatelypreceding period. These acts were not all explicitly political but did nevertheless engender acertain politicization of the streets: they embody what Asef Bayat has termed “social non-movements”. These phenomena, widespread though occurring in different forms and to varyingdegrees throughout the Arab-Muslim world, have helped since the 1990s to make “the Arabstreet” a hotspot of non-institutional but nonetheless very real political expression. As Bayathas remarked, “the Arab street has been neither ‘irrational’ nor ‘dead’, but it is undergoing amajor transformation caused by both old constraints and new opportunities brought about byglobal restructuring. As a means and mode of expression, the Arab street may be shifting, butthe collective grievance that it conveys remains”.4 The politicization of the streets is in some

1. “Just because [the] revolution has its causes does not mean that its history can be reduced to that of itscauses”. François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Histoire, 1978), 44.

2. Choukri Hmed, “Des mouvements sociaux ‘sur une tête d'épingle’? Le rôle de l'espace physique dans le pro-cessus contestataire à partir de l'exemple des mobilisations dans les foyers de travailleurs migrants”, Politix,84, 2008, 145-65.

3. Michel Dobry, Sociologie des crises politiques. La dynamique des mobilisations multisectorielles (Paris: Pressesde Sciences Po, 3rd edn, 2009), 126ff.

4. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics. How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2010), 220.


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ways the flipside of the depoliticization of the public sphere sought by the authoritarian state,which provokes and encourages what may be termed a “private politicization”: “the state’sattempt to ‘depoliticize’ social bonds produces exactly the opposite effect than the one desired;namely, the ‘overpoliticization’ of the private sphere and its conflicts”.1 This phenomenon ofprivate politicization has also been observed by Béatrice Hibou, who remarks that “the negationof pluralism and otherness prevents serious reflection on the access to citizenship and its exer-cise, allowing Tunisians to be ‘subjects’ or ‘individuals’ but never ‘citizens’, according to theformula generally accepted by the Tunisian opposition [...] In Tunisia, opposition, criticism,dissension, disagreement and anger all exist, of course, but they are forbidden in the publicsphere and thus limited to a forced privatization [...]”.2

For Bayat, the street is political in the sense that “the collective sensibilities, shared feelings, andpublic judgment of ordinary people in their day-to-day utterances and practices [...] areexpressed broadly in the public squares – in taxis, buses, shops, sidewalks, or more audibly inmass street demonstrations”.3 Largely atomized, the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary”4 istypically practiced by social groups particularly weakened by globalization and economic dere-gulation and which consequently have recourse to informal economies: street vendors (likeBouazizi), the unemployed and underemployed, storekeepers, the homeless, etc. For them, thestreets are a space to gather, to hang out, but also to make a living and to air their grievances.The Arab street functions as a “passive network” allowing individuals to meet up, identify witheach other and thus move towards collective action. The latter often takes the shape of “openand fleeting struggles without clear leadership, ideology, or structured organization”.5 These“social non-movements”, in the sense that they lack the capacity to organize disruptions, arenot merely forms of “everyday resistance” as identified by James Scott:6 unlike the latter, socialnon-movements carry (most often material) demands – for jobs, housing, social benefits, etc.– and join or combine with other movements, which are better equipped with resources andhave greater organizational capacities. Consequently, “theirs is not a politics of protest, but ofredress, struggle for an immediate outcome through individual direct action”.7

It is precisely from this point of view that, during the period between 17 December 2010 and14 January 2011, the action of neighborhood youths – a heterogeneous category simultaneouslyincluding young college graduates, unemployed individuals with no qualifications, and thosewith precarious jobs as well as temporary and non-status workers – can be viewed as a strugglefor individual assets which would mark their integration into consumerist society (a stable job,housing, a car, household essentials) and collective assets such as autonomy, political freedomand dignity. This is expressed by a 37-year-old house painter, married with two children andliving in the Al-Khadra projects, unemployed at the time of my study, and who took part inthese night-time clashes:

1. Lahouari Addi cited by H. Bozarslan, “Réflexions sur les configurations révolutionnaires tunisienne et égyp-tienne”, 53

2. Béatrice Hibou, La force de l'obéissance. Économie politique de la répression en Tunisie (Paris: La Découverte,2006, 250-1.

3. A. Bayat, Life As Politics, 212.4. A. Bayat, Life As Politics, 43-65.5. A. Bayat, Life As Politics, 56.6. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, (New Haven, Yale UniversityPress, 1985); La domination et les arts de la résistance (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2008 [1st US edition: 1992]).

7. A. Bayat, Life As Politics, 59.



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“Out of twelve million Tunisians, nine million of us are starving. Because the man who has a car,a grocery store, is he living, does he have anything? He has nothing! Because tomorrow he canlose everything, from one day to the next! This is why the state must help us. Projects, factories...small loans, so that people can live properly... livestock, I don't know, something. I think solutionsexist. The people working for the state, they know all this, they've studied it. They know whichprograms should be implemented. And money would shut everyone up. [...] The poor young people[who participated in the revolution], today they're completely lost. And yet they have ambition. Ichallenge anyone to tell me that these young people don't have ambition. Ok, so it's true that theydrink [alcohol] and hang around... But all they want is a car, a house, to earn a living. And how[could they do that today]? Tell me, how could they?”1

The street thus became a geographic framework: by day, the site of protests,2 sit-ins andother demonstrations which challenged the authorities, and by night, a theater of urbanriots, a kind of political “grey zone”.3 However, a three-fold sociological explanation nuancesthis basic structure. First of all, what we call “the street” should really be pluralized. Clasheswith the police often took place within disadvantaged neighborhoods (the Al-Nur projects,where Bouazizi’s family resided, but also the Awlad Bilhadi and Al-Fra’idjiyya projects tothe west and the Al-Khadra and Al-’Awasi projects to the east), on both sides of the majorroad bisecting them; the main avenues were almost never occupied, as they were deemed astoo wide and dangerous, and therefore unfit for “guerrilla”-like actions.4 Riots and directclashes with the forces of law and order often took place in the rioters’ neighborhoods: thatis to say, in the maze of small alleyways, dead-ends and vacant lots. One of the decisiveelements was the young people’s topographical and spatial mastery of the terrain – unlikethe police, whose local officers were unfailingly recruited outside of the municipality wherethey were to work, and also unlike the Brigades d’ordre public (BOP – Public Order Bri-gades), anti-riot forces whose bases were situated far from Sidi Bouzid.5 These neighborhoodssimultaneously provided the terrain for violent, collective action and the space for radicali-zation. The general movement has been described by Bozarslan, who argues that in theMiddle East and the Maghreb, “if we neglect downtown, once again abandoned to the whimsof power [...], then we overemphasize visible space at the neighborhood level. We thus findourselves involved in a contradictory double process which radicalizes daily life and localrelations while deradicalizing the key sites of power”.6 In the case of Sidi Bouzid (as in otherregions), in addition to strains of Islamist radicalization which appeared after 14 January2011,7 an explosion of juvenile delinquency was witnessed, visible in particular in the exces-sive consumption of alcohol and marijuana.8

1. Interview with Hani Samsar (see above).2. “Street demonstrations, understood as any ‘momentary occupation of an open public or private space byseveral persons, and which directly or indirectly entails the expression of political opinions’, take place on thesame terrain as processional, religious, corporate or celebratory marches, this domain also being that of insur-rection, riots and assembly”. Olivier Fillieule, Danièle Tartakowsky, La manifestation (Paris: Presses de SciencesPo, 2008), 11-12.

3. Javier Auyero, Matthew Mahler, “Relations occultes et fondements de la violence collective”, Politix, 93, 2011,115-39.

4. Collective interviews, Al-Nur projects, 23 July 2011.5. Interview with Walid Abdesselem, Director of the Governor's Cabinet in Sidi Bouzid, 23 April 2011.6. H. Bozarslan, Sociologie politique du Moyen-Orient, 76.7. Since this date, and especially since October 2011, there has been a clear increase in the city of small groupswith Salafist leanings that “hold” a mosque on the outskirts of town, south of the Al-Nur projects, and whichregularly organize more or less violent protests (field notes, July, September and December 2011).

8. Field notes concurred in Kébili, Bizerte and Sidi Bouzid, July 2011.


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A second distinction shows that although the action of “neighborhood youths” was situatedin the city’s projects and far from downtown, on the other hand, large demonstrations andprotests took place on the main streets. While urban riots were by and large made up ofdisadvantaged “hustler youths”,1 daytime demonstrations included young dropouts, but alsoteachers, civil servants, college students, housewives, shopkeepers, etc., all belonging to dif-ferent sectors of the precarious middle classes and thus most affected by the economic crisis.2

Consequently, demonstrations centered on the city’s main east-west artery, Habib BourguibaAvenue, especially its large central square,3 where all of the seats of local power can be found:the governor’s mansion (Photograph 1), the sub-prefecture, town hall, the police and nationalguard stations, the Agricultural Office, the Labor and Regional Development Office, thedistrict court, the post office, Tunisie Telecom and the local offices of the Union généraletunisienne du travail (UGTT - General Tunisian Labor Union). From this point of view, theprotest cycle that began on 17 December 2010 can be seen as an individual and collectiveprocess of re-radicalization, as it were, of the place of power through the use of non-violentbut powerful demonstrations, assemblies and marches.

“So how did things happen at night, these riots? The guys from the projects were on guard, evenordinary people were on guard, and they began to close down the streets at each end, to set tireson fire and insult the cops... The streets would become all grey because of the tear gas, youcouldn't see anything. We couldn't shut down the main road, so we blocked off the side streets sothe cops couldn't get in. We would set tires on fire, as well as pieces of wood we found at construc-tion sites. We threw rocks and provoked the police, calling them sons of wh... The regime made amistake: they brought back the Public Order Brigades and set them up in high schools. And justin front of us [Al-Nur projects], there's a street with middle and high schools on it...they put theminside there [...] One night, the BOPs had gone back to sleep at the high school and there were alot of cop bikes out in front. Everyone had decided upon a program for that night: they threwMolotov cocktails at them, stones... there was nothing left of the high school. So we made lifereally hard for the cops, they couldn't sleep at night and all day they were busy dealing with theprotests... The young people would get drunk every night and then go throw rocks and everythingat the cops. This even encouraged people who didn't drink but hated the cops. At the beginning,it started out as being against the cops as individuals, but it ended up being about challenging theauthorities [as-sulta].”4

Finally, a third distinction can be drawn between guerrilla movements, structured in eachneighborhood on the basis of familial, friendly or neighborly ties and taking the form ofdefiance when faced with police forces, and, on the other hand, demonstrations against theregime, organized, initiated and/or reframed by members of the banned political partiesinvolved in local chapters of the sole union. It is partly due to the actions of these groupsthat the movement was to be politicized, organized and radicalized.

1. Hamza Meddeb, “L'ambivalence de la course à ‘el khobza’. Obéir et se révolter en Tunisie”, Politique africaine,121, 2011, 35-51.

2. Interview with Moez Talbi, high school history teacher, member of the local UGTT chapter, 48 years old, SidiBouzid, 20 April 2011.

3. This square, next to the governor's mansion in front of which Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, wasnamed in honor of the revolution's first martyr in January, before losing this name at the end of April 2011when the Bouazizi family moved to a well-off suburb north of Tunis. For many inhabitants of Sidi Bouzid andactivists in particular, this move was seen as a betrayal. See Isabelle Mandraud, “Le calvaire de la familleBouazizi”, Le Monde, 7 April 2011.

4. Interview with Ismaël Hidouri, college graduate with a management degree, unemployed, 24 years old, SidiBouzid, 23 April 2011.



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Photograph 1. Main entrance to the Governor’s Mansion in Sidi Bouzid in April 2011(site of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation)

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The walls are covered with copies of diplomas belonging to young employed graduates from the region whostarted protesting in March 2011 against the “slowness” with which the provisional government was imple-menting economic reforms. These diplomas were then replaced by tents in July, occupied by a dozen or soactivists from the Union nationale des diplomés chômeurs (UDC - National Union of Unemployed CollegeGraduates). © Choukri Hmed

Transgressive politicization and local desectorization

This local revolutionary process can be understood as linking, in a largely unintentionalmanner, the actions of political activists and local union members with the collectiverioting of neighborhoods, where the young people itching for a fight finally confronted

the police.1 The “global contingency”2 which characterized the event was a factor in theengagement of diverse groups of people, from differentiated social spaces3 which in normalcircumstances functioned autonomously, and which were politicized to varying degrees, in

1. Interview with Ismaël Hidouri, Sidi Bouzid, 21 April 2011.2. William H. Sewell, “Trois temporalités: vers une sociologie événementielle”, in M. Bessin, C. Bidart, M. Grossetti(eds), Bifurcations, 109-46 (131).

3. According to Michel Dobry, “complex systems” are during normal times “broken down into multiple socialscenes, ‘fields’ or autonomous sectors, these being highly institutionalized and endowed with their own sociallogic: in other words, they tend to be self-referential and to deviate from the logic of other sectors” (M. Dobry,“Le politique dans ses états critiques”, 79).


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different types of activities. Suddenly, and then perpetually, these groups were ready andavailable to rally and act together against the symbols of the regime. From this arose a kindof transgressive politicization, in the sense that the channels by which Bouazizi’s act wereconstrued as a political problem almost immediately after its occurrence were neither ins-titutional nor officially recognized, but linked the margins of the political system.

The majority of the protests that took place in Sidi Bouzid, Regueb, Menzel Bouzayane, SoukJedid, Sidi Ali Ben Aoun and Meknassy during this first revolutionary situation were orga-nized – on the ground or at a distance – by local members of the country’s sole nationalunion, largely primary and secondary school teachers with extreme left-wing leanings, whe-ther these be of Arab nationalist inspiration (Nasserites and Baathists) or Trotskyists. Thisis because, until December 2010, the local chapters of the UGTT1 in the Sidi Bouzid gover-norate, much as in the rest of the country, functioned as a sort of “melting pot” primarilycomposed of civil servants, in particular secondary-school teachers.2 Unlike the union’snational leadership, which was largely in cahoots with the regime and which acted as aprovisional negotiator with the latter during the first revolutionary situation (as it had alreadydone during a number of previous social and political crises), for the local union chaptersthis was not their first mobilization under Ben Ali. In 2009, following the Israeli attacks onGaza, union activists had organized protests and “solidarity caravans” for the Palestinianpeople. These protests were mainly joined by middle and high school students, with whomeducators were directly in contact.3 Given the Tunisian government’s rather conciliatoryattitude towards Israel, these protests already presented an important challenge to the autho-rities. Moreover, throughout 2008 UGTT activists continued to organize, support and contri-bute to the “coal miners” movement which had started in Redeyef, about 100 kilometersfrom Sidi Bouzid. The initial demands regarding jobs and the management of the GafsaPhosphate Company gradually escalated into protests against Ben Ali’s regime.4 The “coalminers’ movement” or the “Redeyef uprising” (“intifadat ar-Rdayyaf”), described by mostof the union leaders interviewed as “an aborted revolution” or “the building blocks of 2010”,constituted a bank of activist experiences and representations which were to be particularlyuseful two years later. Indeed, at the end of 2010, following the escalating repression inreaction to the increasingly radicalized protests and clashes in Sidi Bouzid, the network oflocal UGTT chapters throughout the governorate took the initiative of opening up newfronts in neighboring towns such as Menzel Bouzayane and Regueb. Their goal was not onlyto prevent a bloodbath but also to avoid making “2008’s mistakes”: in other words, to stopthe movement from being surrounded and geographically confined by the forces of law andorder.

1. On the role of Tunisia's only national union in the country's social history, cf. Michel Camau and Vincent Geisser,Le syndrome autoritaire. Politique en Tunisie de Bourguiba à Ben Ali (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2003). Onthe UGTT's role after Ben Ali's downfall, see in particular Héla Yousfi, “Ce syndicat qui incarne l'oppositiontunisienne”, Le Monde diplomatique, 704, November 2012, 17-18.

2. The departments of education, the postal service, telecommunications and health have traditionally been thebastions of protest activity within the UGTT, to the extent that some researchers believe in “two UGTTs”. LarbiChouikha, Vincent Geisser, “Retour sur la révolte du bassin minier. Les cinq leçons politiques d'un conflit socialinédit”, L'Année du Maghreb, 6 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010), 415-26.

3. Interview with Lotfi Sinaoui, unemployed, no education, member of Sidi Bouzid's Local Council for the Pro-tection of the Revolution, 27 years old, Sidi Bouzid, 24 April 2011.

4. Amin Allal, “Réformes néolibérales, clientélismes et protestations en situation autoritaire. Les mouvementscontestataires dans le bassin minier de Gafsa (2008)”, Politique africaine, 117, 2010, 107-25; L. Chouikha,V. Geisser, “Retour sur la révolte du bassin minier”. See also the article by Amin Allal in this volume.



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“A few days after 17 December, every day we would get frantic phone calls from our comrades inSidi Bouzid telling us: ‘Do something in your neighborhood, rise up, because otherwise here we're allgoing to die’. We organized stuff with people from the union, those who were used to protestingunder Ben Ali, and we started to mobilize people throughout Menzel Bouzayane, especially youngpeople that we already knew from previous mobilizations. We all agreed that in order to get thepolice's attention and distract them from Sidi Bouzid, we had to attack. So some young people toldus that they would support us if we could cover them while they attacked the national guard station.And this is what happened on 24 December, we had a really big protest on the main avenue and thestation was attacked and burnt to the ground. [Silence] Two young guys lost their lives, shot dead.”1

In January 2011, the Secretary-General of the national union for secondary education, SamiAl Tahiri, confirmed that “when we saw that repression was being focused on Sidi Bouzid,and that a lot of police officers had come from Tunis to provide back-up, we [decided] todiversify the fronts and [we organized] demonstrations in other regions”.2

Concomitantly, certain UGTT leaders have admitted to immediately trying to politicize Boua-zizi’s suicide; in other words, to give general appeal to what may have otherwise seemed tobe an individual form of protest, to “publically demonstrate the political nature of thesuffering endured” by this sort of “violence against oneself”.3 “We told ourselves that weabsolutely had to politicize this act.”4 Without necessarily having to give credence to thisstrategic vision proclaimed after the fact by particularly politicized individuals and thoseused to speaking in public, let us note that the politicization of Bouazizi’s act was alsofacilitated by the fact that a number of similarly desperate acts took place throughout 2010in Sidi Bouzid and elsewhere. Young single men, street vendors or otherwise precariouslyemployed individuals set themselves on fire in front of public buildings after being humiliatedby representatives of the authorities. This was the case in Monastir (on the east coast) inMarch and August 2010, as well as in Bousalem (north-east) and in Metlaoui (100 kilometerssouth-west from Sidi Bouzid) during the summer.5 The same scenario had already occurredin Sidi Bouzid in mid-December, and a few months before Bouazizi,6 the city had seenseveral high-school students publicly attempt suicide by electrocution. Bouazizi’s act wastherefore not “the straw that broke the camel’s back” as was alleged by many commentators,experts and journalists, but rather the first component of an event designed to stir theemotions of activists and the local population.7 First of all, the young fruit vendor was far

1. Interview with Mohamed Ameur, member of the local chapter of primary school teachers (UGTT), 47 years old,Menzel Bouzayane, 22 April 2011.

2. International Crisis Group, “Soulèvements populaires en Afrique du nord et au Moyen-Orient (IV): la voietunisienne”, Rapport Afrique du nord/Moyen-Orient, 106, 2011, 4.

3. Olivier Grojean, “Violences contre soi”, in Olivier Fillieule, Lilian Mathieu, Cécile Péchu (eds), Dictionnaire desmouvements sociaux (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2009), 564-70 (566).

4. Interview with Mounir Salloum, Secretary-General of the local UGTT chapter for primary education in MenzelBouzayane, primary school inspector, 49 years old, Menzel Bouzayane, 21 April 2011.

5. In Bousalem alone, almost ten different suicides were attempted by electrocution during the summer of 2010,involving men between 30 and 40 years old (according to Moez El Bey, a journalist with Radio Kalima). Theburn care unit in Ben Arous (a suburb south of Tunis) recorded almost 280 self-immolation attempts nationallybetween January and October 2010, or 12% of all patients admitted (Lazhar Mejri, Ath-Thawra at-tunisiyya17 disambar 2010 fi jadaliyyat al-taharrur wa-l ihtiwa', Tunis, self-published in Arabic in 2011, 63 [The TunisianRevolution of 17 December 2010: A Dialectics of Liberation and Channeling]).

6. Interview with Amor Ben Hamida, high-school history teacher, blogger, UGTT activist, 53 years old, Sidi Bouzid,18 September 2011.

7. After Bouazizi, public suicide attempts proliferated in Sidi Bouzid. The most famous example is Houcine Néji'selectrocution on 22 December 2010 in front of the delegation's offices, just a hundred meters or so from the


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from being unknown in his city: his highly popular stall was particularly well-situated bet-ween the governor’s mansion, the taxi station and the Grand Mosque; this is precisely whyBouazizi was regularly bothered by the police, as he was on 17 December 2010. Some of hisfriends, university professors, large retailers and also political activists and members of theUGTT used his suicide to generate an event. One of his distant cousins, a member of theProgressive Democratic Party (considered until 2010 as the most radical of the parties tole-rated by the regime), a law school graduate and now the owner of a small grocery store afew meters from the governor’s mansion, was immediately alerted and filmed the entirescene on his cell phone;1 he then transmitted the video to an Al-Jazeera journalist that hewas acquainted with from past activism.2 At the same time, a history teacher who was aself-professed “Facebook-addict since 2007”,3 as well as a member of the UGTT and an Arabnationalist, took on the responsibility of broadcasting the video all over the internet viasocial networks.4 The secretary-general of the national secondary school teachers’ union ofthe UGTT in Sidi Bouzid confirms this:

“We immediately called upon the people to consider this act not as a suicide, but as a true politicalassassination. Bouazizi should be seen as one of the regime's victims.”

Not only were those accompanying Bouazizi to Sfax hospital on the afternoon of 17 DecemberUGTT leaders, but the following day saw the creation, at the urging of local union activists,of a special committee to monitor Bouazizi’s case and investigate the social and economicdimensions it revealed. According to its founders, the role of this committee was to “monitorevents and call upon the authorities to enter into dialogue with representatives of civil societyin order to find solutions to the city’s social problems”.

Ali Zarii, a member of the UGTT’s executive board in Sidi Bouzid as well as its informationofficer was interviewed on the phone by Habib Al Ghribi, a Tunisian journalist from Al-Jazeera on the night of 18 December 2010:

“There were violent clashes between citizens and the police. But what are important to us are thereal causes of this situation and these problems. It all stems from the fact that this region iscompletely devoid of economic infrastructures for employment. In Sidi Bouzid, there are thousandsof unemployed people. As a consequence, there is this depression, this despair, these behaviors,the predominance of nearby cities like Sfax. Indeed, Sidi Bouzid's youth is living through a depres-sion. This depression, this despair, we must address it economically.”Habibi Al-Ghribi: “Following the events, a committee was created, let's talk about concrete things.What is its role and do you have a direct interlocutor? ”

“The committee has a two-fold role. First of all, monitoring the events and supporting our youngpeople. Secondly, inciting the region's leaders to address economic and employment issues. In this

governor's mansion. Suicide attempts by electrocution have become somewhat commonplace since this date(field notes, April, July and September 2011).

1. In 2010, 92% of Tunisians had cell phones (Institut national de la statistique [National Institute of Statistics],Enquête nationale sur la population et l'emploi [National Survey on Population and Employment], Tunis, 2010,36, <http://www.ins.nat.tn>).

2. Interview with Ali Abbassi, 38 years old, Sidi Bouzid, 17 September 2011.3. Interview with Amor Ben Hamida.4. For studies that attempt to sociologize the use of social networks and the internet in the context of theTunisian revolution and activist movements, see Michaël Béchir Ayari, “Non, les révolutions tunisienne et égyp-tienne ne sont pas des ‘révolutions 2.0’”, Mouvements, 66(2), 2011, 56-61; Romain Lecomte, “Internet et lareconfiguration de l'espace public tunisien: le rôle de la diaspora”, tic&société, 3(1-2), 2009,<http://ticetsociete.revues.org/702>.



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perspective, at the UGTT we conducted a study to solve these problems, specifically, the creationof an economic infrastructure to give jobs to our young people, and consequently reduce problemsand reduce the number of interventions by the forces of law and order. The police are not thesolution.”Habib Al-Ghribi: “Have you drawn up a list of grievances for the authorities and are you hopefulthat these events will not just be treated like the coal mining case?”

“We're very hopeful. We haven't yet presented a list of detailed items to the regional authorities.We will do this in the next few days, in collaboration with all sectors of civil society, as well asTunis' central trade union. We will present this list. With regard to meeting our demands, this willdepend on a lot of elements, but we will push the authorities, the state, to address this economicaspect.”1

Despite what the comments made by members of the UGTT may lead us to believe, theconnection between the socio-economic situation and the political order of things wouldnot only be made by members of the trade union, and relationships between inner-cityyouth and union activists would not be free of conflict and mutual apprehension. In fact,on the day of the immolation and those following it, demonstrations assembled in frontof the main entrance to the governor’s mansion. The existence of the committee and itscomposition were the object of much virulent criticism from activists opposed to the“bureaucratic line” taken by the union (in other words, its complicity with the regime)and who condemned an action “which sought to anesthetize the people”.2 As far as I amaware, Mannoubia, Mohamed Bouazizi’s mother, was the only woman to speak publiclyin front of the governor’s mansion, screaming “my son set himself on fire!” (“Rahu wilditahrag!”). Concomitantly, Bouazizi’s friends and relatives as well as members of oppositionpolitical parties and local union leaders3 took turns to condemn the actions of “the state”(“ad-dawla”) and of the “governor” (“al-wali”), and asked to be seen by “those in charge”(“al-mas’ulin”).4 The national anthem was sung, and young people tried to enter thegovernor’s mansion by force. One man yelled: “They have destroyed us, we Hamamma!”5

In a very tense atmosphere, still in front of the governor’s mansion, a lawyer well-knownfor his radical positions vis-à-vis the regime “addresse[d] a message to the governor andthe police” (“and to the President of the Republic!” could be heard in the crowd) in thename of “the protestors” (“al-mu’tasimun”),6 demanding the right to “a life of dignity”(“hayat karima”) and “enough to live”. This lawyer was applauded by a crowd of hundreds,both men and women, under the haggard eyes of the anti-riot troops stationed behind the

1. “Al-Hasad al-Magharibi” TV show, Al Jazeera, 18 December 2010. On the role played by Al Jazeera during the“Arab spring”, see Claire-Gabrielle Talon, Al Jazeera. Liberté d'expression et pétromonarchie (Paris: PUF, 2011).

2. Khaled Aouainyya, lawyer at the court of appeals, 38 years old, during a demonstration in front of Sidi Bouzid'scity council, 18 December 2010 (<http://24sur24.posterous.com/36861483>, accessed on 18 August 2011).

3. See the videos posted on Nawaat on 18 December: http://24sur24.posterous.com/?tag=sidibouzid&page=107and <http://24sur24.posterous.com/?tag=sidibouzid&page=108>, accessed 3 January 2011.

4. Although Mannoubia Bouazizi spoke in dialectical Arabic, the other speakers largely expressed themselves inmiddle Arabic. From this we can deduce that most of the videos posted on the site, which became increasinglynationally and internationally popular as events unfolded, were posted by individuals with high levels ofeducation.

5. See the video posted on YouTube which shows the first demonstration which took place around Bouazizi'sfruit and vegetable stall, after his self-immolation: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x2mdGimsDo>, accessed2 April 2011.

6. The term mu'tasim derives from the root ['sm], meaning prohibition or interdiction, and literally signifies “onewho prevents”. In middle Arabic, the term more generally describes the participant of a sit-in or protest. Thisepithet has become incredibly popular in Tunisia ever since 14 January 2011.


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gates. Here and there, voices could be heard protesting against “the hairdresser” (“al-haj-jama”, or Ben Ali’s wife Leïla Trabelsi), while others tried to pacify the overexcited crowdceaselessly insulting the governor and the police. It was not long before clashes with theforces of order erupted and tear gas was deployed, following the stones and Molotov cock-tails thrown at the governor’s mansion and police vehicles by groups of young men. Veryrapidly, political leaders were singled out by the protestors: as early as the afternoon of18 December a car belonging to the party in power was burned by protestors (with nounion involvement) in front of the local Ralliement Constitutionnelle Démocratique (RCD- Constitutional Democratic Rally)1 headquarters and then raised as a trophy (Figure 1).Barricades were erected all over the place by groups of youths using stones, traffic signsand fences. Tires and trashcans were burned in the streets, while calls to “strike the autho-rities” (“al-hakim”), insults against the police and chants of “Allahu akbar” multiplied.2

These scenes were filmed on digital cameras or cellphones and then uploaded to Facebook.3

The following day, back-up was sent to the city and the police proceeded to arrest dozensof protestors who refused to leave. To the dismay of the authorities, these arrests merelyfanned the flamers of protest further, bringing together groups that did not typicallyencounter one other much, if at all. As early as 19 December, lawyers backing UGTT acti-vists – acting independently, without orders from the Bar Council4 – demanded the releaseof those arrested. They organized a protest in the name of “We want, we want our pri-soners’ freedom!” (“shaddin, shaddin, fi-sarah al-mu’taqlin!”), where they were joined bylocal residents, as well as neighbors or relatives of the so-called suspects. With this demons-tration, different groups found various ways to express their bitterness towards a state theydeemed to be corrupt, hostile to freedom and incapable of guaranteeing them “a life ofdignity” (one of the demonstrations’ leitmotifs). The coming together of these heteroge-neous social groups was permitted and facilitated by contingent factors as well as by pre-vious activist experiences which determined and shaped their modes of action.

Contingency, protest history and modes of action

Desectorization and the transgressive politicization of the suicidal gesture were also madepossible by contingent factors which, on the one hand, allowed for the mobilizationof different segments of the population that could participate in collective action (some

of whom already had experience of previous protest activity) and, on the other hand, the reuseof modes of action likely to encourage and sustain momentum in the mid-term.

Two temporal factors created conditions favorable to “interrelated contingencies – [in otherwords] a linkchain of events in which the outcome of one link became an important initialcondition for another”.5 Firstly, Saturday 18 December– the day after Bouazizi’s suicide

1. <http://24sur24.posterous.com/36859852>.2. <http://24sur24.posterous.com/36859632>.3. In 2010, 17.5% of the population had access to an internet connection (source: Institut national de la statistique,Enquête nationale sur la population et l'emploi, 36). As of February 2011, more than 20% of the Tunisianpopulation (or almost 2.2 million people) used Facebook. This percentage is one of the highest in Africa andthe Arab world (source: <http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/>, accessed on 31 March 2011).

4. Éric Gobe, “Les avocats dans la Tunisie de Ben Ali: économie politique d'une profession juridique”, Droit etsociété, 79, 2011, 733-57.

5. Mark R. Beissinger, “Mechanisms of Maidan: the structure of contingency in the making of the Orange Revo-lution”, Mobilization, 16(1), 2011, 23-43 (26).



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Figure 1. Image posted on Nawaat 19 December 2010

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The badly-damaged vehicle being pushed by protestors belongs to the local RCD and symbolizes the slogan:“Jobs are our rights, you band of thieves”, written in Arabic on top of “Sidi Bouzid”. In the top left, there isan ironic inscription: “Global Year of Youth”, an official celebration of Ben Ali’s regime in 2010. Source:<http://www.nawaat.org>, <http://24sur24.posterous.com/derniers-developpements-a-sidi-bouzidtroisie>, 19December 2010.

attempt – was Sidi Bouzid’s weekly market day. As the largest market in the region and thesecond-largest in the country, it regularly brings thousands of customers, most of whom comewith their families,1 to within a few hundred meters of the governor’s mansion and the maintaxi station: precisely where this incident took place. The market thus represented an invaluableresource for activists, as it allowed for the rapid circulation of information and rumors throug-hout this relatively modest-sized agricultural town. Much like the Hautefaye fair, scene of theBaron de Monéys’ murder on 16 August 1870, the temporary gathering created by the market“expands the space of verbal exchange; [it] distracts from the somewhat oppressive closeness of

1. Field notes, April and July 2011.


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the village community, where everyone knows each other. Hence information that goes beyondthe context of neighborly relations can be transmitted and debated”.1 Secondly, this same Saturdaywas also the first day of school vacation, which meant that a large number of college studentsreturned home to their families – Sidi Bouzid only possessing one institution of higher education– but also that thousands of middle and high school students were now free to join the move-ment. The last day of classes before winter break was used by a number of activists to encouragestudents to participate in an afternoon protest.2 Local UGTT leaders and activists who met inan ad hoc committee parallel and simultaneous to the first one discreetly instigated protests inwhich several debuted the slogan that would come to achieve national success: “Jobs are ourright, you band of thieves” (At-tashghil itsihqaq ya ‘isabat as-surraq”). First pronounced duringthe protest of 18 December, the slogan was then picked up the following day on activist sitessuch as Nawaat (Figure 1), thanks to already-established connections between certain activistsand the blogger community in Tunisia and abroad.3 Therefore, we must conclude that theconnection between social and political demands was made at the very beginning of this narrative,in the immediate aftermath of the self-immolation and during the very first protests it sparkedin the city. It has been suggested that several local UGTT leaders were behind the rumor thatdescribed Bouazizi as an “unemployed college graduate”. This rumor, perpetuated in order toallow the greatest number and variety of people to identify with the martyr, operated perfectlyat the national and international level – at least until 30 December 2010. That evening, duringa television show devoted to Sidi Bouzid on Nessma TV, Bouazizi’s sister confirmed that he hadachieved “a 7th year level” in secondary school, or in other words a baccalaureate.4 An unprece-dented event in Tunisia, the show played a decisive role in the revolutionary process, as viewerssaw it as an additional sign of the regime’s weakness and an opportunity to act.5

The tactics of mobilization used throughout this first revolutionary situation were in largepart inherited from previous protest movements and seasoned UGTT activists, a majorityof whom had attended university during the 1980s and thus lived through the repression ofthe student movement (led mainly by the UGET, the General Union of Tunisian Students,but also the General Tunisian Union of Students, the UGTE,6 with Islamic leanings) underBourguiba and immediately after Ben Ali’s “bloodless coup d’état” in 1987.7 This is thesentiment expressed by this 40-something doctor, a father of two, an activist affiliated withthe Islamist party Ennahda and a member of the Local Council for the Protection of theRevolution in Sidi Bouzid (a sort of public safety committee created after 14 January 2011):

“We're the children of 1985, we were university or high school students under Bourguiba, we werepolitical – because Bourguiba, even if he was a dictator, at least there was a little room for freedom,you could be a nationalist, or a socialist... lots of different options. There was a political life, a veryrich one! A young 16 year-old, at the time he could say ‘I've got a political idea, I'm going to take

1. A. Corbin, Le village des cannibales, 77.2. Interview with Ali Yousfi, educator, member of the UGTT and an activist for the Front démocratique pour letravail et les libertés [Democratic Front for Work and Freedom], 52 years old, Sidi Bouzid, 22 July 2011.

3. Interview with Slim Hmidane, university professor and blogger, 38 years old, Tunis, 19 September 2011.4. Special edition on Sidi Bouzid which included Nessma journalists as well as Tunisian human rights activists.5. Doug McAdam, Sydney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2001).

6. Adel Thabti, Al-Ittihad al-'Amm al-Tunusi lit-Talaba. Khalfiyyat at-Ta'sis wa Ma'alat al-Masar [The GeneralTunisian Union of Students. The origins of its creation and its future paths.] (Tunis: MIP, 2011) (in Arabic).

7. On this period, see among others Michaël Béchir Ayari, “S'engager en régime autoritaire. Gauchistes et isla-mistes dans la Tunisie indépendante”, doctoral thesis in political science, Aix-en-Provence, Institut d'étudespolitiques [Institute of Political Studies], 2009.



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political action’. Under Ben Ali, obviously, that wasn't possible. There was no [public] politicalactivity. A political conscience, that, yes of course. The young students who became politicallyactive under Bourguiba, well under Ben Ali, they shut their mouths, but they kept their convictions,their books. Young activists continued to be political, but it was in the shadows. But they remainedactive! Their wives, they politicized them, their kids too. My kids are political! They can analyzeany political situation or event! For example, when they see the Palestinian President [MahmoudAbbas], they say ‘traitor’. Do you understand? Their whole lives, they've heard their father say‘what a traitor, that foreign agent’... When we saw Ben Ali on TV, we'd call him the ‘donkey’

(‘al-bhim’)!”1

Contingency also played a role at a different level, insofar as the reuse of previous proteststrategies, which moved out of the shadows into the light of day as more and more of thelocal population got involved, only took shape and gained meaning in the specific contextof 2010. On the one hand, some trade union networks had been able to create ties outsideof the education world shortly before this and thus to lay the groundwork for the desecto-rization which started to take place locally as early as 17 December 2010 (without, however,consciously deciding upon this strategy ex ante). During the course of 2010, a movement ofsmall farmers protesting against expropriations resulting from their excessive indebtednessorganized themselves in Sidi Bouzid and Regueb (in the former town, Bouazizi was himselfimplicated; his family owns a plot of land in the latter). Not only did union leaders financiallysupport these farmers, they also helped them to organize a relatively important sit-in in frontof the governor’s mansion. Earlier, during the 2006 Libyan war or, as we have seen, duringIsrael’s attacks on Gaza in 2009, extreme left-wing educators took their students for a “fieldtrip” in the streets of Sidi Bouzid and other neighboring towns. In addition to a few scatteredprotests, caravans of solidarity with Gaza and medicine fund-raising efforts were organized,thus mobilizing residents “who were not in the habit of protesting”.2 In particular, studentsorganized by their teachers formed human chains that spelt out slogans such as “Gaza” or“Anger” (Photograph 2). Such performances would also be repeated in 2010–2011 in highschools upon return from vacation and adapted to the Tunisian situation (“No to murder”).These images were particularly well suited for circulation via social networks (Photograph 3).

Moreover, UGTT leaders and key activists had “learnt one of the lessons”3 of the coal miners’movement in 2008: they would avoid appearing at the head of demonstrations, try not tobe singled out and repressed, but also “establish solid relationships” between union members,lawyers and the population at large in order to break with the geographic isolation whichtheir predecessors foresaw. These different elements, connected by the neighborhood youth’smastery of urban spaces, encouraged the transmission of know-how deemed to be “strategic”from activists to groups who were just discovering repression: how to mitigate the effects oftear gas, spare public buildings, break apart sidewalks, build barricades and predict thereactions of the forces of law and order.

1. Interview with Rafiq Mosbah, 43 years old, Sidi Bouzid, 20 April 2011.2. Interview with Abdelhaq Mimouni, Sidi Bouzid, 21 April 2011.3. Interview with Mohamed Ameur, cited.


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Photograph 2. Human chain: “Anger”, Bourguiba Pioneer School, Tunis, January 2009

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Photograph 3. Human chain: “No to Murder”, Preparatory School for Engineers,Tunis, 10 January 2011

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“Since the number of protestors just kept increasing, the police's mistake was badly handling thesituation. Because the tear gas made some people flee and caused a lot of mayhem. So unionmembers like me, we taught the young people and protestors how to protect themselves againsttear gas (‘krumujan’). These people didn't even know what tear gas was, they had only seen it onTV, never in real life. I personally taught these young people how they had to send the tear gasbomb back at the police, and that, the police hadn't predicted. I must say that there were also anumber of natural factors that were against the forces of order and in our favor, because whenthey attacked us with gas, well, the wind blew the gas right back in their faces, because in thewinter, the dominant wind in Sidi Bouzid is a westerly wind and we were coming from the west(from the Al-Nur projects).”1

“I remember that we distributed little vials of perfume so that people could sniff them when therewas tear gas thrown, it's a technique that I learned at university [in the 1980s in Sfax]. We camewith lots of bottles of milk for those who fainted.”2

Young people from all the different projects – Al-Nur, Awlad Bilhadi, Al-Fra’idjiyya andAl-Khadra – would meet in the city’s cafés during the afternoon to decide on the evening’splans: which neighborhood they would target and what weapons they would use (burningtires, throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails, insults, etc.). Come night-time, phone calls andtext messages allowed them to quickly cover a lot of ground, especially since these individualsknew the geography and the inhabitants of these neighborhoods well.

“In order to avoid violent clashes with the police, the young people changed tactics and createdzones of tension in different parts of the city. The rebellion had to become mobile.”3

“Young people would get together and decide on a course of action, quickly, like at 7 o'clock atnight, we would burn tires at the intersection of this road and that road. Young people of all ages,17 years old, or married like me, with or without kids. Personally, I didn't even think about [whetheror not to get involved].”4

The longevity of this “mobile revolution” – whose playful and provocative aspects are revealedin testimonies gathered a few months later – was carefully coordinated with the daytimeactivities and thus caught off-guard the unofficial local surveillance units, affiliated with theRCD, as well as the anti-riot troops (despite the fact that these were massively present inthe city and its environs). The former, allied with various leaders from dozens of the party’scells criss-crossing Sidi Bouzid, organized demonstrations in support of Ben Ali, for exampleon the night of 13 January – the eve of his flight – following the president’s speech ontelevision wherein he announced an end to repression, his stepping down from power in2014, an end to press censorship and a drop in the prices of staple goods. These demons-trations provoked deep dismay in the hearts of activists and neighborhood participants. Thisfather, who had never protested before December 2010 and does not belong to any party,remembers the situation with tears in his eyes:

1. Interview with Moez Talbi.2. Interview with Mohamed Ameur.3. A lawyer in Sidi Bouzid interviewed in February 2011 by members of the Council of the World Social Forumscomposed of 34 trade unionists, representatives of non-profit organizations, activist and political leaders(notably Cedetim, FIDH, Les Verts Europe écologie, LDH, ATMF) and journalists.(<http://www.reseau-ipam.org/spip.php?page=imprime_dossier&complete=oui&id_rubrique=708>).

4. Interview with Hani Samsar.


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“We all listened to this horrible speech. We told ourselves, ‘It's not possible, people can't possiblybelieve this stuff’. We heard the RCD's boats and the surveillance planes (‘al-qwwada’), honking inthe streets and then I told myself, ‘It's over. The people have been tricked. We're fucked.’ Then Ipulled myself together. I told myself that whatever, I would go outside and we'll see what happens,I would never be able to live under Ben Ali, with the RCD, corruption and everything, after thedeaths of all our martyrs. And too bad if I was alone. So I went out into the street and headedtowards the main avenue and there... [pause, he sobs] there I think was the most beautiful day ofmy life, the day I will always remember. I found myself surrounded by people who had thought thesame things as me and come to the same conclusion. We found each other, in disbelief, in frontof all the others [RCD activists] and thank God, there were a thousand times more of us. We hadwon, and another night of fighting was about to start.”1

The fact that, at the beginning, the forces of law and order had presumably received ordersnot to shoot real bullets at the crowd, realistically encouraged more individuals to participateand discover that they were protestors, rioters, or a little bit of both. Unlike in nearby citiessuch as Regueb, Meknassy and Menzel Bouzayane, there were no fatal shootings in SidiBouzid during this entire period. This is not to suggest that clashes were not at times incre-dibly violent and grueling for those involved. The relatively intense use of tear gas bombsshocked the local population, who by and large was not familiar with this form of repressionand who discovered, during the course of the events, that the gas used was out of date orhad been designed for “neutralizing wild animals”.2 Gunshots caused a significant numberof people to be wounded, including small children. Similarly, police brutality showed norestraint towards women: in Menzel Bouzayane, following a demonstration on 24 Decemberand the arson attack on a national guard station, anti-riot police entered into homes atrandom, destroying everything inside and brutalizing the predominantly female inhabitants.3

The repression that rained upon inhabitants and activists indiscriminately thus contributedto the movement’s radicalization and prompted its spread to surrounding cities, then neigh-boring provinces such as Kasserine, before finally reaching the popular suburbs of thecountry’s capital at the beginning of 2011.

** *

In this article, I have tried to establish the basis for a specific narrative that remains tobe written: the ethnography of local processes of desectorization and the transformabilityof political circumstances. As this article was written while the outcome of the Tunisianrevolution was still unknown, it was essential not to reiterate the mistakes and contra-dictions of spontaneous sociology when it attempts to account for the conditions in whichcrises are born, individuals and groups are mobilized, a regime falls or an event takesshape. As we have shown, only empirical research can allow us to go beyond the “enig-matic aspect” of what many analysts have described as the “sudden onset of a series ofexplosions amid populations that had already weathered so many others”.4 The mainadvantage of this approach resides in studying in vivo and in situ “the contingent and

1. Interview with Amor Nsiri, house painter, 56 years old, Al-Nur projects, Sidi Bouzid, 24 September 2011.2. Interviews with Hani Samsar and Abdelhaq Mimouni.3. Private videos taken by Mounir Salloum.4. Frédéric Charillon, “Les bouleversements arabes: leçons, espoirs et interrogations”, Questions internationales,53, 2012, 8-17 (10).



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unpredictable nature of the Revolution – and perhaps of all major historical movements”.1

Reconsidering, as I have done here, the demonstrations and protest movements initiallyconfined to the city and region of Sidi Bouzid has first and foremost allowed us to gobeyond the treacherous opposition between the “spontaneity” and the “organization” ofa movement, an opposition which still unfortunately undermines much scholarship. Spon-taneity, if this term must be used, means that social groups who become mobilized dowhat their members have always done, with means and within a context which none-theless change, and alter their perceptions, and thus feed into a process of alignment.2

Secondly, this perspective led me to pose anew questions regarding causality, the respec-tive roles of structural dimensions, activist networks, previous protest experiences andcontingency. For “taking into account the randomness, the fortuitous nature of an eventor of a series of events does not signify capitulating before history or social science, andthe unpredictable nature of this revolutionary outbreak can also be assumed”.3 Thirdly,what was at stake was showing what rules governed the transformation of configurationsof actors and groups, but also under what constraints and in what spatio-temporalcontexts these transformations can crystalize and acquire meaning. We thus discover justhow much what we call a revolution is “neither [...] purely an accident, the product ofrandom circumstances, nor [...] an absolutely necessity whose form and timing are logi-cally inscribed into its very causes”.4 As an event embedded within social, political andcognitive structures, it nevertheless provokes a breakdown in intelligibility whose rationalewe need to reconstruct and whose differential effects must be measured. For good reason:“the moments before and after an event preserve their own temporal quality and, in thelong term, can never be completely reduced to the event’s conditions. Each event givesbirth simultaneously to both more and less than what was contained in its initial cir-cumstances: hence, its newness surprises us every time. In short, we must further nuancethe opposition between events and structures or rituals”.5

Nuancing this opposition remains of course doubly partial. Firstly, because desectorizationwas not only local, but also national; and secondly, because it did not come to an end withthe president’s flight from the country. In fact, desectorization rapidly accelerated after27 December 2010, on the occasion of a demonstration organized in Tunis in front of thenational UGTT headquarters and which relayed the social and political demands formulatedin Sidi Bouzid and mobilized new social groups. Between 8 and 10 January 2011, violentclashes between police forces and protestors caused dozens of deaths and many morewounded in Kasserine and Thala, two centre-west cities about 100 kilometers from SidiBouzid. The president of the Republic intervened directly in the media several times tocondemn the “extremist conspiracy” and to promise the creation of hundreds of thousandsof jobs. The protest movement’s official recognition by the highest authority of the state,coupled with the escalation of repression, met with opposition from union headquarters,whose executive board had gradually been breaking away from the regime. The union head-quarters organized general strikes between 12 and 14 January in different cities around thecountry; the last one, in Tunis, involved hundreds of thousands of protestors and concluded

1. Timothy Tackett, Le roi s'enfuit. Varennes et l'origine de la Terreur (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), 155.2. Ivan Ermakoff, Ruling Oneself Out. A Theory of Collective Abdications (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008);and “Theory of practice, rational choice and historical change”, Theory and Society, 39, 2010, 527-53.

3. Jocelyne Dakhlia, Tunisie. Le pays sans bruit (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011), 88-9.4. Roger Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la Révolution française (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 205.5. Alban Bensa, Éric Fassin, “Les sciences sociales face à l'événement”, Terrain, 38, 2002, 5-20.


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with the president’s decision to temporarily leave the country for Saudi Arabia. But desec-torization did not come to an end with his flight, quite to the contrary: protests against theprovisional government composed of Ben Ali’s former ministers cropped up in the “interior”regions and inaugurated a second revolutionary situation (the so-called “Kasbah” move-ments). Both political and social demands – calls for jobs, the right to dignity and thedismissal of former elites from the RCD – continued to punctuate Tunisian political life,including after elections for the National Constituent Assembly were held, thus ushering ina new relationship to politics and new protest movements.1,2.

Choukri Hmed

Choukri Hmed is an Assistant Professor in political science at the Université Paris-Dauphine and aresearcher at the Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire en sciences sociales (IRISSO - InterdisciplinaryResearch Institute for the Social Sciences, UMR CNRS 7170). He recently co-edited “Observer lesmobilisations” a special issue for Politix, 24(93), 2011 and has also published: “Les mouvements sociauxet la politisation de l’argent public”, in Philippe Bezes, Alexandre Siné (eds), Gouverner (par) les financespubliques (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2011), 225–62; (with S. Laurens) “Résistances à l’institution-nalisation”, in Jacques Lagroye, Michel Offerlé (eds), Sociologie de l’institution (Paris: Belin, 2011),131–48; and (with Hélène Combes, Lilian Mathieu, Johanna Siméant, Isabelle Sommier) “Observer lesmobilisations. Retour sur les ficelles du métier de sociologue des mouvements sociaux”, Politix, 24(93),2011, 9–27. His research interests include the socio-history of immigration in France and the sociologyof social movements (Université Paris-Dauphine, IRISSO, Bureau P 411, place du Maréchal de Lattrede Tassigny, 75775 Paris Cedex 16, <[email protected]>).

Methodological appendix

The field survey took place over the course of 2011 during four different visits in April, July,September and December, primarily in the city of Sidi Bouzid proper, in Menzel Bouzayane(60 km away), Regueb (37 km) and Sidi Ali Ben Aoun (55 km). Trying to understand thedesectorization process based on the lived experiences of individuals and groups meant thatI had to focus on local observation and explore the consequences and regional scope ofMohamed Bouazizi’s suicide attempt, identified by many as the phenomenon that set offthe Tunisian revolution and the “Arab Spring”. On the one hand, a local scale seemed themost appropriate for diachronically outlining interactions between activist groups, the forcesof law and order, administrations, political groups and union members and leaders, as wellas the space-time of the protests, thus being able to sociologize “the strength of the event”.3

On the other hand, the small number of field studies conducted on Tunisia’s revolutionary

1. Choukri Hmed, “‘Si le peuple un jour aspire à vivre, le destin se doit de répondre’. Apprendre à devenir révo-lutionnaire en Tunisie”, Les Temps modernes, 664, 2011, 4-20.

2. The research which forms the basis of this article was made possible by the support of the Université deParis-Dauphine and the IRISSO (UMR 7170). In particular, I would like to thank my friend and colleague HèlaYousfi, an expert in the field of Tunisian politics and social movements, as well as Mounia Bennani-Chraïbi, AssiaBoutaleb, Michel Camau, Michel Dobry, Olivier Fillieule, Kevin Geay, Laurent Jeanpierre, Abir Kréfa, JohannaSiméant and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments on previous versions of this text.

3. Stéphane Latté, “La ‘force de l'événement’ est-elle un artefact? Les mobilisations de victimes au prisme desthéories événementielles de l'action collective”, Revue française de science politique, 62(3), 2012, 409-32.



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and political transition have been confined to the capital, and quite often to francophoneelites and/or activists, thus de facto excluding an analysis of the key actors of the revolutionaryprocess and relegating them to the sidelines as enigmatic or minor players.1 Moreover, oneof the major advantages of doing research in the field resides in the ability to modify andupdate a certain number of conflicts and rivalries regarding the definition of a “revolution”and events that are appropriate for symbolizing it. Consequently, while political organiza-tions, the provisional government and the media have collectively referred to the “14 January2011 Revolution”, identifying the event as the demonstration which took place in front ofthe Ministry of the Interior on Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis and marking this date inofficial history,2 Sidi Bouzid’s population and activists commonly speak of the “17 December2010 Revolution”. The “First Festival Commemorating the Revolution of 17 December” tookplace in Sidi Bouzid on the 16-19 December 2011, precisely to rectify this “historical error”.3

Until the end of December 2010, protests began in and were largely confined to the city andregion of Sidi Bouzid. In addition, this governorate saw the first victims of repression: MenzelBouzayane’s demonstration on 24 December killed one and wounded dozens of others. Itthus seemed essential to me to study the “other Tunisia”, which is often referred to as the“interior” and seen by coastal inhabitants as a region of “archaism, darkness, poverty, inse-curity, conflict, division, tribalism and selfishness”.4 The enclave of Sidi Bouzid is markedby rural, agricultural activity (the region produces 30% of all Tunisia’s fruits and vegetables,as well as half of the nation’s dairy production)5 and, unlike neighboring Gafsa, by an absenceof industrial activity. The administrative center of the region is in reality a small town ofabout 40,000 inhabitants, set back from the coast (260km from Tunis; 150km from Sfax,the country’s second-largest city) as well as the main transit routes. It is one of Tunisia’spoorest provinces and suffers from high rates of illiteracy (35% of the population), unem-ployment (especially among young college graduates) and emigration.6 Sidi Bouzid’s inha-bitants, like Kasserine’s (pop. 76,000) and more generally, those hailing from what the

1. This comment is not limited to Tunisia in 2011 but can be made about transitological studies in general, which,in the case of the Middle East, not only focus on macro-sociological or institutional processes, but also tend toignore local contexts. Joel Beinin, Frédéric Vairel (eds), Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation inthe Middle East and North Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 7. Certain documentaries madeabout the Tunisian Revolution have also adopted this perspective, for example Mourad Bencheikh's Plus jamaispeur (2011).

2. One of Tunis' central squares, a few hundred meters from the Ministry of the Interior on Habib BourguibaAvenue, which was named for the 7 November 1987 (the coup d'état which put Ben Ali in power), was renamed14 January 2011 Square a few weeks after the regime fell. The 14 January also became a national holiday(“Celebration of the Revolution and Youth”) as of 17 March 2011.

3. Interview with Mongi Abbas, member of the Festival's organizing committee, Sidi Bouzid, 16 and 17 December2011.

4. B. Hibou, La force de l'obéissance, 248.5. Data provided by the Agence de promotion de l'industrie et de l'innovation (Agency for Innovation and thePromotion of Industry [Tunis]): <http://www.tunisianindustry.nat.tn>, accessed 22 May 2011.

6. According to a ranking established in 2010 by the Union des diplômés chômeurs (Union of Unemployed CollegeGraduates) and cited in the weekly magazine Jeune Afrique, “the city of Sidi Bouzid holds [...] the nationalrecord for the number of college graduates who are unemployed: 8,000 individuals, which is much greater thanKasserine (6,000), Jendouba (5,500), Mednine (5,000) and Siliana (4,000)” (Cherif Ouazani, “Sidi Bouzid, centjours après”, Jeune Afrique, 2623-2624, 2011, 58). A survey conducted on a cohort of 4,763 higher educationgraduates in 2004, a year and a half later and then three years later, showed, among other things, that threeyears after obtaining their degrees, 29% of young people aged 18 to 29 were unemployed. Young people fromthe Sidi Bouzid region were generally 1.31 times more likely to be unemployed three years after getting theirdegree than residents of Tunis (Tunisia's Ministry of Employment and Youth Integration (Tunisia) and the WorldBank's The Dynamics of Employment and Adequacy of Training Among University Graduates, 2009, 11 and 73).


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capital’s residents called the “08” regions (in reference to the north-west telephone area code)or “KJB” (Kasserine, Jendouba, Béja) are subject to marked social contempt. Associated withnomadic populations, which are thought to be lawless, the vast majority of people living inthe country’s western provinces occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder.

In total, I completed about 60 interviews, some of which were repeated, with the inhabitantsof neighborhoods or towns that were particularly involved in the rebellion, with unionactivists (local UGTT leaders, essentially from the primary and secondary school base union),with members of political parties (extreme left-wing, Arab nationalist, Ennahda), as well asformer leaders of the RCD (the party previously in power), representatives from the centralstate and members of Comités locaux de protection de la révolution(CLPR - local committeesfor the protection of the revolution), formed after 14 January 2011. These interviews, allconducted in dialectical Arabic, addressed individuals’ activities from 17 December 2010,their degree of politicization, their political socialization, and, if applicable, their activisthistory, their interpretation of the events and their understanding of the current situation,both locally and nationally. In addition, the interviews were supplemented by the observationof a dozen or so protests, demonstrations, sit-ins against the provisional government, localCLPR sessions, meetings organized by political parties during the election campaign andevents commemorating the Revolution. Finally, I also analyzed videos about mobilizationsin Sidi Bouzid and its environs which were posted between 17 December and 14 January onthe main Tunisian opposition website, Nawaat.



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Documents

Abeyance networks, contingency and structures