Abstract
The 2010–2011 uprisings in Tunisia exemplify the mutually reinforcing discourses on redistribution—the expansion of socio-economic rights—and recognition, with claims of personal dignity and social esteem. In 2010–2011, these narratives have been framed together and have generated significant mobilizations, something which in successive waves of protests has failed to materialize to the same extent. This chapter looks at how struggles for redistribution are locked into struggles for recognition by examining the politics of informality in marginal areas of the country. In those areas, standard social injustice claims are coupled with frustration over a lack of recognition and, in particular, of alternative visions of the state and state-society relations. The chapter also claims that the post-2011 political system has failed to accommodate injustice in a transformative way, that is, modifying the modes of production and eradicating the origins of the distributive injustice. While the state has been limiting its action to providing some form of affirmative remedies that do not impact upon the underlying conditions these inequalities stem from, social unrests continue to occur.
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Notes
- 1.
The data here presented are excerpts from the authors’ fieldwork researches. Stefano Pontiggia spent ten months in Tunisia in 2014, of which seven in the Southwest, during his work for the Ph.D. program in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Ferrara. He realized nonstructured and semi-structured interview, but the main part of the data were collected during several hours of observation and participation in the social activities of the inhabitants. Ruth Hanau Santini has carried out fieldwork in Tunisia from the spring of 2011, and in the southern area in November 2015, when she conducted a dozen semi-structured interviews in Medenine, Tataouine, and Zarzis.
- 2.
In 2015, unemployment touched 15% as national average, but reaching 22% in the Southeast and 26% in the Southwest. Even within these three broad areas, there have been significant gaps among internal cities such as Tataouine (30%) and coastal ones such as Monastir (6%).
Informal economy represents between 35% and 50% of Tunisian gross domestic product (GDP), while illegal economy reaches 2.5% of the overall GDP. Informal economic trade revolves around the smuggling of tobacco, petrol, clothes, and electronics.
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Hanau Santini, R., Pontiggia, S. (2019). Informality and State-Society Relations in Post-2011 Tunisia. In: Polese, A., Russo, A., Strazzari, F. (eds) Governance Beyond the Law. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05039-9_13
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