Crises of Authority in the Arab World: Readings from Contemporary Tunisia

Antonio Gramsci’s thought has increasingly inspired the study of the contemporary MENA, reaching far beyond the complex and specific details of politics, history, and culture in which his writings are steeped. Taking the cue from a new generation of Gramscian research, this article provides an additional temporal and geographical test case for such critical scholarship. Through primary and secondary sources, it deploys a Gramscian toolkit to empirically explore the first post-2011 uprisings decade in Tunisia. It argues that the country is mired in an ‘interregnum’ condition due to the combined effect of a ‘crisis of authority’ from above and lacking viable alternatives from below. Since opposing masses advanced disorganized yet revolutionary claims, leadership hinging on consensus to pursue ‘great political feats’—from delivering substantive democracy through political and socio-economic change to navigating the country during Covid-19—continued to fail. Whereas protests persistently pointed to the distance between political elites and the ‘people,’ the hyper-homogenizing look at the latter unmasked citizenry’s lack of cohesion and homogeneity. This ‘double fragmentation’ of the ruling—and, eventually, dominant—classes and the subaltern groups adds to the unbridged disjoin between them for the crisis to persist, and thus reopens the way to coercion.