The Architecture of Docility: Digital Platforms, Post-Revolutionary North Africa, and the Foucault–Bauman Dispositif

This article traces a single, three-stage argument. It begins by documenting, with empirical precision, how digital platforms functioned as genuine instruments of horizontal mobilization during the North African uprisings of 2010–2012. It then analyses how those same platforms were rapidly incorporated into new and frequently more sophisticated architectures of social control, transforming what had been emancipatory tools into what Foucault would call dispositifs of docility. Finally, it asks what theoretical apparatus is adequate to comprehend this transition—and argues that the most productive framework is a deliberate synthesis of Foucault’s analytics of biopower and disciplinary normalization with Bauman’s diagnosis of liquid modernity. The contribution of Bauman is not merely decorative: his account of how solid disciplinary confinement mutates under liquid conditions into consensual, self-administered surveillance explains precisely why the digital panopticon is so much more difficult to resist than its institutional predecessors. The article also examines the epistemological dimensions of this subjection, attending to the structural marginalization of non-Western knowledge traditions through the normative alignment filters of Large Language Models. The argument is organized as a continuous analytical thread, not as a review of theoretical positions, and concludes with implications for decolonial critical theory.