Current Legacies of Colonial Violence and Racialization in Tunisia

This special section deals with the important question of what connects racialized brutality in various places and times across former colonial entities. In contexts where colonial and imperialist interventions persist, for example in Palestine or Iraq, it is easy to make sense of the systematic brutality and violence against local Arab populations through references to past norms of exception. For example, in Palestine, the British laws of exception (the so-called Military or Defence Emergency Regulations) are continuous with Israeli practices in historical Palestine.¹ Old colonial mapping and intromissions, with their overemphasis on "sectarian" dif erentiation, for example in Iraq af er the US intervention in 2003 and the extraordinary power of the Provisional Authority, are here to haunt our present.²

It is harder to draw these direct connections in countries that gained independence decades ago and have ascertained "legitimate" authority over their population af er formal decolonization. This short article tries to build the historical record in the case of Tunisia. As a French protectorate (1881–1956) Tunisia managed to obtain its autonomy without having to pay the enormous price of a war of independence like its Algerian neighbor. Yet the historical process, which I call the uneven distribution of violence—a historical processes that connects the colonial past to current practices of military repression and symbolic violence—is also at play in Tunisia. The uneven distribution of violence refers to three dif erent processes. The first instance resides in the actual use of violence and repression by coercive institutions (police, army) in a given country: some political subjects are more exposed to physical violence than others. The second component deals with the so-called legitimate use of physical force (or legitimate means of coercion)—"legitimate" because it is exercised by the state, to use Max Weber's famous definition. There as well, colonial authorities were spread unevenly across the territory, and postindependence authorities perpetuate such practices, consolidating thereby past forms of marginalization. The third meaning of the uneven distribution of violence deals with symbolic forms of violence, and the continuous existence of "a pyramid of petty tyrants," with groups of powerful Tunisians oppressing some of their peers,³ and generating a new sense of cultural superiority along geographical identification and the bracketing of regional identities, or lieux de mémoire.

Following Sarah Ghabrial's approach of "writing back" the colonial exception in Agamben's theory of exception, I will argue that the social life of racialization in Tunisia can be traced back to colonial norms. Yet, one needs also to look beyond juridical exception and examine everyday life and in the administration of the legitimate means of coercion to understand how exclusion and racialization have persisted af er independence in 1956. In this text, a multiplicity of "exceptions" will be discussed: dif erently from the other articles of this section, I will not trace a clearly tangible or institutionalized legal exception. Rather, I will show a diversity of mechanisms (capitalist extraction and its protection, the geographically dif erential presence of forces of coercion, uneven political development, cultural marginalization) that have led to the survival of racializing forms of marginalization against people of southern parts of Tunisia.⁴

This text belongs more to the category of an interpretative essay: marginal empirical material related to the history of recent protests in post–Ben Ali Tunisia will be of ered to show how colonial legacies of physical violence morphed into symbolic violence carried out by the post-independence governments.⁵ The connection between the modality of capitalist encroachment, that is, the dif erentiated territorial focus by colonial entities, and the impact of colonialism is central here. It helps understanding the geography of exclusion and racialization and how, relationally, certain tropes of governance between center and peripheries are still reproduced more than sixty years af er independence. As we will see, the historical context for the cultural and institutional marginalization of certain parts of the country explains the origin and emergence of the leadership of a very important Tunisian institution born at the time of colonialism, the Union générale tunisienne du travail...