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13 PART ONE TUNISIA Sidi Bouzid is a quiet burg located almost exactly in the middle ofTunisia.Its approximately forty thousand residents buy their produce from an open-air market ranged along a wide but sleepy street in front of a few single-story shops selling tea and other sundry goods. It was here on December 17, 2010 that Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, had his produce confiscated by city officials during a minor altercation over paperwork.The humiliation and frustration he felt at this latest in a long line of incidents of petty harassment led him to set himself on fire later that day in front of the local police station.Reports of his act of desperation spread quickly across the country and proved the catalyst that launched demonstrations throughout Tunisia and eventually across the Arab world. His case became so famous that President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali felt obliged to visit him in the hospital at the end of December to pay his respects. Bouazizi never regained consciousness and passed away on January 4, 2011, unable to witness the fall of Ben Ali’s regime on January 14 and the wider revolts this victory inspired. Bouazizi’s precarious employment was characteristic of many young people his age,particularly inTunisia’s rural interior.Youth unemployment there is estimated at around 30 percent ,which is considerably higher than the national average of 14 percent and much higher than the 7 percent unemployment along the coast.Located far from the beaches and seaside tourist resorts,interior towns have missed out on the considerable sums invested in Tunisia’s most important industry.The uneven development of the last four decades has exacerbated historical tensions and disparities between urban and rural Tunisians.What investment was earmarked for rural projects-millions in loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, among other sources-ultimately profited the agrarian elites who formed the backbone of Tunisia’s post-colonial ruling class. Following Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956, the government led by Habib Bourguiba and his Socialist Destourian Party embarked on an explicitly liberalizing project , rewriting the Tunisian constitution and legal code to regularize rights for women and minorities and expanding access to public education.Despite early reforms,Bourguiba’s rule became increasingly personalized over the subsequent thirty years as he managed political contestation and dissent through media censorship, legal maneuvers, and violent crackdowns on organized labor and Islamist political movements. In 1987, thirteen years after Bourguiba declared himself “president-for-life,”he was ousted from power by Ben Ali (then 14 TUNISIA prime minister) who had the aging president declared mentally and physically unfit. Ben Ali renamed the ruling party but otherwise further entrenched one-man rule.The neoliberal economic reforms that had begun,slowly,under Bourguiba accelerated as Ben Ali and his extended family became the prime beneficiaries of privatization and the development of new export industries.The limited independence of civil society groups disappeared as they were forced to either integrate with state administrative structures or be dismantled. Organized labor had a variable relationship with the regime, but mostly refrained from street politics in favor of high-level bargaining with the regime on bread-and-butter issues. Though there were several legal political parties in the lower house of Parliament, many of them had ties to the ruling Rally for Consitutional Democracy and did nothing to challenge its dominance. Ben Ali consistently won reelection with close to 100 percent of the vote. The police state also expanded dramatically under Ben Ali until over 1 percent of the population was employed by various policing and intelligence agencies.The police mediated daily life in Tunisia: They were the conduit for interacting with much of the state bureaucracy ,as well as the regime’s primary surveillance mechanism.At the pinnacle of the policing apparatus was the fearsome State Security branch, which was responsible for monitoring, arresting and torturing dissidents. Since Bourguiba’s presidency, the most potent threat to the regime-whose secularism was both ideological and a method of political control-came from the Islamist party al-Nahda. Both Bourguiba and Ben Ali arrested, exiled or killed most of al-Nahda’s cadres by the early 1990s but continued to use the threat of political Islam to justify authoritarian rule to international partners. After the attacks of September 11, 2011, Ben Ali took advantage of US funding for anti-terrorism iniatives to enhance the repressive machinery of the state.Ben Ali and...

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