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Middle East & North Africa
Deindustrialization in the Middle East and North Africa
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Middle East & North Africa
Entrepreneurial Bodies, Disciplined Subjects: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Whitening in Tunisia
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Middle East & North Africa
Sightlines Tunisia no.3: Saïed’s Grand Projects Continue to Flounder
Processes of deindustrialization have set the course for postmodernity. Though its impact varies with geography, it is deindustrialization which defines the conditions of social, political, and economic life across most the world today. This is certainly so in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There, premature deindustrialization bequeaths legacies of grave and enduring salience. In the economic domain, effects are observable in the region’s struggles with job creation, productivity, growth, and macrostability. Socially, they are present in MENA’s extreme levels of inequality. Politically, deindustrialization contributes to democracy’s recurring failures to launch.
This report takes identifying the drivers behind deindustrialization in the MENA as its primary task. Based on months of desk research and an extensive exploration of the historical archive, we trace causality across time and beyond the borders of the region. Findings are many, prominently including the following:
(i) The early onsetting of deindustrialization in the MENA was provoked by the global economy’s drift into stagnation beginning in the late 1960s.
(ii) Due to global issues of overcapacity and falling profit rates, securing the investment needed to nurture competitive manufacturing sectors has been exceedingly difficult.
(iii) Though global dynamics did make opportunities for healthy industrializing scarce, they did not condemn MENA countries to the fates ultimately suffered. Political choices and policy errors also played a role in shaping the course of events. Critical in these regards were modalities of state-capital relations, inadequate policy design, and a series of contingencies derived from the management of natural resource endowments.
(iv) Neoliberalism’s resolution of capitalism’s profitability crisis harmed MENA’s industrial prospects significantly. The deepening of global value chains over the past forty years has been detrimental to capital accumulation. The enforcement of intellectual property claims has obstructed traditional pathways to industrial progress. Furthermore, competitive pressures have forced firms to adopt capital intensive forms of production, limiting industry’s capacity to absorb greater shares of MENA’s workforce.
(v) The corporate welfarism that many MENA governments have institutionalized in hopes of attracting foreign investment in recent decades is fundamentally misguided: The extension of non-conditional benefits to corporate actors serves only to minimize the social and developmental utility of a prospective investment.
Looking ahead, it is plain that deindustrialization will continue weighing heavily on the region’s outlook. For a better future to be realized, local policy officials and members of the international community alike will need reckon with the factors compelling deindustrialization. Materially, this requires rethinking the terms and incentives governing matters of production, trade, and investment.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
In Tunisia today, the widespread promotion and use of skin whitening products offer a critical lens into how economic, social, and political systems reproduce racial and gender inequality. These products are not merely cosmetic choices or consumer trends—they are embedded in a broader landscape of social pressure, economic aspiration, and digital visibility. For many young Tunisian women, especially those from working-class or marginalized backgrounds, investing in skin whitening is framed as a strategy for economic and social advancement. The message is clear: lighter skin can increase one’s chances of securing work, social approval, or romantic partnership. In this manner, skin whitening products help sustain unequal systems of power by translating deeply rooted racial and gender hierarchies into normalized personal aspirations. These dynamics are not new but have been intensified in the post-2011 period, fed by economic precarity, an expanding informal economy, and a tightening authoritarian grip on digital expression.
Drawing on insights from social reproduction theory, this paper examines how beauty labor—and skin whitening in particular—plays a central role in Tunisia’s evolving political economy. Capitalism, as feminist theorists have shown, does not function in a vacuum. It depends on the unpaid and underpaid labor of women, the maintenance of racial hierarchies, and the constant reinforcement of social norms that sustain economic inequality. As Susan Ferguson has noted, “while gender relations are shaped by patriarchal dynamics, they are also always concretely interconnected in the ongoing maintenance and reproduction of an overall capitalist social formation.”[1] In this context, skin whitening products are marketed as part of a broader logic of self-entrepreneurship, particularly in the digital space. On platforms like Instagram, Tunisian content creators promote whitening creams as essential elements of self-care and success—tools to appear “more professional,” “more desirable,” or “more modern.” This aesthetic labor is rarely recognized as work by the state, and those who engage in it, particularly from lower-income backgrounds, must often navigate legal ambiguity, moral policing, and even incarceration. At the same time, these women represent an increasingly visible segment of Tunisia’s informal economy. By centering a seemingly “private” act like skin whitening within a larger political economy, this analysis helps ground and nuance policy discussions around informal labor, digital regulation, race, and gender in Tunisia. It also advocates for a policy framework that addresses the economic and social conditions that drive the demand for whitening products, rather than treating them as isolated cultural phenomena.
Skin Tone as Capital: Whitening Products and the Market Logic of Modern Femininity
While much academic attention has been given to the agricultural labor of women in Tunisia, less explored are the emerging forms of gendered labor that unfold in the digital economy. One such phenomenon, particularly visible among young Tunisian women, is the rise of aesthetic self-entrepreneurship on social media—especially through the promotion and sale of skin-whitening products. This shift not only redefines class mobility, beauty, and womanhood, but also exposes the intersection of neoliberalism, race, and postcolonial identity in the country.
Tunisia’s adoption of the Licence-Master-Doctorat (LMD) system in 2005 and its broader neoliberal turn have transformed higher education. Framed by the government and international financial institutions as a solution to graduate unemployment, the reform centered on aligning degree structures and shortening academic cycles. Materially, these changes neither mobilized resources to enhance the quality of education on offer in universities nor addressed the primary cause of joblessness amongst college graduates—namely, weak levels of demand for labor. As such, the functional effects of reform were dual. On the one hand, they rendered universities into temporary holding pens for those who managed to make their way through (defunded) secondary schools. This was a far cry from Bourguiba’s original vision of the university as a crucible for Tunisia’s political, cultural, and economic elite. On the other, they accelerated the professionalization of higher education without improving employment prospects: Ever more Tunisians matriculated to institutions of higher learning, themselves strained by a lack of financial investment, only to depart with little chance of finding work.
In the end, Tunisia’s restructured system of higher education encouraged students to become “self-entrepreneurs” responsible for cultivating their own value in a shrinking and increasingly competitive job market, as Corinna Mullin has deftly noted.[2] And over the years, the imperatives of entrepreneurship spread beyond the classroom to become a logic of everyday life. In the Tunisia of 2025, the individual is called to invest in themselves aesthetically, physically, and socially to secure a better future.
Entrepreneurialism’s ascendance as a strategy of survival and mobility is observed most easily on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. For young women in particular, the business line attracting some of the most interest amongst aspiring self-starters is personal aesthetics. In a narrow sense, hawking beauty products offers some of these parties a viable if precarious form of income and social mobility. Seen more broadly, the same trade can be seen to enlist these entrepreneurs as proselytes of self-improvement. As such, these spaces offer considerable insight into Tunisia’s evolving sociology and political economy.
Selling Whiteness
Skin-whitening products are especially salient to our concerns. On social media, these goods are not only peddled by petty entrepreneurs for their cosmetic effects, but as vital tools of self-improvement. The message is clear: lighter skin means more visibility, more desirability, and thus more value. The effect, then, is to make beauty a currency, and the body a site of economic speculation.
Indeed, today, scrolling through Tunisian social media feeds reveals a flood of whitening products—creams for the face, armpits, knees, elbows, and even intimate areas—all marketed as necessary steps in a modern woman’s self-care routine. Lady Samara serves as a brand ambassador for Laboratoire Trone’s lightening products; Chaima Mansour endorses the Super White Skin line from Maeva Cosmetics; and Bella Emilye regularly promotes Laboratoire Peonies’s lightening products, from deodorants to intimate-area creams. That this phenomenon exists in a supposedly “post-racial” world reveals the ongoing centrality of whiteness within Tunisian aesthetic norms.
Amongst the online Tunisian influencers embodying aesthetic (and racialized) self-improvement, Lady Samara and Bella Emilye stand above the rest. Each has roughly one million followers on social. Often mocked for their language, clothing, or perceived vulgarity, both women are frequently labeled zargā (plural zrûg), a pejorative term in Tunisian Arabic describing women with “the wrong” shade of brown skin—a less desirable version of samrā, the ideal olive complexion. Rather than hailing from elite or culturally privileged backgrounds, the two women have each built their visibility and income from scratch. In many ways, their success derives from embracing their zargā status while simultaneously distancing themselves from its stigma through the use of whitening products. In this manner, Lady Samara and Bella Emilye enact a complex negotiation of class, race, and gender. Unlike wealthier or more “respectable” influencers, they attempt to leverage marginality into a profitable brand via a form of self-cancelation.
In the backdrop to this, there is an economy. Just as the influencers themselves operate in the grey spaces of the informal digital economy, the whitening products Lady Samara, Bella Emilye and others sell often come from informal Tunisian laboratories operating solely online and without oversight. This is true of Maeva Cosmetics, Trone, and Laboratoire Peonies. Amidst Tunisia’s long economic downturn, the influences and pharmacies alike try to secure a living through the extralegal commodification of whiteness—through skirting regulatory and tax authorities while selling those on the periphery on a “workaround” to the stigma of racial marginalization.[3] Collectively, they render whiteness more than a standard of beauty, but a tool for upward mobility—a socially sanctioned investment in one’s self, whether to attract followers, land partnerships, or secure desirable marriage prospects. In ways overt and more subtle, Lady Samara has presented her marriage to a fair-skinned, well-off man as a reward for her physical and psychological self-development. The (spoken and unspoken) discourse is eerily reminiscent of the classic Indian brand Fair & Lovely ad, a product regularly advertised on Arab TV channels in the early 2000s, where personal success and romantic fulfillment were directly tied to achieving lighter skin.[4] Appreciated in full, both the influencers and the laboratories with which they work have not only carved out a place within Tunisia’s beauty economy: conscientiously or not, they also participate in the production of neoliberal, racialized constructions of modernity and Tunisianity.
Contests over modernity and the power relations contained therein are not new in Tunisia. The Bourguibian project, while often celebrated for its progressive legislation on women’s rights, was fundamentally rooted in a Eurocentric vision of modernity. As such, it rooted Tunisia’s national identity against an image of a patriarchal Arab-Muslim Other, embracing a form of Western universalism in which progress was synonymous with industrialization, urbanization, and whitening—both symbolically and literally. Read against this history, it can be appreciated that skin whitening concerns more than beauty. It is at once a mode of survival, a means of asserting one’s place in a neoliberal order that rewards self-discipline, visibility, and conformity to Eurocentric norms. Whether they are single students hoping to escape precariousness or married women seeking social respectability, these influencers demonstrate that whitening is not only a physical act but an ideological one—wrapped in the language of self-care, productivity, and feminine ambition. It is this convergence of aesthetics, capitalism, and race that defines the current moment, and reveals the profound ways in which bodily practices continue to reflect and reproduce social hierarchies in postcolonial Tunisia.
From Self-Made to State-Policed: Content Creation, Censorship, and Precarity
Tunisia currently lacks a formal legal framework governing online content creation and digital commerce. A bill backed by over 80 MPs aims to regulate marketing on websites and social media, protect against online fraud, and bring informal digital businesses into the formal economy to boost tax revenues. While the bill targets urgent gaps, it projects little confidence when it comes to enforcement. Monitoring millions of daily online transactions would require significant investment in advanced technologies and specialized personnel—resources Tunisia currently lacks. AI could help detect fraud, but its cost and complexity pose further barriers. There’s also the risk of overregulation: rigid enforcement could stifle digital entrepreneurship and push small creators into even more opaque spaces. This is especially problematic given that nearly 80% of e-transactions are still cash-based and largely untaxed, sustaining a parallel economy that undermines formal businesses.[5]
Given the absence of regulations, to date, the state’s primary tool for disciplining content creators has been Article 226 bis of the Penal Code, which criminalizes offenses against “public morals.” Under Ben Ali, the article was used to silence dissenting voices—often under the guise of moral protection. Post-2011, it was used to target public figures and everyday people. Public displays of affection, carrying legally purchased alcohol, or expressing non-conforming gender presentation led to arrests and prosecutions under broadly defined morality laws.
The absence of a regulatory framework has produced an ambiguous space where influencers operate both as public figures and as informal workers—vulnerable to the double bind of capitalist commodification and moralistic policing. The Tunisian state has launched several moral campaigns against content creators under the pretext of “atteintes aux bonnes mœurs” (“affront to public decency”), a loosely defined legal category that includes behaviors deemed socially disruptive or morally corrupting. In 2023 and 2024, several influencers were arrested under this charge, among them Lady Samara, pregnant at the time, and sentenced to over three years in prison (later reduced on appeal) for disseminating online content the state deemed inappropriate.
The repression of figures like Lady Samara is particularly significant when viewed through the lens of gender and class. The type of femininity she performs—accessible, unapologetically visible and at times sexualized—directly contradicts the normative codes of respectability that postcolonial Tunisia has long upheld through the apparatus of state feminism. Her incarceration, and that of others like her (including queer and working-class content creators like Khoubaib and the couple Ramzi and Afifa), reveals the cost of visibility in an economy and society that struggles to reconcile its integration to global capitalism with certain forms of moral conservatism.
This tension is further exacerbated by the Tunisian state’s refusal to treat this type of content labor as legitimate economic activity. Despite its contribution to digital economies and consumer markets, content creation is not recognized as “real work.” This reflects not only the state’s outdated legal frameworks but also a broader ideological dissonance between what capitalism deems economically productive and what states, especially authoritarian and/or socially conservative ones, consider morally acceptable. The state thus weaponizes legal ambiguity to criminalize forms of labor and expression that fall outside the bounds of normative respectability.
The Tunisian State, Social Reproduction, and a Better Path Forward
Social reproduction theory helps us understand the impasse facing Tunisia’s digital beauty entrepreneurs by highlighting how the boundary between productive and unproductive labor is not natural, but politically and historically constructed. Traditionally, labor that produces commodities has been valorized and paid, while labor that reproduces people—caring, cleaning, educating, expressing emotion—has been feminized, racialized, and devalued. Digital influencing occupies an uneasy place between the two. On the one hand, it generates content, attention, and sometimes income. On the other, it relies heavily on affective labor, unpaid self-promotion, and the cultivation of intimate personas—activities typically relegated to the domain of the personal or the feminine.
Clearly, state repression of these spaces also intersects with racial politics. Tunisia has, since February 2023, entered a moment of heightened racial anxiety, marked by the securitization of sub-Saharan African migration and a public discourse that increasingly racializes both migrants and national black populations. The moral campaigns against influencers unfolded against this backdrop, revealing the converging pressures of race, class, and gender in defining who is allowed to be visible, to speak, to work. It is no coincidence that the crackdown disproportionately affects marginalized subjects: women, queer people, racialized people, and the poor. These are precisely the actors whose labor and social reproduction undergird the entire system, yet whose presence must be controlled to maintain the appearance of social order.
In a context of economic collapse, political authoritarianism, and social anxiety over national identity, digital labor—especially when performed by women, queer individuals, or marginalized actors—becomes both hyper-visible and hyper-policed. By shifting the focus from the narrow realm of wage labor to the wider systems that sustain life, identities, and hierarchies, we can better understand how and why this is playing out. The increasing repression of content creators and influencers under President Kais Saied’s rule derives from the broader political economy of Tunisia. Likewise, it is structured by global dynamics of gender, labor, and digital capitalism. As such, it is critical that the ongoing criminalization of digital labor in Tunisia not merely be conceived as an attack on individual freedoms—it needs be understood is a reassertion of state control over the terms of visibility, morality, and reproduction. The affective, embodied labor that influencers perform—often from their homes, often as mothers or young women, often without institutional support—is treated as suspect because it challenges the state’s monopoly over public discourse and disrupts the gendered hierarchies that underpin national identity. The fact that this labor is often informal, mobile, and based on personal narrative makes it even more threatening to a state that sees control and surveillance as key to political stability.
The tensions that digital entrepreneurialism evokes between work and morality, between digital entrepreneurship and repression, also highlights a larger contradiction in Tunisia’s post-revolution trajectory. The same economic crisis that produces self-entrepreneurship also fuels authoritarianism. The same youth who are encouraged to “invest in themselves” through neoliberal discourses of success are criminalized when that investment takes the form of non-normative gender or sexual expressions. The labor of social reproduction—whether online or off, remunerated or not—is simultaneously essential and unrecognized, celebrated and policed.
This all being the case, it is essential that those working to reform regulations and criminal laws concerning digital entrepreneurialism not limit their focus to the domain of the law alone. They must also engage with the fundamental structure of Tunisia’s economy. In the same vein, those seeking to unwind the proliferation of skin whitening products would be naïve to direct energies solely at the relevant principals, be they influencers or underground pharmacies. They must also draw attention to the historical and contemporary factors which lead whiteness to be valorized. Furthermore, they must work to advance the kinds of social and economic reforms which might collapse Tunisia’s racialized hierarchies.
[1] Susan Ferguson, “Social reproduction: what’s the big idea”, Blog: Pluto Books.
[2] Mullin, Corinna. « L’enseignement supérieur en Tunisie, lieu de pouvoir (néo)colonial et de lutte décoloniale ». Tumultes, 2017/1 n° 48, 2017. p.185-205.
[3] Lady Samara for instance, once posted a video applying a whitening cream to her elbows while declaring, “I don’t want these to darken, to turn blue,” expressing both her fear of becoming zargā and the labor required to maintain the ideal shade of samrā.
[4] Kaundinya, Anaka. (2023). How Fair & Lovely Bottled Up India’s Insecurities. Kajol. https://www.kajalmag.com/fair-and-lovely-colorism-india/
[5] Maya Bouallégui, “Zoom sur la future loi régulant le marketing et le commerce sur le web et les réseaux sociaux”, Business News (March 17: 2025).
Photo Credit: Adam Jones, ““Fair and Lovely – Billboard for Skin-Whitening Cream – Chittagong – Bangladesh”
This publication is part of the Project Political Economy of the contemporary MENA Region and has been carried out with the financial support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Entrepreneurial Bodies, Disciplined Subjects: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Whitening in Tunisia’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘entrepreneurial-bodies-disciplined-subjects-race-gender-and-the-politics-of-whitening-in-tunisia’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2025-06-04 11:37:24’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2025-06-04 09:37:24’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=772’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )In a scene already widely commented on by critics of the regime, Kaïs Saïed received Brahim Bouderbala, President of the Assembly of People\’s Representatives (ARP), and Imed Derbali, President of the National Council of Regions and Districts (CNRD) at Carthage on the seventh of May. Per the statement published on the Presidency of the Republic\’s website, the head of state told the two leaders of the parliament that it was necessary to “develop new solutions capable of resolving the country\’s economic problems, particularly the issue of youth unemployment.” Expectantly, observers pointed out that Saïed himself has been in office for nearly six years, and with what amounts to unchecked authority for four of them. A bit late in the day, one would think, to draw attention to Tunisia’s cascading social and economic crises. Alas, three weeks later, Saïed returned to the theme in a speech made to the Prime Minister and Finance Minister. At long last, the reality of Tunisia’s unending malaise appears to have dawned on the President.
If affirmation was needed, Saïed’s public remarks establish that the socioeconomic crisis which led to the fall of Ben Ali and contributed to the turmoil of the post-revolutionary decade very much endures. His comments also give occasion to probe the Saïedian economy in greater detail.
The Grand Designs of a Disinterested President
During his 2019 campaign for the Presidency, Kaïs Saïed famously focused more on matters of the law and institutional design than he did on the economy. Three variables informed the choice. First, like much of the Tunisian political class, Saïed had little interest in or understanding of the economy. Second, inasmuch as he did think about the economy, he put little weight in industrial planning or centralized governance: As expressed in Saïed’s imagining of “grassroots democracy”, policy was best directed through a pyramid-shaped system of councils, where the lower level bodies were empowered to propose and approve development projects so long as they honored his populist dictum—“the people want it and they know what they want!” No need, then, to ponder big reform plans. Third, the 2014 Constitution, still in force when Saïed was on the trail, had entrusted economic management to the head of government. If subsequent events would show Saïed had little respect for the constitution’s wider division of powers, on the economic front, his actions conveyed an acceptance that it was not the President’s prerogative or responsibility.
However, if development strategy held little purchase in Saïed’s mind, there was one subject adjacent to the economy which had consumed his thinking as far back as 2012: anti-corruption and criminal reconciliation. The President’s position on these issues derived from his misinterpreting an investigative report which had been produced by a post-revolution commission.[1] The commission in question had been led by Saïed’s mentor Abdelfattah Amor[2] and tasked with determining the mechanisms of embezzlement which had prevailed under the fallen Ben Ali regime. Critically, their research centered on the revenue losses the state incurred by turning a blind eye to these practices; it did not attempt to estimate the ill-begotten gains captured by implicated parties. In fact, the report did not even venture ballpark figures. Nevertheless, without referencing any evidence, a minister at the time did forward the claim that nefarious actors had leveraged corrupt dealings into 13.5 billion dinars in stolen public wealth.[3] And to this figure Saïed would anchor himself evermore. While still a professor, while on the campaign trail, and while President, he has spoken of this 13.5 billion incessantly. He has also made moves toward recovering this phantasm.
Criminal Reconciliation—The Farce with No End
Upon granting himself total discretionary authority in 2021, Saïed issued a decree-law establishing the mechanism known as criminal reconciliation. The law established a commission responsible for investigating cases of corruption, either on its own initiative or at the request of principals violated. In circumstance where the commission determined guilt, the law presents two possibilities for reconciliation: restitution of the sums owed (with a penalty of 10% per year of delay), or a commitment to carry out development projects at the local, regional, or national level. The idea was that the most corrupt individuals should invest in the most needy regions.
Commencing work at the start of 2023, the commission was initially mandated to serve for one year. During the time allotted, the President expected it would gather his missing 13.5 billion Dinar. So confident was Saïed in its arrival that he constantly derailed his own ministers’ negotiations with the IMF, as the prospective receipt of reconciliation money would obviate any need for a loan. Unfortunately for the President, come January 2024, the commission had only been able to haul in 26.8 million Dinar, just 2.19% of the target. And this was despite his dismissing many members and leaders of the commission on a number of different occasions.
Faced with this poor performance, Saïed amended the decree-law to transfer final arbitration procedures to the National Security Council (NSC). By Saïed’s pen, the NSC was made a de facto court whose decisions were not subject to appeal. At the same time, dozens of businessmen were arrested and summoned to “negotiate” with the authorities. But once again, Saied’s interventions backfired. Far from resolving the situation, the legislative change completely blocked the process. At the time of writing, no information about ongoing reconciliation negotiations has been released in months. As all the major businessmen brought in to purchase their penance remain in prison, the data suggests no cash will be en route to the Treasury any time soon.
Community Enterprises—Empty Signifier Again
Community enterprises are the other flagship feature of Saïed\’s economic project. Unlike the criminal amnesty, they were not included in the candidate\’s 2019 election platform. However, they are very much in keeping with his overall ideological vision: Insofar as for Saïed, “the people” are best placed to organically find solutions that will get the country out of the crisis, it holds that simply getting “the people” a bit of capital for their businesses should do the trick.
To expedite this aspect of the Saïedist vision, the president promulgated a decree-law on March 20, 2022, Tunisian Independence Day. Under the terms of the law, community enterprises are designated as commercial entities dedicated to undertakings “that meet the needs of the inhabitants and are in line with the specific characteristics of the region.”[4] They are eligible to manage collective lands and charged with participating in the sustainable development and good governance of regions concerned while abiding by principles of corporate social responsibility.[5] In the fine print, two types of community enterprises are qualified: (i) local companies, which operate within a single delegation or a group of contiguous delegations; and (ii) regional companies, which operate a governorate-wide level. The former are under the supervision of the governors within which the delegations in question lie. The latter are overseen by the Minister of the Economy. As such, regardless of size, community enterprises are hardly free to express the will of “the people”: Rather, they are subject to the oversight of state representatives bearing significant managerial and disciplinary powers. In addition, as the decree-law includes ambiguous language prohibiting engagement “political activity,” it is the case that those state representatives retain wide discretionary authorities in fulfilling their supervisory mandates. Indeed, according to a study of this legislation by researchers at Legal Agenda, mere business planning sessions can be interpreted as “political activity.” The existing evidence, then, suggests, that Saïed\’s communitarian enterprise venture was designed to allow his central authority to again impose its visions and orientations, this time on private decision-making circles.[6]
The material output of the community enterprise push is difficult to evaluate. According to the National Business Register (RNE), as of August 2024, only 70 community businesses had been created, the majority of which were of the local modality. A report published by the i-drak think tank based on the first two years of community business experience paints a negative picture as well. Entitled “Two Years Between Illusion and Reality”, the study denounces the fetishization of this type of enterprise by the government, notes a lack of appetite among citizens, and explains this by bureaucratic constraints that perpetuate the difficulties experienced by young entrepreneurs.[7]
This has not prevented Saïed from continuing to push and publicize the venture. Saliently, government departments, the Tunisian Solidarity Bank, and a few private banks have been mobilized to support social entrepreneurship. Predictably, Saïed has also attributed the venture’s lengthy takeoff process to legal obstacles created by conspiracists within the state. To address these problems, the president appointed Hasna Jiballah as Secretary of State for Community Enterprises. This close associate of the original Saïed circles is not an economist, as evidenced by her statement that community enterprises are “tax havens.” In less than a year in office, Jiballah did managed double the number of functioning communitarian enterprises, bringing the total to 160 as of February 2025. Growth has not been accompanied with or led by a coherent vision, however. The Tunisian public waits, moreover, for reports on a businesses that has actually managed to scale or achieve sustainability.
Conclusions
After nearly six years in office, including four years with absolute power, Saïed has not made any significant changes to Tunisia’s socioeconomic situation. His two flagship projects, criminal amnesty and community enterprises, were not backed by impact studies and have been haphazardly implemented. With his hands otherwise off the economic steering wheel, the President’s rule has deepened the de-development of the Tunisian economy and left another generation without hope for a better future.
[1] Specifically, La Commission nationale d’investigation sur la corruption et la malversation.
[2] Amor was the former President of the Tunis Law school, where Saïed was a professor.
[3] The minister in question was Salim Ben Hmidane, who served between December 2011 and January 2014.
[4] In Arabic, they are called الشركات الأهلية
[5] Collectively held lands are mostly found in Tunisia’s south. They were predominantly the common properties of multiple tribes engaged in pastoralism, their legal status entrenched from 1901 forward. Some were privatized over intervening years.
[6] See: Elleuch, M., Khalfaoui, M., & Ben Ghazi, S. (2022). Le président veut. Contradictions et dangers du régime de la construction par la base. Tunis: Legal Agenda.
[7] See: I-Drak. (2024). Entreprises communautaires : deux ans entre l\’illusion et le réel. Tunis: IWatch.
Photo Credit: Nawaat, “Les Mabrouk dans la nouvelle Tunisie” (August 12, 2011).
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