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Middle East & North Africa
The Political Economy of Divestment Campaigns Across the Atlantic
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Middle East & North Africa
Tunisia’s Opposition in the Wake of October’s Presidential Elections
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Middle East & North Africa
Sub-Saharan African Migrants in Tunisia: Geo-Racialized Security and the Local Revival of Antiblackness
Introduction
In 2024, student protests spread across North America and Europe agitating against the genocide in Gaza. In the United States, they were massive: tens of thousands of students on nearly 140 college campuses built encampments, staged walk-outs, and occupied buildings demanding their universities to divest or sever ties with Israel. After the April 19 police raid of Columbia University, the tactical repertoire of encampments soon spread rapidly, like the diffusion of shantytown protests against South African apartheid in the 1980s.[1] Academics in Dublin, Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Leiden, Lund, Rome, and Zurich also staged protests against what the global human rights community charge as crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Israeli state against Palestinians.[2]
With few exceptions, the student protests largely failed to win concessions in the United States and mainland Europe. But they partially succeeded in Spain, Ireland, and Norway. Across time, similar campaigns have attempted to pressure institutional investors to divest, such as the anti-apartheid divestment campaigns against South Africa in the 1980s as well as the ongoing fossil fuel divestment campaigns. The former prompted 53 American universities to partially divest from apartheid by 1984, three years before the U.S. Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto and passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. At the same time, it failed to move an institution like MIT, which never divested at all despite Massachusetts enacting the first statewide pension fund divestment in the United States, again over the governor’s veto.
Then as now, divergences in outcome can be explained by the interaction of politics, social pressure, and higher education financing. When governing parties are more sympathetic to activist demands, national universities move with them; however private funding channels also insulate tertiary educators from the shifting winds of national political sentiment. This insulation provides some activists an advantage, empowering small liberal arts colleges in particular to become ‘first-movers’ against a national political taboo as long as their alumni donor base are supportive or apathetic. However, it also tends to exact a cost, tilting the university’s selectorate toward the political conservatism of what is typically an older, wealthier, whiter, and more male donor base.
Palestine Protests in the North Atlantic
Responding to the Gaza genocide, student activists in the United States placed particular emphasis on divesting university endowments. For example, a demand from a group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest focused on the university’s financial holdings of publicly traded stocks and bonds implicated in the Israeli occupation. The 2018 and 2020 referenda passed in the undergraduate Columbia College challenged Columbia University to “divest from and/or refrain from investing in” Amazon, Caterpillar, Elbit Systems, and Boeing, and “withdraw assets” from BlackRock’s iShares ETF and Barclays Bank, totaling some 6% of the university’s currently disclosed endowment portfolio.[3] Activists frequently drew parallels between their demands and university ‘responsible investor’ policies against tobacco and private prisons or pointed to past university divestment decisions on South African apartheid or the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
Student activism has extended beyond the university endowments. Campaigns at MIT and Johns Hopkins focused on research funding channels tied to the Israeli military[4] while organizers at Uppsala University in Sweden, LSE in London, and state universities in California, Michigan, and Georgia have criticized their universities’ institutional partnerships with Israeli universities such as Technion and Hebrew University Jerusalem. Organizers have also asked to rename buildings, increase academic opportunities for Palestinians, and juxtaposed their universities’ inaction on Palestine to their willingness to condemn Russia and sever relationships with Russian higher education institutions over the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Authorities’ response to these protests has been uneven. In the United States, the board of trustees at Union Theological Seminary voted on May 9, 2024 to direct its investment managers to exclude from the school’s modest portfolio “those companies substantially and intractably benefiting from the war in Palestine.” The decision was in keeping with the seminary’s progressive Christian ethos and long-standing responsible investor policies against private prisons, fossil fuels, and weapons manufacturers. Officials at Oregon’s Evergreen State College, the alma mater of the killed activist Rachel Corrie, reached a similar accommodation with their encampment, signing an agreement pledging to divest from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”[5] At MIT, a seed fund to encourage MIT collaborations with Lockheed Martin in Israel was not renewed, in a win for the student majority supporting divestment, although the Institute denied the decision had any relationship to activism.
Apart from these examples, however, successes for the American protest movement have been fairly meager. By July 2024, police forces arrested more than 3,000 students, and most encampments were violently destroyed.[6] As of December 2024, no R1 university has committed to a major divestment decision on Israel. (Brown University’s Corporation agreed to vote on a divestment measure in October though the vote failed.) Other agreements with encampments to voluntarily disband, such as those at Harvard, Northwester, and Rutgers-New Brunswick, did not pledge the universities to divest financial assets implicated in the Israeli occupation.
A similarly cold reception can be recorded across France, Germany, and Sweden. In April, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal accused the student protesters at the Sorbonne and Sciences Po of importing a “North American ideology”. Riot police swiftly cleared encampments at the behest of university authorities. Interim president of the Sorbonne Jean Basseres dismissed protestor demands to review ties with Israeli institutions and partner companies, and a statement by 70 French university presidents in Le Monde affirmed this attitude: “Universities must not be used for political ends.”[7] In Germany, the encampment at Freie Universität Berlin was immediately cleared on May 7 and Humboldt University’s was emptied on May 23. Officials have not met student protests in Frankfurt, Leipzig, Munich and Bremen with any compromise. As the chief security officer at Swiss ETH Zürich said, the university “does not offer a platform for political activism.”[8] In Sweden, the home of a once-formidable social democratic movement, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (SUHF) representing 38 universities and colleges issued a statement on May 21 that Swedish educational institutions cannot “take a position on foreign policy issues.” Its flagship universities – in Stockholm, Lund, Uppsala – have applied this principle to Israeli collaborations. The encampment in Lund was violently cleared by police. Authorities at Portugal’s flagship University of Coimbra have similarly not met its student protesters with any compromise.
We can juxtapose these results against more accommodating positions in Ireland, Spain, Norway, Belgium, and Denmark. On May 8, Ireland’s Trinity College Dublin reached an agreement with students to end the encampment and “complete a divestment from Israeli companies that have activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and appear on the UN blacklist.”[9] A Sanctuary Fund for Gaza scholars was also created, and a senior dean who led the negotiations thanked the students for their engagement. This was followed by similar solidarity statements by University College Dublin and Irish universities in Limerick and Galway. On May 9, the Conference of University Rectors in Spain (CRUE) representing 76 public and private universities in Spain announced their intention to “suspend collaboration agreements with Israeli universities and research centres that have not expressed a firm commitment to peace and compliance with international humanitarian law” and “strengthen cooperation with the Palestinian scientific and higher education system.”
Successes for the student movement extend beyond Catholic Europe. Amidst protests in Norway, five universities suspended ties with Israeli universities as early as February 2024, as did Finland’s flagship University of Helsinki. In Denmark, the University of Copenhagen announced that it would divest holdings worth a total of about 1 million Danish crowns ($145,810) on May 28. Fund managers committed to ensure institutional investments comply with a United Nations list of companies involved in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Université Libre de Bruxelles has also joined three other Belgian universities that have ended or committed to review ties with Israeli institutions. As of January 2025, some Dutch and British institutions have also made halting or partial moves to divest from arms manufacturers or suspend overt ties with the Israeli government.
Thus the puzzle: why have student movements succeeded in winning some divestiture demands in parts of Europe but not in America where the student mobilization was arguably more sustained, organized, and militant? In Norway and Denmark, but not Sweden? Belgium but not France? Spain but not Portugal? The student movements largely employed the same tactical repertoire but have yielded different results.
A Theory of Partisan Control
The simplest answer is that institutions of higher education, regardless of their autonomy vis-à-vis their respective governments, are still risk-adverse and follow the winds of different national politics in responding to insurgent social movements from within.
Consider the starkest juxtaposition: the United States versus Spain, Ireland, and Norway. On a demographic level, Spain, Ireland, and Norway have numerically marginal Jewish Zionist populations, and their Catholic or secularized, liberal-Protestant majorities are historically less respondent to Christian Zionist framings than the sizable evangelical community in the United States. The foreign policy preferences of these European voter publics are aggregated by electoral systems more proportional than those in the United States, which is uniquely characterized by strong bicameralism and judicial review, constitutional rigidity, federalism, a presidential executive, and first-past-the-post electoral architecture—what political scientist Lisa Miller has aptly called “veto exceptionalism.”[10]
Moreover the American polity is characterized by substantially deregulated campaign finance or ‘dark money’ compared to the European states[11], measurable pro-Israel bias in the media[12], and a stronger and better-organized Israel lobby (CUFI, AIPAC, etc), which tend to shift policy outcomes to more pro-Israel positions.[13] Evidence of the latter is the 38 US states which have passed anti-BDS laws with the help of interest groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council.[14] Differences in geopolitical stakes are also important features. Spain, Ireland, and Norway are not major security guarantors to the Israeli government, unlike the United States. US voter demographics, veto exceptionalism, vulnerability to special interest lobbying, and geopolitical reach then shape its political culture. Unlike the liberal and left-wing parties in Europe, both U.S. parties strongly support Israel.[15] On this persistent demographic, institutional, and partisan terrain, it is not surprising that U.S. universities face higher political risks for capitulating to protestor demands perceived to isolate or shame Israel.
What about within Europe? Again, divergent response could be attributed to different national party politics. Two of the first-movers on university divestment (Spain, Norway) are currently led by left-wing coalition governments, which in the European party families tend to be more sympathetic to Palestinian rights.[16] Although Ireland, a third early-mover, had the Christian-democratic party Fianna Fáil in the lead for most of 2024, Ireland’s party system is buttressed by an activist political culture of Irish republicanism historically friendly to the Palestinian national movement.[17] Additionally, Ireland’s incumbent coalition partners Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael faced collapsing support for most of the year and played defense to the left-wing opposition Sinn Féin.[18] These coalition dynamics have produced national-level policy shifts for Palestine. All three countries announced recognition for the state of Palestine in spring 2024, publicly committed to uphold ICC rulings against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and blocked military cargo shipments to Israel over the war on Gaza.
Under the political cover of sympathetic governing coalitions, national universities can concede ground to activists. Thus we can explain the friendly response by universities in Spain under a left-wing coalition compared to the stonewall in Portugal under a centre-right one. In Belgium, where six of the seven governing parties (PS, Vooruit, Groen, Ecolo, Open VLD and CD&V) favored recognizing the Palestinian state, to those universities in France, whose coalition partners ruled out diplomatic recognition of Palestine. In short, left-wing governing coalitions open space for university divestment.
At first glance, Germany appears to be the glaring anomaly. Despite a governing coalition under Olaf Scholz of Social Democrats and Greens, Berlin’s governing mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) introduced a new regulatory law at Berlin’s colleges and universities in April 2024 to criminalize Palestine protests on campus. The federal Education and Research Ministry then launched an investigation against academics who sympathized with the student protestors. But although Germany was ostensibly led by a social democratic chancellor during 2023-2024, the coalition make-or-breaker was the virulently neoliberal Free Democratic Party, while the Christian Democrats (CDU) held a de facto veto. Moreover, the meaningful policy distinctions between party families on an issue domain can blur in the face of a persistent political culture of consensus. Critics often attribute the Zionist consensus of the political establishment in Berlin and the länder to the pathologies of postwar Holocaust memory culture—the German Staatsräson to protect the Jewish state against all criticism.[19] Political culture can, of course, work the other way. Håkan Thörn[20] and Knud Andresen[21] have separately argued that Nordic political culture played a role in the considerable financial support provided by Scandinavian governments for anti-colonial struggles in southern Africa, despite party cycling.
These political cultures are not fixed and can fracture. For example, despite Sweden’s more active record on Palestine, such as the Social-Democratic government’s recognition of the state of Palestine in 2014 (the first in the EU) as well as its history of Israel-Palestine consensus diplomacy[22], the 2010s and 2020s witnessed what Swedish political scientist Maria Owiredu documents as a divergence in party positions on Palestine.[23] The current right-wing government of Sweden Democrats has made a pivot toward Israel, measurable in both its party position and the attitudes of its voters. Thus when governing coalitions are more sympathetic to Palestinian rights, the national universities move with them; when the coalition turns a cold shoulder to Palestine, so do the universities. A remarkably frank statement by the Stockholm University of the Arts in April 2024 illustrates this point:
A public stance and position from SKH, as a Swedish university and public authority, in the war is not possible. However, we condemn all forms of violence, including abuses against the civilian population. In connection with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Swedish government cancelled all Swedish authorities’ cooperation with Russia. With regard to the war between Hamas and Israel, the Government has not taken a similar position.
A Theory of Education Financing
As an Ockham’s Razor explanation of university divestment decisions, the partisan theory does well at explaining the bulk of variation in institutional response. It explains why universities in Norway and Finland folded but not in Sweden. In Spain but not in Portugal. Belgium but not France, and more broadly, peripheral Europe but not America.
The notion that partisanship affects policy outcomes, even those of para-statal institutions like the university, is not new to students of political economy: what impact partisan coalitions have on policy is a worn question, from Andrew Shonfield’s classic Modern Capitalism (1965) to the power resources theory of Walter Korpi and Gøsta Esping-Andersen.[24] However once we examine uneven responses within the same national political context, a simple partisan theory becomes less helpful. Institutions of higher education within the same national context do not respond alike to divestment calls, as the cases in the introduction attest. For example, five universities in Norway severed ties with Israel in the last year, but not the flagship University of Oslo.
Here the political economy of higher education financing carries significant explanatory power. Countries in the North Atlantic have organized the legal and funding structure of higher education quite differently. The United States has adopted a ‘Partially Private’ model, in which both public and private universities uniformly require tuition fees. Some European states created a Mass Public model, while others, such as the German-speaking countries, built a dual-track vocational system and ‘Elite Public’ university model. These ‘three worlds of human capital formation’ are well-known typologies for the scholars of the welfare state and varieties of capitalism.[25]
As products of history, these disparate political economies cast a long shadow over present-day activism. This is because different financing arrangements map on to pressure from philanthropists, students, party leaders, and mass publics. As Charlie Eaton and Mitchell Stevens put it, universities are ‘peculiar’ organizations.[26] They are positionally-central to the institutional order of modern societies, providing “working links between state, market, civil society, and private-sphere organizations.” In their terms, universities are also polysemic, embodying civic, economic, and sacred meanings simultaneously and quasi-sovereign, enjoying a margin of jurisdiction over their own boundaries and internal affairs. For sociologist John W. Meyer, this quasi-sovereignty is articulated in the notion of “the charter” whereby universities certify official knowledge and provide the organizing basis for the Weberian rationalization of education and training. This institutional power to distribute status and opportunity makes the university a crucial site in the reproduction of what Randall Collins once called the “credential society”[27] or Pierre Bourdieu the noblesse d’état.[28]
Yet in terms of quasi-sovereignty, substantial variation exists in the relationship between tertiary educators and the state. In the United States, universities can be incorporated as public non-profit, private non-profit, or for-profit institutions. In Sweden and Belgium, by contrast, they are almost always public institutions. Regardless of legal status, universities raise money from various sources, which insulate or expose them to different shades of partisan or state interests. They can acquire revenue from (1) financial assets that generate liquid income – what is often called an endowment, (2) land or property rents, (3) tuition from students, who may pay from a menu of family home financing options or borrow with government-subsidized loans, (4) state grants, either per-student or lump-sum, (5) gift philanthropy from benefactors and alumni, (6) state research funding, such as from the U.S. National Science Foundation, and even (7) bond issuance. Each of these sources can be conceptualized as dials that move a central dial of the university’s exposure to state pressure.
What determines how these dials are set? As Iversen and Stephens show, higher education systems often cluster cross-nationally on several indicators of state involvement—clusters they label Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, and Liberal and which they attribute to historical differences in the organization of capitalism and electoral politics in the mid-late 19th century.[29] Other studies of the political economy of higher education financing similarly start the causal story behind the setting of the dials in the postwar era.[30] Iversen and Stephens, for instance, assert that “the three worlds of welfare and publicly financed skill formation were not clearly detectable as of 1950.” Indeed, the historic expansion of higher education, what education scholar Martin Trow called the ‘great transition’[31], is a post-war phenomenon.
Find Lee and Lee citation at [32]
Financing Higher Ed: The Political/Policy Trilemma
As Ben Ansell’s work has developed, higher education financing has required policymakers to balance the scale of enrollment, the degree of subsidization, and the public cost of higher education—what he calls a ‘trilemma.’ When public cost is held constant, a country faces a tradeoff between the first two. Partisan preferences over these trade-offs are derived from their unequal fiscal burdens. Unless access to higher education is made independent of income, allocating public resources to universities is fiscally regressive, benefiting the children of a rich elite with the taxes of a poorer majority. However if enrollment is expanded to a mass level, regressivity is diluted, and higher education subsidies begin to look more like standard redistributive public spending. Accordingly, at low levels of development, conservative parties favor channeling resources to universities (and by extension, their wealthier constituencies). Left-wing parties, meanwhile, tend to prefer building out primary and secondary schooling, which benefits their lower-income base. As tertiary enrollment becomes accessible to the masses, the parties swap positions. Left-wing parties embrace higher subsidization and mass enrollment while the right tries to limit public grants and equal access. The degree to which universities rely on state funding and find themselves susceptible to either partisan pressure or private donor pressure is thus a function of the long-term balance of partisan power.
There are examples, however, where the left-right interplay was flummoxed. We can see this in countries with a historically strong Christian Democratic presence or federalist constitutional constraints. Take Germany as an example. There, the roots of a vocational training system were introduced at the turn of the 20th century by an authoritarian state.[33] Access to universities was jealously restricted by the sub-national länder. A dual-track education system eventually calcified during postwar years of Christian-Democratic rule, which prioritized cross-class compromise between unions and employers as part of what Kees van Kersbergen calls a “politics of mediation.”[34] As the länder controlled the admissions process and remained hostile to raising funding or enrollment, and as the unions acquired interests in the dual-track system, so did the left-wing parties; the SPD in Germany remained historically “unwilling to countenance expansion of a system where few working-class students gain access.”[35]
Despite a shared lineage as providers of an elite distinction[36], the tertiary education sectors in the United States and Europe were on different footing before they entered the age of mass enrollment. In the United States (and to the lesser degree the United Kingdom) large endowments, tuition-charging, philanthropy, and alumni fundraising practices developed in the late 19th century under a “free money” ideology, to use a term from an excellent new book by Bruce Kimball and Sarah Iler.[37] The endowment-centric ideology flourished best in monetary and partisan conditions specific to the United States. With the threat of socialist or social-democratic policy influence low, rights to the income of financial assets guaranteed, and macro-economic conditions stable, the endowments of elite universities amassed enormous holdings. Under these conditions, the universities shaped the transition to mass enrollment in such a manner as to preserve (and diffuse) their private funding practices across the country. For instance, ‘free money’ ideology was incorporated into the policy prescriptions of the General Education Board, Carnegie and Ford Foundations. On the European continent, the upheaval of world wars, hyperinflation, and the rise of communism and social democratic parties meant that private philanthropic foundations in the 20th century faced uncertainty and frequent decline.[38] In peripheries such as Ireland, the Mediterranean and Scandinavia, capital markets and industry were not deep enough to generate the titanic personal wealth that endowed the British and American ivory towers at the turn of the century. These factors guaranteed that Europe’s transition to mass higher education after the war would rely on heavy state financing.
Later, the same elite Anglo-American institutions were also positioned to co-produce and benefit from the shift to financialization. Under their influence, Congress and regulators made aggressive forms of endowment accumulation more profitable. In the 1970s, Congress loosened constraints on junk bonds and other debt vehicles, cut income and capital gains taxes, and passed legislation to allow institutional investors to hold more equities in their portfolios. In 1984, Congress also eliminated a two percent excise tax on university endowment investment returns. Outside the Capitol, the primacy of endowments and donor-giving as metrics for university excellence was embedded in the formulas by which universities were ranked by the US News & World Report and Times Higher Education. Rankings further attuned university growth strategies to the importance of accumulating large reserves and encouraging donor philanthropy. Indeed, the intimate ties between the university social environment and asset management capitalism, in particular venture capital, private equity, and hedge funds, constitute what Charlie Eaton calls in his book Bankers in the Ivory Tower (2022) the ‘high-finance advantage.’
Student Loans and Defense Dollars
Of course, alumni philanthropy and endowments were not the only means by which higher educators expanded. Today, American universities are a top employer of lobbyists on Capitol Hill.[39] Josh Mitchell[40] and Susan Mettler[41] separately detail their role, along with financier partners, in shaping a student loan industrial complex. With the post-realignment Republican party unwilling to fully subsidize education via universal block grants beyond the G.I. bills, Congress created a loan-financing regime to expand enrollment and make education accessible to the masses. Subsidized credit became particularly important after more ambitious public funding schemes following the 1965 Higher Education Act failed to pass conservative opposition.[42] During the Cold War, universities with strong science and technology faculties, such as MIT, Stanford, and Georgia Tech, could also supplement their endowment growth by tying themselves to the national security apparatus and pursuing substantial government research funding.[43]
This history casts a long shadow on divestment activism. During the transition to mass higher education, universities in the United States and United Kingdom not only protected their philanthropic foundations from nationalization but entrenched and diversified existing financial models. In preserving private funding channels, American and British universities retained greater independence from the political parties of the day but exposed themselves to the political conservatism of their own donor base. Historically, the alumni donor base for the prestigious R1 schools in the U.S. or Russell Group in the U.K. tend to be older, wealthier, whiter, and more male than their respective student bodies and the national electorate. As the endowment portfolios of the deep pocketed universities became larger and more complex—especially in the 1980s with asset securitization enabled by the loosening of financial rules—this conservatism became more pronounced.
Insulation from state pressure did not lead all US and UK higher education providers to become conservate, of course. Some schools developed a “social circuitry of activists” among alumni and students, who cultivated campus leaderships and donor networks more sympathetic to social activism. This encouraged the development of institutional reputations for being progressive, anti-racist, or otherwise socially conscious. Notable here are liberal-arts colleges, seminaries, historically black colleges and universities, and women’s colleges. This factor can help explain why schools like Evergreen State College and Union Theological Seminary were willing to make public announcements against the Israeli occupation prior to national legislation, similar to Brown University and Vassar College’s decisions in an earlier era against South African apartheid.
Continental Europe followed a different path, with attendant consequences for the protests against the Gaza genocide. There, as mentioned, university philanthropic funds were destroyed or nationalized earlier in the 20th century, and the purse strings of higher education were subsumed under the state.[44] Downstream of that process, university divestment politics become synonymous with partisan control. Where the political objectives of European student movements have aligned with national political party sentiment, the universities are more likely to capitulate to student demands. They have also been more likely to capitulate swiftly and in a unified, clustered cascade than is the case in the United States.
Policy Implications and Conclusions
Two complementary variables, both products of history, explain how higher education institutions respond to activist demands: (1) the degree to which they are subjected to partisan-cum-state control and (2) institutional funding structures. The Palestine protests on campuses in spring 2024 serve as an affirming test case for these claims.
US endowments were originally created, at least in part, to shield elitist institutions from political interference, such as the whims of state legislatures. For instance, Unitarian Harvard and Congregationalist Yale had spats over the curriculum with their respective state legislatures up to the 1840s, after which they solicited private sources of funds in large enough amounts to insulate themselves from lawmaker influence for the remainder of the century. The acquisition of private donor funds came at its own cost: It exposed university decision-makers to the preferences of the donors. In the case of early 19th century Yale and Harvard, that donor class was the New England business elite. Today, it’s a global network of wealthy men, such as MAGA billionaires Kenneth Griffin or William Ackman.
On one hand, the trend in the United States tilted the universities’ selectorate toward the political conservatism of an older, richer, whiter, and more male donor base. It also naturalized an economic order in which investing according to profit incentives is interpreted as an apolitical act, whereas divesting on the basis of moral demands is understood as an unwelcome political intervention. We can juxtapose this to the more morally alert investment strategies of pension and sovereign wealth funds in Norway. On the other hand, American higher education preserved a heterogeneity of institutional forms and funding structures into the age of mass enrollment, leaving open the possibility that some donor networks—for instance those at progressive liberal arts colleges and historically black institutions—could provide cover for an institution to accommodate its student activists, even against the currents of national partisan consensus. Thus some of the American colleges can be first movers. In Europe, as both the peripheries and core transitioned to mass higher education, the purse strings of the old elite universities were subsumed under the state. Under these conditions, student protests can still be effective at driving divestment. However, efficacy depends on students forcing their priorities directly into the governing party coalitions, not by a ‘long march through the institutions’ that conquers the universities first and the government second.
Disparities in the funding of higher education shape not only the extent of university autonomy from partisan control, but also how social movements relate to the university as an arena of contestation. In Europe, activist pressure more frequently revolves around the school’s institutional rather than financial relationships with complicit entities. This reflects the fact that university endowments in Europe are meager or absent, and European university finances are more widely recognized as tethered to the state. In the United States, in comparison, where universities are often perceived to be autonomous institutional and financial actors, activists lay intensified claims on them—and contest the universities’ endowment and exterior funding channels. This dynamic is reinforced by the symbolic and physical sequestration of American student and campus affairs from urban life, as manifested for example in the geographic layout of land-grant campuses, the housing structure (dorms, Greek life, on-campus apartments), and alumni and student culture.
This leads to a final insight pertinent to protests against the genocide in Gaza. In continental Europe, universities’ ties to states can be a problem and an opportunity. Where European states are more responsive to democratic pressure than Anglo-American varieties—a virtue born of their more proportional political institutions and institutionally-supported working class movement—it is possible governments can be swayed and with them, the national universities. In the United States and United Kingdom, student activists face not just the antipathy of the parties but an additional opposition: the donors.
This insight serves as a rejoinder to a theme of university institutional design—discernable in the anti-state sentiment of Enlightenment education theorists such as Mirabeau, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and J.S. Mill—which asserts that the ideal university is the one capable of funding itself independently from the legislature. In Humboldt’s words, the financially dependent university degenerates into a “mere institute for the use of the state.” Independent financing he argued insulates the university from politics and makes it best able to provide a fertile ground for an emancipated civil society and the moral development of the whole person (“Bildung”). He even resigned in disappointment after failing to secure a land-grant from the King of Prussia for his new university in Berlin. Instead, we should understand that universities always contend with different selectorates of various sizes and persuasions that impose political demands, whether by party-dominated legislatures or private donors. In fact, institutional reliance on the state can serve as an advantage to progressive mass movements as long as the state itself is democratic.
[1] Soule, Sarah A. 1997. “The Student Divestment Movement in the United States and Tactical Diffusion: The Shantytown Protest.” Social Forces 75 (3): 855–82.
[2] See for example materials from the ongoing South Africa v. Israel case in the International Court of Justice. Also Amnesty International, “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.” December 5, 2024. Human Rights Watch, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.” December 19, 2024. Forensic Architecture, “A Cartography of Genocide: A Spatial Analysis of the Israeli Military’s Conduct in Gaza since October 2023.” October 25, 2024.
[3] Tooze, Adam. 2024. “Chartbook 279: Columbia University’s ‘Crisis’ – a Political Economy Sketch Map.” Substack newsletter. Chartbook (blog). April 26, 2024.
[4] See MIT Coalition for Palestine. MIT Science Against Genocide report (December 10, 2024).
[5] Sowersby, Shauna. 2024. “Evergreen Signs Agreement with Students to Move toward Divesting from Companies Profiting in Gaza.” The Olympian. May 3, 2024.
[6] The New York Times. “Where Protesters on U.S. Campuses Have Been Arrested or Detained,” May 2, 2024.
[7] Le Monde. “L’appel de 70 présidents d’établissements d’enseignement supérieur : « Les universités ne doivent pas être instrumentalisées à des fins politiques »,” April 25, 2024.
[8] ETH Zurich Staffnet. “‘ETH Zurich Is Not a Platform for Political Activism.’” May 8, 2024.
[9] Carroll, Rory, and Rory Carroll. “Trinity College Dublin Agrees to Divest from Israeli Firms after Student Protest.” The Guardian, May 8, 2024.
[10] Miller, Lisa L. 2023. “Checks and Balances, Veto Exceptionalism, and Constitutional Folk Wisdom: Class and Race Power in American Politics.” Political Research Quarterly 76 (4): 1604–18.
[11] Oklobdzija, Stan. 2024. “Dark Parties: Unveiling Nonparty Communities in American Political Campaigns.” American Political Science Review 118 (1): 401–22.
[12] Jackson, Holly M. 2024. “The New York Times Distorts the Palestinian Struggle: A Case Study of Anti-Palestinian Bias in US News Coverage of the First and Second Palestinian Intifadas.” Media, War & Conflict 17 (1): 116–35.
[13] Mearsheimer, John J., and Stephen M. Walt. 2007. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. See also Pappe, Ilan. 2024. Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic. Simon and Schuster.
[14] For a good treatment of ALEC, see Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander. 2014. “Who Passes Business’s ‘Model Bills’? Policy Capacity and Corporate Influence in U.S. State Politics.” Perspectives on Politics 12 (3): 582–602.
[15] Rynhold, Jonathan. 2023. “Partisanship and Support for Israel in the USA.” In The Palgrave International Handbook of Israel, edited by P. R. Kumaraswamy, 1–31. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
[16] “Positions of EU Leaders on Israel-Palestine Dispute (Track Record).” 2024. Eumatrix.
[17] Browne, Brendan Ciarán. 2024. “Reading Irish Solidarity with Palestine through Ireland’s ‘Unfinished Revolution.’” Journal of Palestine Studies 53 (1): 92–103.
[18] Finn, Daniel. “Brittle Opposition.” NLR/Sidecar, December 05, 2024.
[19] Jewish Currents. “Bad Memory” [Deutsch]. Spring 2023.
[20] Thörn, Håkan. 2019. “Nordic Support to The Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa-Between Global Solidarity and National Self-Interest.” Southern African Liberation Struggles, 1.
[21] Andresen, Knud. n.d. “Between Goodwill and Sanctions: Swedish and German Corporations in South Africa and the Politics of Codes of Conduct.” In Apartheid and Anti-Apartheid in Western Europe, 25–48. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
[22] Levitan, Nir. 2023. Scandinavian Diplomacy and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Official and Unofficial Soft Power. London: Routledge.
[23] Owiredu, Maria. 2024. “Sveriges Politiska Partieroch Israel-Palestinafrågan: En Analys Av Svenska Partiers Agerande 2006–2021.” PhD Thesis, Linnaeus University Press.
[24] On education policy and financing, Carles Boix, Marius Busemeyer, and Ben Ansell have also examined the impact of partisan coalitions.
[25] See Iversen, Torben, and John D. Stephens. 2008. “Partisan Politics, the Welfare State, and Three Worlds of Human Capital Formation.” Comparative Political Studies 41 (4–5): 600–637.
[26] Eaton, Charlie, and Mitchell L. Stevens. 2020. “Universities as Peculiar Organizations.” Sociology Compass 14 (3): e12768.
[27] Collins, Randall. 1979. The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press.
[28] Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford University Press.
[29] Iversen, Torben, and John D. Stephens. 2008. “Partisan Politics, the Welfare State, and Three Worlds of Human Capital Formation.” Comparative Political Studies 41 (4–5): 600–637.
[30] See for instance Ansell, Ben W. 2010. From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Political Economy of Education. Cambridge University Press. Busemeyer, Marius R. 2014. Skills and Inequality: Partisan Politics and the Political Economy of Education Reforms in Western Welfare States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eaton, Charlie. 2022. Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education. University of Chicago Press. Stevens, Mitchell, and Michael W. Kirst. 2015. Remaking College: The Changing Ecology of Higher Education. Stanford University Press.
[31] Trow, Martin. 2010. Twentieth-Century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal. JHU Press.
[32] Data source: Lee, Jong-Wha, and Hanol Lee. 2016. “Human Capital in the Long Run.” Journal of Development Economics 122 (September):147–69.
[33] For a canonical study, see Thelen, Kathleen. 2004. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge University Press.
[34] Kersbergen, Kees van. 2003. Social Capitalism: A Study of Christian Democracy and the Welfare State. London: Routledge. Kersbergen, Kees van, and Philip Manow. 2009. Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States. Cambridge University Press.
[35] Ansell, Ben W. 2011. “9. Humboldt Humbled? The Germanic University System in Comparative Perspective.” In Social Policy in the Smaller European Union States, edited by Gary B. Cohen, Ben W. Ansell, Robert Henry Cox, and Jane Gingrich, 215–36.
[36] At the dawn of the 20th century, universities in all OECD countries were competing providers of an elite distinction, serving less than 3% of the graduating age cohort from secondary schooling. Many universities held assets such as land or company stock and relied on wealthy benefactors to cover expenses.
[37] Kimball, Bruce A., and Sarah M. Iler. 2023. Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education: A Brief History. JHU Press.
[38] For a useful typology of Europe’s philanthropic funding regimes, see Anheier, Helmut, and Siobhan Daly. 2006. The Politics of Foundations: A Comparative Analysis. Routledge.
[39] OpenSecrets, Federal Lobbying by Industry, 1998-2024.
[40] Mitchell, Josh. 2021. The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe. Simon and Schuster.
[41] Mettler, Suzanne. 2014. Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream. Basic Books.
[42] Student debt, infamously, is the only class of debt U.S. borrowers cannot escape by declaring bankruptcy.
[43] Leslie, Stuart W. 1993. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. Columbia University Press.
[44] In Austria for instance, the monarchy repeatedly attempted to appropriate foundation assets to fill budget gaps at various times from the 17th to 19th centuries and then made private university foundations government institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Image Attribution: عباد ديرانية, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘The Political Economy of Divestment Campaigns Across the Atlantic’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ‘Across the Atlantic, student protest movements in spring 2024 reaped uneven success in challenging their universities to divest or sever ties with Israel. In Spain, Ireland, Denmark, and Norway student organizers partially succeeded in severing ties. In the US, Sweden, France, and Germany, they failed. I use this example to explore the behavior of an important institutional investor in the American political economy, the university. My argument is that the disparate success does not just reflect different national politics. Cross- national differences in the division of labor between public and private sources in education financing mediate how national politics influence institutional decisions, ultimately shaping patterns of divestment demand and response. I use this example to trace the process by which universities and their funding channels across Atlantic evolved historically in different directions. These directions in turn shaped how social movements relate to the university as a site of political contestation.’, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘the-political-economy-of-divestment-campaigns-across-the-atlantic’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2025-01-16 21:55:54’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2025-01-16 20:55:54’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=685’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )Introduction
Tunisia held Presidential elections on October 6th, 2024. Unsurprisingly, incumbent President Kais Saied won with 90.69% of the votes cast, ahead of liberal candidate Ayachi Zammel (7.35%) and Arab nationalist Zouhair Maghzaoui (1.97%). The election was marked by low turnout (28.80%) and controversy. The latter stemmed from bans imposed on particular opposition candidates. While Kais Saied\’s regime claimed an affirming victory, the opposition framed his win within the context of a rigged electoral process and a political environment hostile to democratic contention.
There is little doubt that Saied’s triumph was assured by the manner with which the Presidential election was organized. That is not to say, however, that Tunisia’s opposition might have won had the plebiscite been fairly contested. Indeed, the opposition’s weakness at our current juncture is difficult to overstate. As this weakness is fundamental to Tunisia’s future—at once contributing to the longevity of Saied’s power and the poor prospects of a democratic restoration—an audit of its causes has become necessary.
Changing the Rules of the Game
Coup d\’état and Repression of Freedoms
Any discussion of the opposition’s weakness must first consider the conditions under which it operates.
On July 25th, 2021, President Kais Saied activated Article 80 of the Constitution, froze parliament, dismissed the head of government and temporarily vested all executive and legislative powers in his own hands. The emergency of the Covid-19 pandemic was used as pretext for these sweeping actions. Two months later, this coup de force turned into a coup d\’état proper when Saied formally suspended the Constitution. Thereafter, he ruled by executive decree. And little by little, the institutions put in place after the 2011 revolution to create a democratic political environment were dismantled.
Saied’s power grab culminated in the adoption of a new Constitution in July 2022. Once the constitution was in place, Carthage embarked on a project for (re)consolidating autocracy. Key to this was Decree no.54. Officially aimed at combating false information and cybercrime, the Decree was leveraged to muzzle opposition voices and establish a climate of terror throughout the country.[1] Several journalists were arrested under this decree, including Sonia Dahmani, Mourad Zeghidi and Borhene Bsaies.[2] On the political front, high-profile leaders of Tunisia’s political parties were arrested, too: Charged with plotting against the state’s security, leaders such as Ghazi Chaouachi (former Secretary General of the Courant Démocratique), Issam Chebbi (Secretary General of Al Joumhouri) and other well-known figures were imprisoned across 2023. Most continue to be held in pre-trial detention.[3] Though charged with different crimes, prominent figures like Rached Ghannouchi of the Islamist Ennahdha party and Abir Moussi of the Parti Destourien Libre also remain behind bars. None of this would have been possible without Saied’s commandeering of the judiciary. The President’s weaponization of the law began in 2022, when he dissolved the Supreme Council of the Magistracy and dismissed 57 judges.[4] With institutional counterweights cleared, he was freed to repress freedoms as he saw fit.
Saied’s actions fundamentally shifted the parameters of political contention after July 25th. In the lead up to last fall’s Presidential elections, his actions also made it incredibly difficult for opposition forces to stage a challenge.
Though the leading parties of the democratic transition announced intentions to boycott the elections from the start, candidates from other political families did attempt to a bid for Carthage. One of the first to enter the race was Lotfi Mraihi. Leader of the Union Populaire Républicaine party, Mraihi had been a candidate for the Presidency in 2019, when he garnered nearly 6.56% of the vote. An outspoken critic of the regime, he was arrested in July 2024 and sentenced to eight months in prison on suspicion of corruption.[5] Like that, he was disqualified him from running. A similar fate awaited Safi Said, who won 7.4% of the vote in 2019. In June 2024, Said was sentenced to four months\’ imprisonment in absentia[6] and thereby struck from the ballot. Other candidates were prevented from completing the application process due to the interventions of the Ministry of Interior. One such example was rapper K2Rhym, who was refused his bulletin n°3 (where one reports a possible criminal record).[7]
Even some of the candidates who managed to successfully file their candidacy with the Independent Superior Electoral Body (ISIE) wound up booted from the ballot in the final instance. Prominently, this was the outcome that awaited Mondher Zenaidi, a former minister under Ben Ali; Abdellatif Mekki, a former Minister and Ennahda party member; and Imed Daimi, the former chief of staff for Moncef Marzouki. Each won decisions from the administrative court validating their candidacies. At the end of an unprecedented legal battle, however, the ISIE overruled the court and unilaterally disqualified the three. The ISIE’s actions transgressed electoral law and set a dangerous precedent for the rule of law in Tunisia.[8]
Abstentionism in Tunisia: A Timeline
The voter participation rate in October 2024’s Presidential elections was just 28%. This is in keeping with a post-2011 trend: Abstentionism in Tunisia has risen steadily across the past fourteen years.
At the time of the first free and democratic election in the country\’s history (which elected the National Constituent Assembly in 2011), roughly 50% of eligible voters participated. In 2014, the first round of Presidential elections brought just 38% of eligible voters to the ballot box. Five years later, Presidential elections inspired a 50% turnout. In absolute terms, the figures are as follows: 4.3 million voted in 2011, 3.3 million in 2014, 3.4 million in 2019, and just 2.8 million in 2024.
In view of events over the past four years, to say conditions have been unconducive to opposition activities would risk gross understatement. It is therefore imperative that the opposition’s record post-July 25th first be understood in view of the environment Saied has created.
Popular Disconnect and a Failed Boycott
But it is not Saied’s actions alone that explain the opposition’s weakness. This weakness, observed most recently in failures to politicize an election boycott—a boycott attempted by the mainstream opposition (i.e. the leading parties of the democratic transition)—must also be understood in light of the opposition’s inability to connect with popular forces.
Ennahda, arguably the decisive actor during the decade of the democratic transition, has clearly come up short in rebuilding its social sinews. In power throughout the democratic transition (apart from the parenthesis of 2014, when a technocratic government ruled), the party came to be seen as the main culprits behind the country’s floundering political and economic fortunes. With galloping inflation, rising unemployment and eroding purchasing power, resentment towards the Islamists grew steadily. Post-election alliances with Nidaa Tounes (2014), and Qalb Tounes (2019) hurt their cause further by giving credence to the notion of a democracy co-opted by a handful of elites. So too did accusations of corruption and embezzlement and public perceptions related to the post-2011 security crisis: Whether due to their being inept governors or cynical conspirators, many Tunisians saw Ennahda as responsible for the attacks at the Bardo museum and Sousse beach in 2015 and for the political assassinations of Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi in 2013. All this led to Rached Ghannouchi earning the worst favorability scores of any Tunisian political figure while he was in charge of the Assembly of People\’s Representatives prior to Saied’s coup.[9] And all this informs why the party had no capacity to turn an election boycott into a meaningful political weapon: They might have persuaded their dwindling number of voters to stay at home this past fall, but stood no chance of using this to delegitimize Saied’s claim to power.
The various descendants of the Destourians were equally hapless in the autumn.[10] The faction led by Abir Moussi, the Parti Destourien Libri (PDL), actually led the polls on the eve of Saied’s coup in 2021.[11] This had been achieved on the back of Mousi’s virulent anti-Islamism and rejectionist positioning vis-à-vis 2011’s revolution: Casting herself as an agent of stability amidst a decade of chaos, Moussi gained more momentum as the shortcomings of the democratic transition accumulated.[12] Alas, with Saied’s coup d\’état in July 2021, Mousi and the PDL saw their political cause appropriated by a more virulent champion: Voters hitherto inclined to put their hopes in the Moussi alternative instead aligned themselves with a President who had made that alternative real. In the two years that followed, the PDL was left in the awkward position of opposing a regime which shared in its politics. The resulting incoherence cost Moussi and the PDL support, though did not weaken them enough to convince Saied she might not one day become a threat. As a result, the President had Moussi arrested in October 2023 after she had lodged complaints against the President’s rule-by-decree governance.[13] The move disqualified Moussi from contesting for the Presidency in 2024 and delivered a so-far irrecoverable blow to the PDL: The party had neither the institutional footprint nor popular buy-in needed to leverage abstentionism into a broader challenge.
A second Destourian current, this one spearheaded by the aforementioned Mondher Zenaidi, also proved unable to withstand a Saied offensive. A member of the old guard who had held ministerial portfolios including health, tourism, transport and trade under Ben Ali, Zenaidi presented himself as an independent technocrat and statesman last fall. The sell was compelling enough to lift him to the top opposition spot in many pre-election polls[14]. The polls sufficed to have Zenaidi, campaigning from abroad, regarded as a danger by Carthage. This led to his candidacy being annulled on the pretext of an incomplete sponsorship file. Lacking a real social base, Zenaidi could not level a response to Carthage’s repression.
Tunisia’s partisan left was equally unequipped in October (and even more unequipped now) to mobilize an opposition. Historically, the Tunisian left has been compromised by internal divisions. Occupying a spectrum defined at at its poles by opposition to the old regime and the Islamists, respectively, this political tendency continues to be made up of a multitude of parties and ideological currents. Broadly speaking, it is possible to identify three main camps, each of which contains its own cleavages: the Social Democratic Left, the Marxist Left and the Pan-Arab Left.[15]
Over the ten year democratic transition, none of the leftist camps were able to approach a plurality in the legislature, to convince the other camps to align, or to carve out a steady electoral presence. After the 2021 coup d\’état, this motley of actors fractured again, this time into supporters and opponents of President Kais Saied.[16] The Arab nationalists and part of the radical left (the Democratic Patriots Movement most prominently) lined up behind Saied. Contrarily, the social democratic left and the Workers\’ Party, a Marxist outfit, formed a coalition to oppose the coup on the eve of the 2022 referendum.[17] The breaks within the wider leftist tent compounded existing problems. It also did nothing to improve troubles that all leftist currents have with elitism and social disconnectedness. This all being the case, when the elections for the Presidency were held in October, the left could neither speak with a single voice nor bring real political pressure to bear.
A Powerless Civil Society
Outside the realm of partisan politics, opposition forces have also found little traction in pushing back against Saied. Much of this can be explained by the developments within civil society. There, the combination of Carthage-directed repression and inadequate performance has had profound consequences.
The Submission of the UGTT
A big part of this story concerns the Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT), the country\’s main trade union center.[18] Saliently, the UGTT’s leadership supported the measures taken by Kais Saied on July 25, 2021, if hedging their support with calls for constitutional guarantees of democratic governance.[19] Once the writing was on the wall concerning Saied’s intentions, the same leadership turned on Carthage, publicly criticizing Saied’s instituting of Decree 117.[20] Thereafter, the UGTT’s national leadership did take a distance from Saied: In 2022, for instance, the UGTT refused to participate in the commission the President established for deliberating on a new constitution.[21] The arrest of Anis Kaabi in early 2023, General Secretary of the Motorways Union, revealed Saied’s approach for dealing with these challenges.
By 2024, the UGTT was something of a spent force politically. Its demonstrations attracted hundreds where they once drew thousands, its attempts at organizing a national dialogue floundered, and its weight on decision-makers calculations was greatly diminished. The organization’s decline find its source in two places. The first is Noureddine Taboubi, an autocratic character who amended the union\’s internal regulations to allow him to run for a third Presidential term. The second is the union’s own divisions. A large share of the UGTT\’s rank and file, those of far-left and Arab nationalist currents especially, remain big boosters of Saied. (Cognizant of this, Saied appointed Mohamed Ali Boughediri, a prominent trade unionist, to head the Ministry of Education in 2023). This makes opposing the President a fraught prospect.
For an indication of just how far the UGTT has fallen, consider Noureddine Taboubi’s September 2023 declaration that “silence was also a form of militancy.” A confession of powerlessness if there ever was one.[22]
NGOs Repressed and Rejected
Repressive interventions from Carthage have likewise ensured that Tunisia’s NGOs, another pillar of democratic transition, cannot oppose his agenda.[23] Saied’s machinations have been deft in this regard. Specifically, he has capitalized on and amplified preexisting public unease around social associations. The unease stems from a mix of legitimate concerns and disinformation as relates to particular associations’ financial opacity and political linkages.[24] Piggybacking on this, Saied has regularly claimed Tunisia’s civil society organizations to be foreign agents and declared that they are a threat to national sovereignty.[25]
On October 10, 2023, parliamentarians under Saied’s direction presented a bill to the Assembly of People\’s Representatives which would reshape the legal landscape for associations full-cloth.[26] Though not as yet passed, Saied has leveraged the law’s spectre to create a chill across civil society. He has also shown no hesitation in targeting leaders in the sector for arrest. Witness the arrests of Saadia Mosbah[27], President of the Mnemty Association working to combat racial discrimination in Tunisia, and Sherifa Riahi[28], former executive director of the migrant aid association Tunisie Terre d\’Asile. Through these maneuvers, Saied has paralyzed Tunisian civil society for all effects and purposes.
A Demobilized Street
Nor is the likelihood of opposition mobilizing on the street very high. Certainly, it was the street that played an essential role in the transition to democracy—and in consolidating the democracy thereafter. Since July 25th, 2021, however, the popular energy that once pulsed out there has been significantly diminished. A number of demonstrations were organized with relative success in the run-up to the presidential elections in October of last year, it should be said. A demonstration organized by left-wing youth collectives in May 2024 to protest against Decree 54 and the arrests of journalists gathered large crowds. The Network for the Defense of Rights and Freedoms, an alliance of left-wing parties and civil society associations, also brought big numbers to the street in a series of demonstrations denouncing the anti-democratic context of the elections and the ISIE\’s authoritarian actions. None of these efforts, however, proved lasting or of a magnitude sufficient to sway Carthage’s decision-making.
On balance, the street, like civil society and political parties, looks be exhausted. As many indicators establish, young people are less and less involved in the public arena today, and the climate of fear installed after the coup has had a direct impact on people’s willingness to mobilize for demonstrations
Street Politics: A Brief History
The fall of Ben Ali’s regime has many causes, but in the most immediate sense, it was compelled by relentless street pressure and the demonstrations that took place between December 17, 2010 and January 14, 2011. During the Constituent Assembly period, the sit-ins that took place in the summer of 2013 after the assassinations of Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi also forced leading political actors to take part in the national dialogue, a dialogue which ultimately delivered the country from its political crisis. Between 2015 and 2017, meanwhile, when President Beji Caid Essebsi had proposed a bill on reconciliation with the old guard of the Ben Ali Regime, it was again the mobilization of young people in the “Menich Msemah” movement which led to the bill being rolled back and gutted. Demonstrations on July 25th, 2021 also had a hand, if not a decisive one, in Saied’ coup.
Conclusions
One cannot deny that by weaponizing the law in the manner he has, Kais Saied made opposing his rule an incredibly challenging prospect. Nevertheless, the relative ease with which Saied has consolidated his power suggests that the weakness of Tunisia’s opposition has also played a significant role in the course of events.
Whether one speaks of the partisan actors that led the democratic transition, the UGTT, or those operating in civil society today, the following is clear: None has the institutional strength, social groundedness, or political vision to present an alternative to Kais Saied. The reasons for the opposition’s weakness are manifold. Regardless, though, the effect is to buttress Saied’s grip on authority. Whatever the President’s flaws—and they are innumerable—absent an opposition with real teeth and capacity, authoritarianism will persist. It may be in the form of Kais Saied’s regime. It may be in the form of a military junta. But until opposition forces can embed themselves within society, democracy will not be in the cards.
[1] Human Rights Watch, “Tunisie, un décret sur la cybercriminalité utilisé contre les détracteurs des autorités”, hrw.org, December 19th 2023.
[2] Frida Dahmani, “Zeghidi, Bsaies, Dahmani… En Tunisie, tension maximale après l’arrestation de plusieurs chroniqueurs radio”, Jeune Afrique, May 13th 2024.
[3] La Rédaction d’Inkydafa, “Affaire du complot contre la sûreté de l’Etat : un an après, quel bilan ?”, Inkyfada, February 11th 2024.
[4] Jeune Afrique avec AFP, “En Tunisie, la mainmise de Kais Saied sur la Justice contestée dans la rue”, Jeune Afrique, June 1st 2023
[5] Le monde avec AFP, “Un candidat à la présidentielle condamné à huit mois de prison et à une inéligibilité à vie”, Le Monde, July 19th 2024.
[6] S.H. “Safi Said condamné à quatre mois de prison par contumace”, Businessnews.com, June 26th 2024.
[7] S.G. “K2Rhym : on a refusé de me fournir mon bulletin n°3”, Businessnews.com, August 5th 2024.
[8] Malik Ben Salem, “En Tunisie, vers une présidentielle “qui balaye l’Etat de droit””, Courrier International, September 3rd 2024.
[9] Khalil Jelassi, “Sondages et baromètres politiques : Rached Ghannouchi l’éternel impopulaire”, Lapresse.tn, June 2nd 2021.
[10] The Destour family is heir to the Neo-Destour party, founded by Bourguiba in 1934 and at the forefront of the struggle for decolonization. Initially Néo-Destour, then Parti Socialiste Destourien, and finally Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique under Ben Ali, this party governed the country from 1956 to 2011. After the Revolution, the party was dissolved, and several political formations subsequently claimed the heritage of the Destour family, the most notable being Nidaa Tounes, formed by former president Béji Caid Essebsi, and having governed hand in hand with the Islamists from 2014 to 2019, then the Parti Destourien Libre (PDL) guided by Abir Moussi.
[11] Nadia Dejoui, “Intentions de vote : Kais Saied et le PDL toujours en tête du classement”, L’économiste Maghrébin, May 25th 2021.
[12] Mousi led her party to a third place finish in terms of votes in the legislative elections of 2019, winning 6.63% of the ballots cast. She climbed to the top of the polls in the two years that followed and the PDL was in first place in terms of voting intentions for several months in 2021.
[13] Jeune Afrique avec AFP, “En Tunisie, arrestation de Abir Moussi”, Jeuneafrique.com, October 4th 2023.
[14] Meher Kacem, “Présidentielle 2024 / Intentions de vote : Mondher Zenaidi en deuxième position”, Radioexpressfm.net, April 3rd 2024
[15] In 2011, the Social-Democratic Left was most ascendant and led by the Forum Démocratique pour le Travail et les Libertés (FDTL): The FDTL sent twenty deputies to the Constituent Assembly, followed by the Parti Démocrate Progressiste (PDP) with 16 deputies, and the Pôle Démocratique Moderniste with 5 deputies. Come 2014, the Popular Front alliance, made up mainly of Marxist and Arab nationalist parties, was on top, sending 15 deputies to the Assembly of People\’s Representatives. Five years later, the Social Dems took back the reins, with the Courant Démocratique, an offshoot from the CPR, winning 22 deputies, seven more than the Mouvement du Peuple (Arab Nationalist).
[16] Hakim Fekih, “Tunisie. A gauche, fractures ouvertes face à Kais Saied”, OrientXXI, April 26th 2023.
[17] Yosra Ouanes, “Tunisie : 5 partis politiques lancent une campagne pour renverser le référendum Constitutionnel”, aa.com.tr, June 2nd 2022
[18] Founded in 1946 by Farhat Hached, the UGTT played a leading role in the struggle for independence, was behind the main uprisings against the dictatorship, notably in 1978 and 2008, and was one of the main driving forces behind the 2011 Revolution. During the democratic transition, organization was a leading political player, notably thanks to the role it played during the crisis of summer 2013, which earned it the Nobel Peace Prize with the National Dialogue Quartet in 2015.
[19] C.B.Y, “Tunisie : l’UGTT appelle à accompagner les mesures exceptionnelles prises par Saied d’un ensemble de garanties constitutionnelles”, Kapitalis, July 26th 2021
[20] Frida Dahmani, “Tunisie : L’UGTT, première force d’opposition à Kais Saied ?”, Jeuneafrique.com, December 7th 2021
[21] Le Monde avec AFP, “En Tunisie, la centrale syndicale rejette le dialogue proposé par le président Kais Saied”, Le Monde, May 24th 2022
[22] LM, “Tunisie – VIDEO : Tabboubi : Le silence est une forme de militantisme”, Tunisienumerique.com, September 10th 2023
[23] During the transition to democracy, the Tunisian associative landscape underwent a veritable revolution, with the decree-law 2011-88 put in place by the High Instance for the Realization of the Objectives of the Revolution, Political Reform and Democratic Transition guaranteeing freedom of association in Tunisia. This decree, combined with the atmosphere of freedom that reigned in the country after the revolution, resulted in the creation of no fewer than 13,000 associations between 2011 and 2020. The associative sector thus experienced its golden age during the post-revolutionary period.
[24] Khalil Jelassi, “Financement douteux des associations et interférence avec la vie politique : Des mécanismes juridiques de contrôle limités”, Lapresse.tn, July 16th 2019
[25] S.H, “Kais Saied tire à boulets rouges sur les associations financées de l’étranger”, businessnews.com.tn, September 26th 2024
[26] Zeineb Ben Ismail et Jawher Djelassi, “Loi sur les associations : un projet qui met la société civile en péril”, Inkyfada.com, December 13th 2023.
[27] Monia Ben Hamadi, “L’arrestation de la militante antiraciste Saadia Mosbah ravive les craintes de la communauté noire, Le Monde, May 9th 2024
[28] Y.N, “L’ancienne présidente de l’association “Terre d’Asile Tunisie” en garde à vue”, Kapitalis.com May 9th 2024
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Tunisia\’s Opposition in the Wake of October\’s Presidential Elections’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘tunisias-opposition-in-the-wake-of-octobers-presidential-elections’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2025-01-14 11:57:13’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2025-01-14 10:57:13’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=681’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )Introduction
Following a meeting of the National Security Council on February 21, 2023, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied issued what became an infamous communiqué. In it, he claimed sub-Saharan African migrants were building a presence in Tunisia as result of a criminal scheme aimed at modifying the “demographic composition” of Tunisian society. Thereafter, life for sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia, hardly great to begin with[1], worsened considerably. Hundreds were evicted from their homes, hundreds others were subjected to job terminations, physical and verbal violence, and punitive deportations. Social media videos documented buses dropping migrants based in Sfax near remote areas close to the Libyan border. There, they faced extreme conditions, including temperatures soaring to 50 degrees, without assistance or anything in the way of food, water, and shelter. The National Guard and Tunisian military were also revealed to have forcibly relocated up to 1,200 individuals in multiple groups to border regions, environs equally devoid of shade, vegetation, water, electricity, and communication services. These cruel acts resulted in the disappearance and deaths of many, including a migrant named Fatie and her daughter Marie. A photograph taken of mother and child, prostrate and lifeless in under the unforgiving sun, wound up shared widely on the Tunisian internet.[2]
If extreme, Saied’s interventions against sub-Saharan African migrants are in keeping with a policy trend evinced across the southern Mediterranean region. This trend must be understood in view of changes to the European Union’s migration policies towards the Global South. Despite Europe’s service sectors retaining a need for imported labor (care industries especially)—and despite ageing populations imperiling Europe’s growth prospects—the past decade has seen aggressive attempts at curtailing immigrant flows. This policy pivot is broadly attributable to the rise of rightwing political forces, both in Brussels and across the EU’s member states. Europe’s rightwing has weaponized discontent over the continent’s economic stagnation by redirecting popular anxiety and fear against vulnerable populations, migrants most of all. Having successfully swayed many center-right and center-left parties into adopting its agenda, Europe’s rightwing has set the course for the EU’s anti-immigrant turn. Amongst other things, these dynamics have led the EU and its member states to incentivize and/or pressure North African countries into becoming agents of “border externalization policies”. In effect, Europe is enlisting governments of the Maghreb as sub-contractors, tasking them with intercepting Europe-bound migrants before they can cross the Mediterranean.
Such arrangements speak to the endurance of postcolonial bargains. For the leaders that won independence across the Maghreb last century, victory was hardly total: Sovereignty was limited not only by economic dependence, but by demands that they ensure the geo-racialized security of the Global North. Then as now, this demand has reinforced the racially-charged violence of borders. Then as now, subordination to Europe has also left societies in the Maghreb dealing with deeply corrosive social effects.
Postcolonial and Geo-Racialized Security
Migration and Postcolonial States as Security Providers for the Global North[3]
Before turning to the specifics of present day Tunisia, it is appropriate to begin with the role attributed to postcolonial ruling elites by colonial interests during the long twentieth century. As discerned by Palestinian political scientist Tamim al-Barghouti, the establishment of formal independence often required postcolonial rulers to respect and secure the material interests of the former colonial overseer.[4] In al-Barghouti’s estimations, this vested post-colonial states with fundamental contradictions.[5] On the one hand, the postcolonial leader’s rule—and the prosperity of the ruler’s social coalition—hinged on their acting as comprador for the departed colonial power. On the other, it hinged on the postcolonial leader convincing the native population that they were agents of national emancipation. Servicing both imperatives fomented irreconcilable tensions. In attempting to resolve them, al-Barghouti asserts that rulers frequently leaned into the following playbook:
“To the native population, it offers the promise of liberation, symbolized by legal independence, formal, or sometimes only nominal, sovereignty as well as the end of military occupation; to the colonial power, it offers to secure the vital colonial interests, such as the safety of international trade routes, the safety of colonial enterprises, the safety of European residents, and all other regional geo-strategic interests of the colonial power. All of these functions require the keeping of law and order by a state apparatus.”[6]
While evolving over time, the partial sovereignty of the postcolonial state has endured across the Maghreb. And though not the only variable at work, this partial sovereignty animates the migration policies of Tunisian governors since the introduction of the Schengen system in 1985.
To appreciate partial sovereignty’s salience, it is worth recalling that absent external compensation, Tunisia itself derives little benefit in preventing either nationals or non-nationals from departing from its shores for Europe. After all, in doing so, the country loses out on remittance flows while the state, rendered complicit in the deaths of thousands in the sea, sheds legitimacy. In view of the consequence, that successive Tunisian governments would take on the role of Europe’s gatekeeper suggests policy choice is not wholly volitional. The example of Kais Saied’s government indicates that financial needs heavily mediate the policymaking process.
The weight that liquidity problems exert on Tunisia’s contemporary migration policies are observable in the terms of the country’s most recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the European Union, signed on July 16, 2023. De jure and de facto, the MoU offered Tunisia a pay-off for policing the border more intensively: For a relatively small amount of money (€900 million in macroeconomic support and €150 million in direct budgetary support), the EU purchased a proxy force for its distal southern frontier.[7]
The efficacy of this proxy force is apparent in the data. In July 2023, prior to the MoU going into effect, Tunisia’s Coast Guard intercepted 848 migrants. In August, after the MoU, the figure surged to 4,427. In September, the number in question hit 8,781. As the calendar turned to 2024, moreover, Tunisia’s patrolmen stayed just as active. Between January and April 2024, the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) reported approximately 21,200 migrants being intercepted along the country’s shores. By the end of May 2024, statistics from the National Guard indicated that around 30,300 individuals had been intercepted through both land and sea operations, nearly 9,000 more than 2023’s corresponding total. Meanwhile, Italy reported a 60.8% year-on-year decrease in irregular arrivals on its shores from January to May 2024.
For its part, the Tunisian government has also introduced legal measures to formalize and expand its activist posture when it comes to controlling people movement. On April 5, 2024, the President issued Order No. 181. Framed as a regulation for maritime search and rescue operations, human rights advocates have expressed concern the Order creates conditions which may lead to humanitarian violations in the Mediterranean, including heightened confrontations between fragile migrant vessels and the National Guard. Making matters worse, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) recently revised Tunisia’s Search and Rescue Area map. Specifically, the IMO extended Tunisian authorities’ jurisdiction in the Mediterranean thereby facilitating more frequent interceptions and returns. Critics have voiced significant concerns about the lack of safeguards in the IMO’s decisions. SOS Humanity and Alarm-Phone, for instance, have denounced the absence of any human rights conditions, consequent monitoring tools, or mechanisms of suspension in case of violations.[8]
The Problems with Security at a Lower Cost
The small sums allocated to a main migration hub like Tunisia by the EU can be understood as a partial function of neoliberalism. At a basic level, Brussels’ MoU with Tunis, like past and current IMF lending arrangements, represents an attempt to buy stability on the cheap. Rather than seek to address root causes of migration—or, in the case of the IMF, root causes of macroinstability—Europe and the global North deploys tools for short-term crisis management.
The strategy of the EU pushes its southern partners into a political bind. This is clearly observed in Tunisia. Since issuing his communique in February 2023, Kais Saied has waffled incoherently. Attempting to preserve his postcolonial bona fides while servicing Europe’s needs (and thereby securing the cash he sorely needs), the President is forced to hedge and conditionalize all his claims: In his analysis of President Saied’s media statements post-February 2023, Tabbabi records Saied saying “yes…but” at least thirteen times: the fruit of the clash between sovereigntist pretensions and (European) security needs.[9] A clearer example of al-Barghouti’s could nowhere be found. On the one hand, Saied has no choice but to protect the European “garden”, as EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell called it.[10] On the other, he must try position himself as independent and no one’s lackey.
Providing Security, (Re)Activating Historical Antiblackness: Provenance of the Internal Enemy Trope in Tunisia
The intensity, institutional framing, and straightforwardness of the racism today displayed against sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia are unprecedented. However, the roots of anti-black racism in the country run deep. They can be traced back to disjunctions inherited from slavery and shaped by colonialism.
Much has been said about Tunisia’s position and role within trans-Saharan, or Islamic, slavery and its racialized legacy. In broad terms, black slaves in Ottoman Tunisia were primarily employed in domestic roles, serving wealthier households in urban areas, as Mrad Dali has documented. Some were involved in both domestic and agricultural labor in rural regions.[11] The in-home servitude of many should not imply that Tunisian slavery was especially gentle, however. Indeed, Montana highlights the harsh treatment of black slaves in the Regency of Tunis. Detailing their suffering during transportation, he reveals how long marches and exposure to diseases left many slaves frail and unfit by the time they reached Tunis. Once in the market, slaves were displayed in degrading ways, and the separation of families drew attention to their plight.[12] Despite the argument that domestic labor was less brutal than its plantation counterpart, the harsh treatment of domestic slaves played a significant role in Ahmad bey’s successful abolition of slavery.[13]
Contrary to the cases of Europe and the Americas, racial categories in North African slavery were fluid and relational. Beyond phenotype and skin color, they were shaped by factors such as religion, social rank, and kinship, as scholars like Elouafi[14] and Davis[15] establish. With Islam often the variable mediating an individual’s standing as a free person or slave, binaries between blackness and whiteness never fully calcified. Mazrui argues the Arab patrilineal society also allowed for significant racial integration, as mixed-race children with an Arab father were fully accepted into higher social echelons.[16] All this being the case, racial divisions were comparatively porous and dynamic in Tunisia prior to the incursion of French colonialism.
Alas, Europe’s arrival in the region did change things. As anthropologist Abdelmajid Hannoum contends, the Maghreb as we understand it today is fundamentally a cartographic construct, with the divisions between North, West, and East Africa reflecting not so much the region\’s anthropological realities as the competing interests of colonial powers. Eighteenth-century European cartographers drew a region called Barbary, sometimes divided into separate units from which Egypt and “Black Africa” (formerly called Nigritie) were excluded. Although the Maghreb had been mapped prior to this, European efforts vastly shifted the social and political consequence of cartography. France’s colonization of Algeria represented a turning point in these regards. As the conquest progressed, France used it stronghold in Algeria to expand into Tunisia at the expense of Italy, and to Morocco at the expense of Spain.[17] Thereafter, new denominations appeared to attach northern Africa to Europe, and by extension whiteness, and detach it from the rest of the continent.[18]
The colonial-nurtured disjunction between north and sub-Saharan Africa, between “black” and “white”, is what Hassan Mohamed terms “a racialist cartography”.[19] The consequence of this cartography persists to this day. It is present in a Hegelian imaginary of Africa[20]—one that Kais Saied himself subscribes to—which positions racial whiteness as native to North Africa, racial Arabness as reinforcing that whiteness, and racial blackness as foreign.[21] The last of these tenets weighs heavily on contemporary Tunisia. It has perpetuated the fiction that the country’s black communities are of servile and external lineage—an “African diaspora in Africa”. In other words, it erases the historicity[22] and indigeneity of black Tunisia, rendering the latter into an alterity.[23]
Conclusions: History Weighs Heavily on the Present
Observing a massacre of Sudanese migrants at the Moroccan border with Mellila, Samia Moucharik has posited that a new form of antiblack state violence is emerging today. Hinging upon the figure of the black migrant, this one links the logics of border control to a reconfiguration of internal enemies.[24]
The logic Moucharik discerns clearly abides in Tunisia. While long constructed as foreign and inconvenient, since February 2023, sub-Saharan migrants have been reimagined as internal enemies by both public authorities and the Tunisian population. They have been redefined by the state apparatus as an independent category, portrayed not just as a socioeconomic inconvenience but as a civilizational threat to the state and its people. Via the question of the border, however, this same category of persons also furnishes the state with a key material resource: Framed as threat and burden though they may be, it is these migrants which grant Carthage leverage over a desperate Europe.
It is in the nexus of Europe’s racialized fears and Tunisian (post)coloniality, then, that one finds the animating force behind the antiblack violence of the present. It is here we find a tragic reenactment of the programmed disunity of the African continent. And it is here that the contest for a better tomorrow must be waged.
* Image Credit: Department for International Development/Kate Joseph
[1] Racialized violence, administered either institutionally or socially, is not new to Tunisia. Historically, it often targeted black people more generally rather than black migrants in particular. Cognizant of this, the 2011 Revolution birthed a prolific anti-racism movement that questioned the country’s trans-Saharan slavery legacy, entrenched antiblack stereotypes and practices, and antiblack racism’s intersections, most notably that between blackness and womanhood and blackness and migration. Although initiated by and for black Tunisians, post-2011 episodes of racial violence against black migrants sparked wide outrage and bolstered the movement around sub-Saharan Africans’ lived experiences of racism as well. Advocacy and mobilization efforts culminated into the promulgation of the 2018 law against all forms of racial discrimination, which notably framed antiblack racism as an individual, not structural problem, that the State ought to mediate and sanction, excluding the role of the latter as the main racializing agent.
[2] Tunisia lacks an asylum law. After the coup d’etat in 2021, which was enabled by popular disillusionment and which brought to power a conspiracy-minded President, the establishment of one has become an impossibility. Saied has borrowed extensively from European far-right ideology, the Great Replacement Theory in particular, in discussing the migration of sub-Saharan Africans into Tunisia. He also adds his own personal flourishes, all of which draw on postcolonial trauma. With vague references to Western interventionism, imperialism and settler-colonialism, the President has suggested that a conspiracy to make Tunisia an “African” rather than Arab Muslim country began at the start of this century. The Tunisian Nationalist Party, one of the President’s ideological allies, has likened this to Zionist plots in Palestine.
[3] On the notion of security, Al-Barghouti contends: “Security is an extremely valuable commodity for a colonial power: security of international trade routes, security of foreign enterprises and businesses, security of European residents, including the military occupation forces and so on. The local elite then also becomes involved in the provision of such a commodity either by direct participation in security apparatuses or, due to their claim of representation, by creating a mirage of native participation and legitimizing the colonial structure of power. […] to provide security efficiently, the native elites have to have some legitimacy among their own population. By their efficiency I mean that the native elite’s provision of security should be less costly to the colonial power than direct occupation and policing by the colonial power’s own forces.” (p.93)
[4] Al-Barghouti, T. (2008). The Umma and the Dawla: the Nation State and the Arab Middle East. Pluto Press.
[5] Al-Barghouti, T. (2008). The Umma and the Dawla: the Nation State and the Arab Middle East. Pluto Press.
[6] Al-Barghouti, T. (2008). p. 95.
[7] There is little ambiguity on what Brussels bought with its money. €67 million of the €150 million earmarked for budgetary support were designated to enhance the capacity of the Coast Guard, covering costs for fuel, spare maritime equipment, vehicles, and training for operational teams.
[8] The creation of the Search and Rescue Region (SRR) is above all a commitment to the international community. According to the IMO, in being member, Tunisia must now “ensure that help is provided to any person in distress, regardless of that person\’s nationality or status”. This latest development is in line with Italy\’s strategy of outsourcing border control. By assigning responsibility for rescue and repatriation to Tunisia, Italy is seeking to relieve pressure on its own migrants’ reception and management system. “It could only be a matter of time before violent behavior also targets sea rescue NGOs or the crews of their ships”, worries Marie Michel of SOS Humanity, who explains that the NGO ‘fears a potential increase in cases of human rights violations and the use of physical violence against migrants’. An increase in interceptions by the Tunisian coastguard is likely to lead to more forced returns to Tunisia. See: https://inkyfada.com/fr/2024/10/24/nouvelle-region-maritime-recherche-sauvetage-opaque/
[9] Amongst the President’s statements: “The solution can only be humanitarian and collective, based on humanitarian standards, ‘but’ in accordance with the legislation of the state”/ “We are Africans, they are our brothers and we respect them, ‘but’ this situation that Tunisia is experiencing and has never experienced is an abnormal situation and we must put an end to these inhuman conditions”/ “They are victims of poverty, civil wars and the absence of the state, and they turn to Tunisia as a refuge. ‘But’ we are also a state that has its own laws and respects the law and human beings. ‘But’ everyone must respect the laws and sovereignty of the Tunisian state”/ “The solution must not be at the expense of the Tunisian state. We naturally preserve and protect these people and don’t let those who attack them walk away, ‘but’ they must also respect Tunisian laws”/ “We will not accept any attack against them, and we will protect them, ‘but’ they must be under legal conditions”/ “The humane treatment these migrants receive stems from our values and character, contrary to what is promoted by colonial circles and their agents whose only concern is to serve these circles, and nothing is more obvious than that their positions are the same as those of the frenzied trumpeters abroad who are paving the way for a new type of colonisation, falsifying facts and spreading lies.” See: Tabbabi, K. (2024, December). From African jungles and deserts to the forbidden land, Tunisia. migration.info. https://migration-control.info/en/blog/from-african-jungles-and-deserts/
[10] Speaking of Europe and the dangers posed to it by migration in 2022, Borrell said the following: ” Europe is a garden. (…) It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build (…) The rest of the world (…) is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”
[11] Mrad Dali, I. (2005). De l’esclavage à la servitude: le cas des noirs de Tunisie (From slavery to servitude: ‘Blacks’ in Tunisia). Cahiers D’Études Africaines, 45(179/180).
[12] Montana, I. M. (2013). The abolition of slavery in Ottoman Tunisia. University Press of Florida.
[13] Marcel, J. J., & Frank, L. (1851). Histoire de Tunis: précédée d’une description de cette régence. Firmin Didot Frères.
[14] Elouafi, A. A. (2009). The colour of Orientalism: race and narratives of discovery in Tunisia. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(2), 253–271.
[15] Haleh Davis, M. (2021). Incommensurate Ontologies’? Antiblack racism and the question of Islam. Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.
[16] Mazrui, A. A. (2001). Africa and other civilizations: Conquest and Counter-Conquest. Africa World Press.
[17] The maps soon represented a North Africa from which Libya – under Italian rule – and Egypt – under British rule – were excluded. In other words, a Maghreb patterned on French possessions.
[18] Hannoum, A. (2021). The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East. Cambridge University Press.
[19] Mohamed, M. H. (2010). Africanists and Africans of the Maghrib: casualties of Analogy. The Journal of North African Studies, 15(3).
[20] In Hegel’s words: “Africa consists of three continents which are entirely separate from one another […] The first of these is Africa proper, the land to the south of the Sahara desert […] The second is the land to the north of the desert, […] which might be described as European Africa. And the third is the region of the Nile […] which is closely connected with Asia […]. What we understand as Africa proper is that unhistorical and undeveloped land which is still enmeshed in the natural spirit.”
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Lectures on the philosophy of world history. Cambridge University Press. pp. 173-183.
[21] Tayeb, L. (2021). What is Whiteness in North Africa? Lateral, 10(1).
[22] Mohamed, M. H. (2010). Africanists and Africans of the Maghrib: casualties of Analogy. The Journal of North African Studies, 15(3).
[23] Tayeb, L. (2021). What is Whiteness in North Africa? Lateral, 10(1).
[24] Moucharik, S. (2023, June 24). Le devenir-ennemi d’exilés noirs : enquête politique sur le massacre d’Etats à la frontière coloniale de Mellila/Mlilya. https://indigenes-republique.fr/. https://indigenes-republique.fr/le-devenir-ennemi-dexiles-noirs-enquete-politique-sur-le-massacre-detats-a-la-frontiere-coloniale-de-mellila-mlilya/
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