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Middle East & North Africa
Deindustrialization in the Middle East and North Africa
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Middle East & North Africa
Systemic Violence and Social Reproduction through the Kafeel System: Vietnamese Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia
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Middle East & North Africa
Entrepreneurial Bodies, Disciplined Subjects: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Whitening in Tunisia
Processes of deindustrialization have set the course for postmodernity. Though its impact varies with geography, it is deindustrialization which defines the conditions of social, political, and economic life across most the world today. This is certainly so in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There, premature deindustrialization bequeaths legacies of grave and enduring salience. In the economic domain, effects are observable in the region’s struggles with job creation, productivity, growth, and macrostability. Socially, they are present in MENA’s extreme levels of inequality. Politically, deindustrialization contributes to democracy’s recurring failures to launch.
This report takes identifying the drivers behind deindustrialization in the MENA as its primary task. Based on months of desk research and an extensive exploration of the historical archive, we trace causality across time and beyond the borders of the region. Findings are many, prominently including the following:
(i) The early onsetting of deindustrialization in the MENA was provoked by the global economy’s drift into stagnation beginning in the late 1960s.
(ii) Due to global issues of overcapacity and falling profit rates, securing the investment needed to nurture competitive manufacturing sectors has been exceedingly difficult.
(iii) Though global dynamics did make opportunities for healthy industrializing scarce, they did not condemn MENA countries to the fates ultimately suffered. Political choices and policy errors also played a role in shaping the course of events. Critical in these regards were modalities of state-capital relations, inadequate policy design, and a series of contingencies derived from the management of natural resource endowments.
(iv) Neoliberalism’s resolution of capitalism’s profitability crisis harmed MENA’s industrial prospects significantly. The deepening of global value chains over the past forty years has been detrimental to capital accumulation. The enforcement of intellectual property claims has obstructed traditional pathways to industrial progress. Furthermore, competitive pressures have forced firms to adopt capital intensive forms of production, limiting industry’s capacity to absorb greater shares of MENA’s workforce.
(v) The corporate welfarism that many MENA governments have institutionalized in hopes of attracting foreign investment in recent decades is fundamentally misguided: The extension of non-conditional benefits to corporate actors serves only to minimize the social and developmental utility of a prospective investment.
Looking ahead, it is plain that deindustrialization will continue weighing heavily on the region’s outlook. For a better future to be realized, local policy officials and members of the international community alike will need reckon with the factors compelling deindustrialization. Materially, this requires rethinking the terms and incentives governing matters of production, trade, and investment.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Introduction
In 2014, the governments of Saudi Arabia and Vietnam signed a bilateral labor agreement (BLA) that allowed Vietnamese citizens to temporarily migrate to work as domestics in Saudi homes. Written to automatically renew every five years, the BLA was of great consequence to the thousands of Vietnamese women who signed contracts for employment as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. Materially, the BLA entrenched a visa labor sponsorship system which grants kafeel (i.e. the head of household and employer) complete control over the lives of imported female workers. The language of the BLA did specify that Saudi Arabia and Vietnam establish a Standard Employment Contract in order to ensure that Vietnamese workers are afforded basic legal protections. However, eleven years since the BLA came into effect, no progress has been made on this front.[1] Consequently, Vietnamese women continue to be subjected to acute precarity, excluded from Saudi Arabia’s social welfare and social protection systems. With the two governments’ complicity and neglect, they also continue to suffer from structural violence. The latter has manifested in physical, sexual, and verbal abuse.
In 2021, the reporting of local journalists and Vietnamese independent scholars, combined with the reporting of international media (the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons), put a spotlight on the plight of Vietnamese female domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. In 2022, the US Department of State also decided to downgrade the Vietnamese state’s efforts in combatting human trafficking to the lowest possible ranking (Tier 3). To head off media pressure, Vietnam placed an unofficial gag order on reporting of labor abuse in Saudi Arabia. To appease the Americans, a few low-ranking officials were discharged from the Department of Labor at the Vietnamese Embassy in Riyadh. From the Vietnamese state’s perspective, these actions have proven successful. In 2023, the country was reinstated by the US State Department to the Tier 2 watch list in its annual report on human trafficking. In 2024, the country was ranked in Tier 2 proper.[2]
While the Vietnamese government has engineered the appearance of progress when it comes to the working conditions of female nationals in Saudi Arabia, the reality is one of enduring hardship and abuse. Away from media scrutiny, recent years have also seen worrisome new developments come into effect. Specifically, aspects of the BLA have effectively been marketized and/or privatized: To differing degrees the recruitment, brokerage, and oversight of labor flows have been turned over to market logics. These changes continue to leave Vietnamese female workers invisible and without any protection.
Creeping Marketization
An estimated 5,000 Vietnamese workers labor in Saudi Arabia. The rhetoric of Saudi Arabia and Vietnam might have one believe that a large majority are high-skilled workers employed in industries near the global technological frontier. In fact, the public statements put out by the two governments hardly mention domestic workers at all.[3] Alas, data gathered from government sources and relevant recruitment platforms establish that domestic workers represent the second largest category of laborer sent from Vietnam to Saudi Arabia, behind only individuals working in the extraction and refining of oil.[4]
Historically, the agencies handling the recruitment, regulation, and oversight of bilateral labor flows between Vietnam and Saudi Arabia have been state-run and quasi-state run. Past research from the author affirms the extent to which the Vietnamese state and its recruitment agencies exploited women in poor and remote areas, including those below the legal working age and belonging to ethnic minorities.[5] (Nor is the Vietnamese state exceptional in these regards. Records establish that government officials in Uganda and Kenya have also profited from the recruitment and exportation of female workers to Saudi Arabia.[6]) Within the receiving country, meanwhile, it was semi-public entities—typically managed and partially owned by members of the Saudi royal family—that arranged for the placement of workers.
While the rampant abuse prevailing in the past made the need for reform urgent, the modality of “reform” adopted in recent years threatens to make things worse. As suggested, the trend is toward marketization and privatization. Concerning the former, recruitment processes within Vietnam have become anonymized and market-oriented. If state and quasi-state recruitment agencies are almost certainly still involved—specifically, the Vietnamese Association of Manpower Supply and Department of Overseas Labor, the latter operates under the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs—they are no longer visible on their respective official websites.[7] Also absent is the mention of BLA in all Vietnamese official websites. Instead, the market mechanism has replaced it to recruit workers in a commercial website called: “the platform of labor export to Saudi Arabia” [8] which bears no trace of being part of any state agency. It suggests that the process is being governed by “unmediated” laws of supply and demand in which any person with access to this “platform” can explore, select and apply for these open positions in Saudi Arabia. The state’s enduring responsibility for the placement of these workers and attendant problems of human trafficking and labor abuse—failures documented in full in 2021—are now fully obscured.
In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, the state has privatized one of the few support services it had previously provided international domestic workers: the provision of shelters for abused women who had escaped their kafeel owners.[9] As investigations from The New York Times detail, until as late as 2023, the Saudi state turned over management of these facilities to a company called Sakan. Per the testimony of those interviewed, Sakan extorted those in its care for money in exchange for arranging their travel.[10]
The same article also gives a sense for the breadth of physical and sexual violence suffered by female domestic workers in Saudi Arabia and the reason that it persists through the present day: to quote the authors, “powerful people profit off the system as it exists.”
Structural Violence and Social Reproduction
In Johan Galtung’s groundbreaking work on structural violence, he traces the structural character of political violence, physical violence and the economic violence of deprivation, malnutrition, and illness (1968). For 21st century domestic workers, however, structural violence expresses itself as well through severe sexual violence resulting in bodily injuries, dehumanization, and forms of suffering largely invisible to the world outside the houses of the kafeel.
In 2019, Nghiêm Hương, a former domestic worker in Saudi Arabia, provided insight into how this structural violence is experienced. In her devastating memoir entitled “Đừng Chết Ở Ả Rập Xê Út,” Hương, from the north of Vietnam, recounts how she came to sign a work contract in November 2014 and all that followed thereafter.[11] Across seventeen chapters, she speaks of how she and others moved to Saudi Arabia dreaming of earning money but ended up enduring graphic abuses—physical, sexual, and psychological in nature. Hương herself describes working under oppressive conditions, over 50 degrees Celsius, not only to take care of the household but also to work on the chicken/cattle ranch that the household owned. Despite violating the terms of her labor contract, she also reveals how she was sold from one kafeel’s household to another. Regardless of its illegality, the latter practice is extremely common and regularly arranged through collaborations between Vietnamese and Saudi commercial entities, private brokers, and the kafeel households. In Hương’s case, her story ended when she faked suicide by threatening to jump from the top of the minaret of the kafeel mansion: Fearing the scandal, her final kafeel agreed to send her home. Tragically, her story is far from exceptional. As one of Vani Saraswathi’s interlocutors from east Africa conveyed in a 2022 article on domestic workers in Saudi Arabia: “You will be raped. You will be beaten. No action will be taken. You will have a child as evidence of rape. Still no action. The police, the embassy, the office all collaborate to make you work only. You have no rights.”[12]
The reality is that structural violence, in both its physical and sexual forms, remains extremely pervasive in Saudi Arabia. Applying Tithi Bhattacharya’s “social reproduction” theory to the international female domestic workers,[13] my interviews and current evidence show that the capitalist market system relies on these workers not only in the production of services, but also in the work of the ladies in the kafeel’s households. These “production of life” tasks include taking care of the family members who work, taking care of the children and the elderly who do not work but are part of the kafeel’s households, and taking care of pregnant women so they can biologically “reproduce” workers for the future workforce. Indeed, it is important to note that domestic workers are not an elite luxury in Saudi Arabia, but a staple and expectation of middle-class life. It is also worth noting that it is in middle class households where abuse of domestic workers is often the worst: Worker testimony suggests that conditions are most intense for those working for “less affluent” large-sized families, where sixteen-hour workdays and sexual violence are especially common.[14]
A sense of scale for structural violence can be had through surveying relevant Facebook postings.[15] As recent as April 2025, searches on the platform revealed users asking questions about “How to escape abusive kafeel.” Of the advice offered, one respondent recommended they “go to the police station, to never return to the house of the kafeel, but return straight to Vietnam”; another warned not to seek out help from Vietnamese living in Saudi Arabia as their countrymen were liable to sell them into a brothel (March and April 2025). Facebook postings also exhibited laments about workers suffering so much that they wanted to return home prior to the conclusion of their contract (February 2025). Female domestic workers also lamented that there is no break for them, compared to male workers who were relaxing over the weekend with their friends (2020).
But what is perhaps most troubling is ongoing concerns over abuses and tragedies that happened as far back in 2020. Even today, these incidents’ past—the death of an underage woman in 2020, the 2021 SOS message via Facebook of a group of female workers (one with an eye injury due to physical abuse) —continue to garner a lot of viewing and sympathy. Similar to the anecdotes compiled by journalists, these artifacts from social media speak to the constancy of structural violence amongst domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. This truth is simply being suppressed through the actions of governments like Vietnam’s.
“Reforms” of Domestic Worker Laws are not Bearing Fruit
In October 2024, a new law on domestic workers came into effect in Saudi Arabia. To what extent, if any, has it changed things on the ground?
Unfortunately, the answer is next to none. To understand why, one need first appreciate that this law is not designed to protect workers. Rather, it was legislated for two purposes: (i) to protect the kafeel; and (ii) to appease the outside world. This is apparent through even a superficial reading of the law in question. To begin, the law does not prohibit passport confiscation. It also fails to specify that work contracts are not transferable amongst kafeel. In addition, the law does not designate maximum work hours per day, mandatory one-day of weekly rest, stipulations on decent living conditions and privacy, and workers’ freedom of association; alarmingly, the law does not assure workers safe access to complaint and justice mechanisms. In particular, workers’ anonymity is not guaranteed in these mechanisms and the online portal where complaints can be filed is only in Arabic and English.[16] Complicating matters further, should a worker attempt to file their complaint in person, they risk being charged with “absconding.” Lastly, even if they do manage to break their contract, one final obstruction remains: Under the new law as under old regulations, workers still need to get prohibitively expensive exit visas to leave the country prior to the completion of their original contract. Moreover, the new Saudi Domestic Workers Law is also lacking in key enforcement mechanisms. And to make things worse, the Saudi Arabia government has recently reduced the penalties for employers who violate safety and health regulations. The gap between ILO Convention #189: Convention on Domestic Workers (2011) and Saudi Arabia’s so-called domestic workers reforms remains far apart.
Conclusions and Recommendations
The bilateral labor agreement (BLA) between Vietnam and Saudi Arabia facilitates systematic abuse of domestic workers. The responsibility that the two states bear for this reality remains, even if both have used gag orders and a combination of marketization and privatization to muddy the waters.
At this stage, it is essential that the terms of the BLA be changed, and that the international community mobilize to advance this end. Members of global civil society must broadcast and demand the swift establishment of a Standard Employment Contract as well as the instituting of proper enforcement mechanisms. Pressure must be put on the government of Saudi Arabia to revise its Domestic Workers Law to align it with ILO Convention 189. The government of Saudi Arabia must also bring sheltering facilities and protocols back under the control of public authorities and take transparent steps toward guaranteeing that these facilities follow best practices. On the side of labor-sending countries such as Vietnam, entities like the United States’ State Department should hold the government of Vietnam to account for its actual performance on human trafficking and not reward their gag order. In deploying market mechanisms, the BLA’s recruitment procedure has served to normalize structural violence and make it harder for the public to detect systemic violations of domestic workers’ rights. At present, workers are left on their own to deal with abusive employers without any legal recourse and state protection. With awareness, public outcry can demand genuine reforms of the BLA and effective enforcement mechanisms to protect these vulnerable domestic workers. It is that awareness we must work toward.
Photo Credit: 2023 recruitment photo on the website of Thuan An Labor Recruitment Company
[1] Vietnam Law and Legal Forum, “Vietnam-Saudi Arabia relations on strong development momentum,” 21 October2024, https://vietnamlawmagazine.vn/vietnam-saudi-arabia-relations-on-strong-development-momentum-72826.html
[2]The 2023 TIP report https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-trafficking-in-persons-report/vietnam/)
The 2024 TIP report https://www.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-persons-report/)
[3] https://baochinhphu.vn/saudi-arabia-muon-tiep-nhan-them-nhieu-lao-dong-viet-nam-102231019181702009.htm
[4] https://sanxuatkhaulaodong.com/xuat-khau-lao-dong-a-rap
[5] Modern-day slavery: Vietnamese women domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, November 29, 2021, New Mandala, https://www.newmandala.org/modern-day-slavery-vietnamese-women-domestic-workers-in-saudi-arabia/
[6] https://www.business-humanrights.org/my/%E1%80%9E%E1%80%90%E1%80%84/saudi-arabia-east-african-saudi-arabian-govt-officials-allegedly-profit-from-deadly-trade-in-domestic-workers-through-recruitment-cos-investment/; https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/world/africa/saudi-arabia-kenya-uganda-maids-women.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
[7] The two key state websites that used to publish news and regulations of BLAs in Saudi Arabia are:
Vietnam Association of Manpower Supply (VAMAS):
https://vamas.com.vn/NguoiDung/TinTuc/timkiem/tabid/272/language/vi-VN/huong-dan-viec-dua-nguoi-lao-dong-sang-lam-viec-tai-a-rap-xe-ut_t221c654n44323 and Department of Overseas Labor (DOLAB):
https://www.molisa.gov.vn/organizational/2230. The private website is: https://sanxuatkhaulaodong.com/xuat-khau-lao-dong-a-rap
[8] This is an English translation of the website’s Vietnamese name: https://sanxuatkhaulaodong.com/xuat-khau-lao-dong-a-rap. The head company of this “floor” is the An Vi Group, which is most likely a quasi-state staffing company: https://anvigroup.com.vn/chung-toi
[9] https://www.business-humanrights.org/my/%E1%80%9E%E1%80%90%E1%80%84/saudi-arabia-east-african-saudi-arabian-govt-officials-allegedly-profit-from-deadly-trade-in-domestic-workers-through-recruitment-cos-investment/
[10] Abdil Latif Dahir and Justin Scheck, “Why maids keep dying in Saudi Arabia”, New York Times (March 16, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/world/africa/saudi-arabia-kenya-uganda-maids-women.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
[11] Nghiêm Hương, Don’t die in Saudi Arabia, Thế Giới Publisher, Hochiminh City, 2019.
[12] Vani Saraswathi, “If my husband touches you, I’ll kill you” August 2022, Migrant-Rights.Org
[13] http://socialistworker.org/2013/09/10/what-is-social-reproduction-theory
[14] “If my husband touches you, I will kill you”
[15] Vương quốc người Việt tại Ả Rập Xê Út | Facebook
[16] Global Detention Project, “Saudi Arabia: joint submission to the United Nations committee on the elimination of racial discrimination 114th session (25 November – 13 December 2024). Issues related to the human rights of migrants including discriminatory labor policies, gender-based violence, and arbitrary detention and deportation measures,” October 2024
‘, ‘post_title’ => ‘Systemic Violence and Social Reproduction through the Kafeel System: Vietnamese Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia’, ‘post_excerpt’ => ”, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’, ‘comment_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘ping_status’ => ‘closed’, ‘post_password’ => ”, ‘post_name’ => ‘systemic-violence-and-social-reproduction-through-the-kafeel-system-vietnamese-domestic-workers-in-saudi-arabia’, ‘to_ping’ => ”, ‘pinged’ => ”, ‘post_modified’ => ‘2025-07-02 09:50:54’, ‘post_modified_gmt’ => ‘2025-07-02 07:50:54’, ‘post_content_filtered’ => ”, ‘post_parent’ => 0, ‘guid’ => ‘https://noria-research.com/mena/?p=774’, ‘menu_order’ => 0, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ”, ‘comment_count’ => ‘0’, ‘filter’ => ‘raw’, )In Tunisia today, the widespread promotion and use of skin whitening products offer a critical lens into how economic, social, and political systems reproduce racial and gender inequality. These products are not merely cosmetic choices or consumer trends—they are embedded in a broader landscape of social pressure, economic aspiration, and digital visibility. For many young Tunisian women, especially those from working-class or marginalized backgrounds, investing in skin whitening is framed as a strategy for economic and social advancement. The message is clear: lighter skin can increase one’s chances of securing work, social approval, or romantic partnership. In this manner, skin whitening products help sustain unequal systems of power by translating deeply rooted racial and gender hierarchies into normalized personal aspirations. These dynamics are not new but have been intensified in the post-2011 period, fed by economic precarity, an expanding informal economy, and a tightening authoritarian grip on digital expression.
Drawing on insights from social reproduction theory, this paper examines how beauty labor—and skin whitening in particular—plays a central role in Tunisia’s evolving political economy. Capitalism, as feminist theorists have shown, does not function in a vacuum. It depends on the unpaid and underpaid labor of women, the maintenance of racial hierarchies, and the constant reinforcement of social norms that sustain economic inequality. As Susan Ferguson has noted, “while gender relations are shaped by patriarchal dynamics, they are also always concretely interconnected in the ongoing maintenance and reproduction of an overall capitalist social formation.”[1] In this context, skin whitening products are marketed as part of a broader logic of self-entrepreneurship, particularly in the digital space. On platforms like Instagram, Tunisian content creators promote whitening creams as essential elements of self-care and success—tools to appear “more professional,” “more desirable,” or “more modern.” This aesthetic labor is rarely recognized as work by the state, and those who engage in it, particularly from lower-income backgrounds, must often navigate legal ambiguity, moral policing, and even incarceration. At the same time, these women represent an increasingly visible segment of Tunisia’s informal economy. By centering a seemingly “private” act like skin whitening within a larger political economy, this analysis helps ground and nuance policy discussions around informal labor, digital regulation, race, and gender in Tunisia. It also advocates for a policy framework that addresses the economic and social conditions that drive the demand for whitening products, rather than treating them as isolated cultural phenomena.
Skin Tone as Capital: Whitening Products and the Market Logic of Modern Femininity
While much academic attention has been given to the agricultural labor of women in Tunisia, less explored are the emerging forms of gendered labor that unfold in the digital economy. One such phenomenon, particularly visible among young Tunisian women, is the rise of aesthetic self-entrepreneurship on social media—especially through the promotion and sale of skin-whitening products. This shift not only redefines class mobility, beauty, and womanhood, but also exposes the intersection of neoliberalism, race, and postcolonial identity in the country.
Tunisia’s adoption of the Licence-Master-Doctorat (LMD) system in 2005 and its broader neoliberal turn have transformed higher education. Framed by the government and international financial institutions as a solution to graduate unemployment, the reform centered on aligning degree structures and shortening academic cycles. Materially, these changes neither mobilized resources to enhance the quality of education on offer in universities nor addressed the primary cause of joblessness amongst college graduates—namely, weak levels of demand for labor. As such, the functional effects of reform were dual. On the one hand, they rendered universities into temporary holding pens for those who managed to make their way through (defunded) secondary schools. This was a far cry from Bourguiba’s original vision of the university as a crucible for Tunisia’s political, cultural, and economic elite. On the other, they accelerated the professionalization of higher education without improving employment prospects: Ever more Tunisians matriculated to institutions of higher learning, themselves strained by a lack of financial investment, only to depart with little chance of finding work.
In the end, Tunisia’s restructured system of higher education encouraged students to become “self-entrepreneurs” responsible for cultivating their own value in a shrinking and increasingly competitive job market, as Corinna Mullin has deftly noted.[2] And over the years, the imperatives of entrepreneurship spread beyond the classroom to become a logic of everyday life. In the Tunisia of 2025, the individual is called to invest in themselves aesthetically, physically, and socially to secure a better future.
Entrepreneurialism’s ascendance as a strategy of survival and mobility is observed most easily on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. For young women in particular, the business line attracting some of the most interest amongst aspiring self-starters is personal aesthetics. In a narrow sense, hawking beauty products offers some of these parties a viable if precarious form of income and social mobility. Seen more broadly, the same trade can be seen to enlist these entrepreneurs as proselytes of self-improvement. As such, these spaces offer considerable insight into Tunisia’s evolving sociology and political economy.
Selling Whiteness
Skin-whitening products are especially salient to our concerns. On social media, these goods are not only peddled by petty entrepreneurs for their cosmetic effects, but as vital tools of self-improvement. The message is clear: lighter skin means more visibility, more desirability, and thus more value. The effect, then, is to make beauty a currency, and the body a site of economic speculation.
Indeed, today, scrolling through Tunisian social media feeds reveals a flood of whitening products—creams for the face, armpits, knees, elbows, and even intimate areas—all marketed as necessary steps in a modern woman’s self-care routine. Lady Samara serves as a brand ambassador for Laboratoire Trone’s lightening products; Chaima Mansour endorses the Super White Skin line from Maeva Cosmetics; and Bella Emilye regularly promotes Laboratoire Peonies’s lightening products, from deodorants to intimate-area creams. That this phenomenon exists in a supposedly “post-racial” world reveals the ongoing centrality of whiteness within Tunisian aesthetic norms.
Amongst the online Tunisian influencers embodying aesthetic (and racialized) self-improvement, Lady Samara and Bella Emilye stand above the rest. Each has roughly one million followers on social. Often mocked for their language, clothing, or perceived vulgarity, both women are frequently labeled zargā (plural zrûg), a pejorative term in Tunisian Arabic describing women with “the wrong” shade of brown skin—a less desirable version of samrā, the ideal olive complexion. Rather than hailing from elite or culturally privileged backgrounds, the two women have each built their visibility and income from scratch. In many ways, their success derives from embracing their zargā status while simultaneously distancing themselves from its stigma through the use of whitening products. In this manner, Lady Samara and Bella Emilye enact a complex negotiation of class, race, and gender. Unlike wealthier or more “respectable” influencers, they attempt to leverage marginality into a profitable brand via a form of self-cancelation.
In the backdrop to this, there is an economy. Just as the influencers themselves operate in the grey spaces of the informal digital economy, the whitening products Lady Samara, Bella Emilye and others sell often come from informal Tunisian laboratories operating solely online and without oversight. This is true of Maeva Cosmetics, Trone, and Laboratoire Peonies. Amidst Tunisia’s long economic downturn, the influences and pharmacies alike try to secure a living through the extralegal commodification of whiteness—through skirting regulatory and tax authorities while selling those on the periphery on a “workaround” to the stigma of racial marginalization.[3] Collectively, they render whiteness more than a standard of beauty, but a tool for upward mobility—a socially sanctioned investment in one’s self, whether to attract followers, land partnerships, or secure desirable marriage prospects. In ways overt and more subtle, Lady Samara has presented her marriage to a fair-skinned, well-off man as a reward for her physical and psychological self-development. The (spoken and unspoken) discourse is eerily reminiscent of the classic Indian brand Fair & Lovely ad, a product regularly advertised on Arab TV channels in the early 2000s, where personal success and romantic fulfillment were directly tied to achieving lighter skin.[4] Appreciated in full, both the influencers and the laboratories with which they work have not only carved out a place within Tunisia’s beauty economy: conscientiously or not, they also participate in the production of neoliberal, racialized constructions of modernity and Tunisianity.
Contests over modernity and the power relations contained therein are not new in Tunisia. The Bourguibian project, while often celebrated for its progressive legislation on women’s rights, was fundamentally rooted in a Eurocentric vision of modernity. As such, it rooted Tunisia’s national identity against an image of a patriarchal Arab-Muslim Other, embracing a form of Western universalism in which progress was synonymous with industrialization, urbanization, and whitening—both symbolically and literally. Read against this history, it can be appreciated that skin whitening concerns more than beauty. It is at once a mode of survival, a means of asserting one’s place in a neoliberal order that rewards self-discipline, visibility, and conformity to Eurocentric norms. Whether they are single students hoping to escape precariousness or married women seeking social respectability, these influencers demonstrate that whitening is not only a physical act but an ideological one—wrapped in the language of self-care, productivity, and feminine ambition. It is this convergence of aesthetics, capitalism, and race that defines the current moment, and reveals the profound ways in which bodily practices continue to reflect and reproduce social hierarchies in postcolonial Tunisia.
From Self-Made to State-Policed: Content Creation, Censorship, and Precarity
Tunisia currently lacks a formal legal framework governing online content creation and digital commerce. A bill backed by over 80 MPs aims to regulate marketing on websites and social media, protect against online fraud, and bring informal digital businesses into the formal economy to boost tax revenues. While the bill targets urgent gaps, it projects little confidence when it comes to enforcement. Monitoring millions of daily online transactions would require significant investment in advanced technologies and specialized personnel—resources Tunisia currently lacks. AI could help detect fraud, but its cost and complexity pose further barriers. There’s also the risk of overregulation: rigid enforcement could stifle digital entrepreneurship and push small creators into even more opaque spaces. This is especially problematic given that nearly 80% of e-transactions are still cash-based and largely untaxed, sustaining a parallel economy that undermines formal businesses.[5]
Given the absence of regulations, to date, the state’s primary tool for disciplining content creators has been Article 226 bis of the Penal Code, which criminalizes offenses against “public morals.” Under Ben Ali, the article was used to silence dissenting voices—often under the guise of moral protection. Post-2011, it was used to target public figures and everyday people. Public displays of affection, carrying legally purchased alcohol, or expressing non-conforming gender presentation led to arrests and prosecutions under broadly defined morality laws.
The absence of a regulatory framework has produced an ambiguous space where influencers operate both as public figures and as informal workers—vulnerable to the double bind of capitalist commodification and moralistic policing. The Tunisian state has launched several moral campaigns against content creators under the pretext of “atteintes aux bonnes mœurs” (“affront to public decency”), a loosely defined legal category that includes behaviors deemed socially disruptive or morally corrupting. In 2023 and 2024, several influencers were arrested under this charge, among them Lady Samara, pregnant at the time, and sentenced to over three years in prison (later reduced on appeal) for disseminating online content the state deemed inappropriate.
The repression of figures like Lady Samara is particularly significant when viewed through the lens of gender and class. The type of femininity she performs—accessible, unapologetically visible and at times sexualized—directly contradicts the normative codes of respectability that postcolonial Tunisia has long upheld through the apparatus of state feminism. Her incarceration, and that of others like her (including queer and working-class content creators like Khoubaib and the couple Ramzi and Afifa), reveals the cost of visibility in an economy and society that struggles to reconcile its integration to global capitalism with certain forms of moral conservatism.
This tension is further exacerbated by the Tunisian state’s refusal to treat this type of content labor as legitimate economic activity. Despite its contribution to digital economies and consumer markets, content creation is not recognized as “real work.” This reflects not only the state’s outdated legal frameworks but also a broader ideological dissonance between what capitalism deems economically productive and what states, especially authoritarian and/or socially conservative ones, consider morally acceptable. The state thus weaponizes legal ambiguity to criminalize forms of labor and expression that fall outside the bounds of normative respectability.
The Tunisian State, Social Reproduction, and a Better Path Forward
Social reproduction theory helps us understand the impasse facing Tunisia’s digital beauty entrepreneurs by highlighting how the boundary between productive and unproductive labor is not natural, but politically and historically constructed. Traditionally, labor that produces commodities has been valorized and paid, while labor that reproduces people—caring, cleaning, educating, expressing emotion—has been feminized, racialized, and devalued. Digital influencing occupies an uneasy place between the two. On the one hand, it generates content, attention, and sometimes income. On the other, it relies heavily on affective labor, unpaid self-promotion, and the cultivation of intimate personas—activities typically relegated to the domain of the personal or the feminine.
Clearly, state repression of these spaces also intersects with racial politics. Tunisia has, since February 2023, entered a moment of heightened racial anxiety, marked by the securitization of sub-Saharan African migration and a public discourse that increasingly racializes both migrants and national black populations. The moral campaigns against influencers unfolded against this backdrop, revealing the converging pressures of race, class, and gender in defining who is allowed to be visible, to speak, to work. It is no coincidence that the crackdown disproportionately affects marginalized subjects: women, queer people, racialized people, and the poor. These are precisely the actors whose labor and social reproduction undergird the entire system, yet whose presence must be controlled to maintain the appearance of social order.
In a context of economic collapse, political authoritarianism, and social anxiety over national identity, digital labor—especially when performed by women, queer individuals, or marginalized actors—becomes both hyper-visible and hyper-policed. By shifting the focus from the narrow realm of wage labor to the wider systems that sustain life, identities, and hierarchies, we can better understand how and why this is playing out. The increasing repression of content creators and influencers under President Kais Saied’s rule derives from the broader political economy of Tunisia. Likewise, it is structured by global dynamics of gender, labor, and digital capitalism. As such, it is critical that the ongoing criminalization of digital labor in Tunisia not merely be conceived as an attack on individual freedoms—it needs be understood is a reassertion of state control over the terms of visibility, morality, and reproduction. The affective, embodied labor that influencers perform—often from their homes, often as mothers or young women, often without institutional support—is treated as suspect because it challenges the state’s monopoly over public discourse and disrupts the gendered hierarchies that underpin national identity. The fact that this labor is often informal, mobile, and based on personal narrative makes it even more threatening to a state that sees control and surveillance as key to political stability.
The tensions that digital entrepreneurialism evokes between work and morality, between digital entrepreneurship and repression, also highlights a larger contradiction in Tunisia’s post-revolution trajectory. The same economic crisis that produces self-entrepreneurship also fuels authoritarianism. The same youth who are encouraged to “invest in themselves” through neoliberal discourses of success are criminalized when that investment takes the form of non-normative gender or sexual expressions. The labor of social reproduction—whether online or off, remunerated or not—is simultaneously essential and unrecognized, celebrated and policed.
This all being the case, it is essential that those working to reform regulations and criminal laws concerning digital entrepreneurialism not limit their focus to the domain of the law alone. They must also engage with the fundamental structure of Tunisia’s economy. In the same vein, those seeking to unwind the proliferation of skin whitening products would be naïve to direct energies solely at the relevant principals, be they influencers or underground pharmacies. They must also draw attention to the historical and contemporary factors which lead whiteness to be valorized. Furthermore, they must work to advance the kinds of social and economic reforms which might collapse Tunisia’s racialized hierarchies.
[1] Susan Ferguson, “Social reproduction: what’s the big idea”, Blog: Pluto Books.
[2] Mullin, Corinna. « L’enseignement supérieur en Tunisie, lieu de pouvoir (néo)colonial et de lutte décoloniale ». Tumultes, 2017/1 n° 48, 2017. p.185-205.
[3] Lady Samara for instance, once posted a video applying a whitening cream to her elbows while declaring, “I don’t want these to darken, to turn blue,” expressing both her fear of becoming zargā and the labor required to maintain the ideal shade of samrā.
[4] Kaundinya, Anaka. (2023). How Fair & Lovely Bottled Up India’s Insecurities. Kajol. https://www.kajalmag.com/fair-and-lovely-colorism-india/
[5] Maya Bouallégui, “Zoom sur la future loi régulant le marketing et le commerce sur le web et les réseaux sociaux”, Business News (March 17: 2025).
Photo Credit: Adam Jones, ““Fair and Lovely – Billboard for Skin-Whitening Cream – Chittagong – Bangladesh”
This publication is part of the Project Political Economy of the contemporary MENA Region and has been carried out with the financial support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.
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