ConflictualDemocracy · Conflictual Democracy: Urban politics, gender and local governance in post-revolution Tunisia
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-09-01 → 2024-08-31
- EU contribution
- €166,320
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Conflictual Democracy: Urban politics, gender and local governance in post-revolution Tunisia
ConflictualDemocracy was conceived as a response to the 2011 Arab uprisings and their manifestations in Tunisia. Proposing to shift the lens from the national level to the city and its institutional municipal form, the project aimed to explore whether contestation politics at the municipal level weakened the revolution's democratic achievements. At stake was understanding democratic transformation beyond the procedural level (for example elections), to examine how citizens, especially poorer marginalized Tunisians, experienced democracy daily as a system of practices, values, and processes, and crucially outcomes affecting their lives and livelihoods. To study democratic transformation, the project had three entry points: (i) the participation of citizens from popular neighbourhoods in municipal investment planning and their engagements with their municipalities, (ii) the experiences of female mayors elected to serve on municipal council in balancing the management of municipal affairs with male-dominated upper echelons of government, and (iii) the judicialization of local politics whereby some mayors were suing the centralized administration because of intervention in their municipal affairs. The overall objectives of the project were understanding local politics as a relational process between citizens and the "local state", the gendering of this space of encounter, and the extent to which this gendered space of encounter gave rise to conflict between citizens and "the state" perceived as unresponsive to their expectations.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The 2011 Arab uprisings were extraordinary events. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has long been understood as the bastion of authoritarianism, stifled markets and Islamic fundamentalism. The protestors who filled streets and city squares in 2011 disrupted these narratives. A decade after the uprisings, I propose to investigate whether politics leads to the weakening of democracy. In a context of deepening socio-economic inequalities, I explore this question from Tunisia, the country celebrated in foreign policy circles as ‘the only hope’ of the Arab revolutions. The hypothesis I aim to test is whether a conflictual democracy is being consolidated at the local level, where ‘the state’, the space of institutionalized politics, meets the street, the space of contestation. Through this fellowship, my research attends to whether and how conflictual democracy in post-revolution Tunisia which manifests at the intersection of municipalities as spaces of encounter, the gendering of these local governments, and the legal battles these decentralized entities have waged against the deconcentrated state. My research engages with three bodies of literature: the urban studies literature on the political, feminist theories of the space, and the political geography literature on scale and topologies of power. The conceptual innovation of this project lies in bridging political theory, urban studies, and feminist studies to theorize the dynamics of an unfolding conflictual democracy while being attentive to questions of gender, the perceived threat of political Islam and the legal aspects of politics. In addition to its theoretical rigor, I aim to build on my professional experience in policy circles and my knowledge of Tunisian politics to develop policy briefs about decentralization reforms, and teach-ins modules aimed at increasing female political participation in local governance.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT GENT · GentCoordinatorBelgium
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union