Retrospective Revolutionary Narratives: Variation in Social Grievances in Tunisia

• In Event: Pro-Democracy Protests

Abstract

The construction of common grievance forms a core aspect of revolutionary mobilization (Snow and Soule 2010; Simmons 2014). Social and economic grievances were particularly salient in the 2011 Arab Uprising – even surpassing, in several studies, the importance of grievance related to political or civic rights (Beissinger, Jamal, and Mazur 2015; Cammett and Salti 2018). Yet “social grievances” remain, in these contexts, a black box; we have little understanding of which social grievances, among an array of state failings, proved most salient. Further, citizens in the wake of an uprising may well disagree over which grievances and demands were most central to popular mobilization. The ways in which citizens understand, reconstruct, and share retrospective revolutionary narratives may have significant consequences for their expectations of post-revolutionary politics and their propensity to mobilize in the future.

We examine the retrospective narratives of the social grievances underpinning revolutionary mobilization through a unique household survey of Tunisian citizens in 2017, six years following the 2011 uprising that deposed longstanding dictator Zine el Abedine Ben Ali. Tunisians were asked to rank the socioeconomic grievances most important to revolutionary participation, including unemployment, insufficient wages, inadequate access to healthcare, inadequate access to food, and inadequate access to education. Accounting for a range of individual-level covariates, we show that most significant variation in grievance priority occurs on the regional level, in particular between the wealthier, coastal capital region and the underdeveloped regions of the interior. In interior governorates, where spontaneous and localized anti-regime mobilization began in December 2010, citizens overwhelmingly identified unemployment as the key revolutionary grievance. In coastal and capital regions, where mass protests emerged later in the revolutionary cycle, citizens identified a wider array of important grievances, including greater emphasis on wages and healthcare. We also find small effects associated with a respondent’s gender and occupational status. Notably, whether a respondent self-reports participating in the 2011 protests has little effect on their prioritization of grievance.

In aggregate, these patterns suggest that revolutionary narratives are socially constituted, most often on the community (rather than the individual, or the national) level. The project contributes to our understanding of grievances in mobilization as well as the means by which citizens continue to refract and draw on revolutionary narratives further into the post-revolutionary period.

Authors

• Michelle Jurkovich, University of Massachusetts Boston

• Dina Bishara, Cornell University

• Chantal Berman, Georgetown University