Charis Boutieri

National identities after 2011: interrogating the politics of culture and relations of soft power in the Maghrib

Notwithstanding its prominent place in diplomatic discourse, development policy, and to an extent everyday parlance, the concept of ‘soft power’ and the set of operations it incorporates have featured minimally in contemporary scholarship with regard to the Maghrib and has mainly been used to describe the foreign policy of national states (see for example: Saaf 2016; Zaghlami 2017). Understandable as this oversight may be, for reasons that we will touch on later, it is also deplorable for it prevents scholars working on cultural politics from grasping specific mutations within power relations as these affect experiences of identity – intersecting language use, ways of acting, and modes of being – in specific settings. This collection of articles, the outcome of a rewarding workshop held at the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Perugia in May 2016, wishes to inaugurate an interdisciplinary conversation about these precise mutations in the states of the Maghrib after the important events of 2011. The collection builds on and complicates varying articulations and manifestations of soft power, leading its contributors to make original, yet diverse, arguments about the phenomenon in the period in question. Harvard professor Joseph Nye coined the term to discuss the capacity of states to exercise international influence through cooption instead of coercion (1990). Intentionally or unintentionally vague over its affinity with the notions of cultural diplomacy, public diplomacy, and cultural relations on state level, the concept of soft power constitutes the particular instantiation of cultural encounters emerging out of Cold War configurations and desires. Cold War historians have explicitly tied mid-century government initiatives of ‘cultural diplomacy’ with the aims of soft power. These initiatives included overt agendas for cultural and student exchange such as the founding and maintenance of foreign schools, the building of libraries and cultural associations run by organisations such as the Fulbright Foundation and the British

On democratic glossaries: ‘soft power’ and hard markets in post-revolutionary Tunisia

ABSTRACT Inside Tunisian civic training programmes funded by foreign donors in the post-revolutionary period, democratic training collapses into neoliberal frames of being and doing. This paper traces the ‘soft power’ that imbues the glossaries of democratisation with a specifically economistic logic. It argues that this economistic logic influences the shaping of an emerging civic public in Tunisia along international objectives despite the translation of the civic training lexicon into standard Arabic or the Tunisian dialect and the multilingual code-switching of the training sessions. Engendering this young civic public as a counter-public to earlier articulations of civic awareness and practice – that are now construed as unruly, violent, and unproductive – the internationally approved glossaries of democratic deliberation and civic action recalibrate democracy as predominantly the space for free competition, production, and consumption. While not unique to Tunisia, the Tunisian case urges us to think of the paradoxes of democratic transition in places where the state simultaneously strives to build institutions of liberal representative democracy and simultaneously alters the meaning of liberal representative democracy along neoliberal lines.