Éric Gobe

Of Lawyers and Samsars: The Legal Services Market and the Authoritarian State in Ben 'Ali's Tunisia (1987–2011)

The recent history of the Tunisian Bar was symptomatic of repeated attempts by President Ben ‘Ali’s authoritarian state to subjugate a profession which was meant to guarantee respect for the rule of law and defendants’ rights. To this end, the state established an apparatus intended to control the workings of the legal services market and reduce the profession’s capacity for self-regulation. This situation led to the development of illegal practices and influenced a majority of lawyers to support the mobilization against Ben ‘Ali’s regime.

Lawyers Mobilizing in the Tunisian Uprising: A Matter of “Generations”?

If the young lawyers from the lower-level legal profession joined in massive numbers the marches, protests, and sit-ins that fed the protest movement, it was the professionals with experience in political activism that were the organizers of the lower-level lawyers mobilization. From this point of view, political engagement by the lawyers appears as “transgenerational.” But their participation in the protest movement was mainly due to its young segment, which followed the large increase in numbers in the legal profession. The feeling of sharing a common socio-economic status and perceiving the Ben Ali authoritarian regime as fundamentally hostile to them, contributed to the creation among most lawyers of a generational conscience and a rejection of the authoritarian status quo. Ultimately, the uprising in December 2010-January 2011 contributed to crystallizing this conscience, or in a more general way, “the interaction between historical resources, the contingency of circumstances, and a social formation” is susceptible to render pertinent a generation as a sociological category . But in the case of lawyers, the generational reading of the uprising in 2010-2011 must be balanced with the lower-level legal profession identity crisis, itself a consequence of the policies directed by the authoritarian regime towards the profession. With the fall of the authoritarian regime led by Ben Ali, “young lawyers” exacted their revenge following years of humiliation during his regime. At the same time, the professional organization, although reticent at first to get involved in collective action, was able to capture and profit from the dividends of mobilization by its grassroots and political activist lawyers. Afterwards, the latter, especially the most senior, leaned heavily on their revolutionary legitimacy to get politically involved: two-thirds of the lawyers from the first category, as well as the most politicized lawyers in the second inserted themselves in the official political scene and became professional political figures. These opposition lawyers, whose politico-professional engagement is anchored in the continuation of a political trajectory marked by their socialization and their previous activist mobilizations in the 1970s and early 1980s, had developed under Ben Ali a professional practice in support of union and political activists repressed by the authoritarian regime. In so doing, these lawyers had continued their oppositional practice within the framework of their professional activity. Two fundamental areas in their life, their career and their political engagement, had thus mingled thanks to their profession. At present, thanks to their protesting political action within the popular uprising of 2010-2011, they have been able to convert the activist and oppositional political resources accumulated since their university days into official political positions and status in post-Ben Ali’s Tunisia.

Dossier : La fabrique de la mémoire

Le Maghreb est-il, a l’instar des societes du Nord, sature par la fievre des entreprises memorielles ? Certes, il est invite – et s’invite – en France dans les conflits resultant de l’affrontement des memoires autour de la question coloniale. Mais la fabrique de la memoire au Maghreb n’est pas uniquement le resultat des interactions entre le Nord et le Sud de la Mediterranee. Elle est aussi le fruit d’un « travail de memoire » interne qui se deploie depuis les independances avec d’autant plus de force qu’il s’est agi pour les Etats de l’Afrique du Nord de construire rapidement des nations a la fois ancrees dans le passe et porteuses d’un vouloir-vivre ensemble. Comme le note Jean-Philippe Bras coordinateur de ce dossier de recherche, ce processus de production d’une memoire nationale edifiante se heurte a l’emergence de memoires concurrentielles qui s’inscrivent dans les conflits les plus contemporains des societes maghrebines. C’est aujourd’hui la necessite de surmonter les dechirements politiques ayant affecte le tissu social qui debouche, comme le montre bien l’exemple marocain, sur l’emergence d’un nouveau « registre memoriel » fonde, cette fois-ci, sur la conciliation et la reparation. Un debat de recherche essentiel a cote duquel on retrouve les rubriques habituelles de L’Annee du Maghreb : Chroniques politiques, Gros Plans, Etudes thematiques, ainsi que des sujets a la pointe de l’actualite portant sur l’islamisme ou les relations Maghreb-Europe en matiere de securite et de defense. Eric Gobe, redacteur en chef