Description
Authoritarian breakdowns prompt institutional change in militaries in the form of resource allocations, political centrality, and military doctrine. These critical junctures, however, remain poorly understood and often demonstrate contradictions: democratic reform programs may increase authoritarian coercive capacity, officers find themselves further politicised, and the process of change involves substantial trial-and-error. While the extant literature emphasises threat perception and international cooperation as the leading explanations for change, institutionalist scholarship has the potential to provide more insight into these processes. Using post-authoritarian Tunisia as its case study, this paper aims to provide an account of Tunisian military transformation since 2011. Albeit a relatively small force, the Tunisian military today is a very different organisation compared to the marginalised and largely ineffective army under Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime. Based on in-country fieldwork and elite interviews, the paper argues that the Tunisian military has experienced a form of lopsided growth which demonstrates problems with designing institutional change in a transitional setting, including an over-emphasis on special forces, persistent recruitment problems, and selective borrowing of the US military doctrine. As such, the paper aims to contribute to the small but growing literature on MENA militaries, and the literature on coercive institutions in general.
