Description
The analysis of material practices of security in both ‘orthodox’ and critical security studies has so far mostly focused on the so-called ‘elite actors’ (such as politicians, diplomats, and more generally security practitioners), focusing on security politics and policies as a top-down process. This paper aims at shifting such perspective, building on the growing literature on the so-called ‘everyday’ or ‘vernacular’ practices of security (see Guillame and Huysmans 2019, Jarvis 2019, Nyman 2021) and observing security policies and programs as horizontal processes shaped and re-shaped not only by political decisions and state practices, but also through more mundane ‘day to day’ practices. The objective of this paper is to analyze the enactment of a security discourse in Tunisia not through the lens of governmental practices and narratives, but rather focusing on how so-called ‘common people’ shape and influence material practices of security, whether by adapting to it, challenging it or negotiating their space of action. To do this, this paper will focus on ethnographic interviews conducted with imams in Tunisia between 2018 and 2020, in order to observe how (in)security practices are understood and perceived by the imams, with particular attention to the intersection between security and religion, a topic of central relevance in post-authoritarian Tunisia. Lastly, this paper aims at building on existing literature on the subject (Ochs 2011, Hönke, and Müller 2012, Gunning and Smaira 2021) in order to provide a working method for investigating day to day practices of security in a post-authoritarian and post-colonial space such as the Tunisian one.
