21–23 Jun 2021
Europe/London timezone

Authoritarian neoliberalism in Tunisia's pandemic response

22 Jun 2021, 16:00

Description

The COVID-19 crisis has demanded that governments across the world take unprecedented action in limiting the movements and constraining the everyday lives of their populations. The justification for such radical imposition on civil liberty has been the protection of public health. However, across the world and particularly across the MENA, in particular, political regimes have used coronavirus to establish ‘all forms of suppression and represent potential power grab that, even if temporary, will likely have a lasting impact on the citizen-state relationship’ (Yerkes, 2020). Such tendencies pose even more significant questions in the context of Tunisia’s fragile transition. In Tunisia, policy makers used a plethora of existing emergency powers and security measures that circumnavigate normal policy and legal frameworks to pass illiberal security measures in response to the Coronavirus crisis. Simultaneously, the state of exception is being used as a smoke screen with which to ram neoliberal economic reforms through parliament and further consolidate authoritarian neoliberalism. Authoritarian neoliberalism is a term being used by International Relations scholars that seek to engage with the increasingly illiberal and disciplinarian nature of states within the context of neoliberalism, so often conceptualised as involving the retreat of the state. Such authors argue that contemporary neoliberalism reinforces and relies upon 1) coercive state practices that discipline and criminalise oppositional social forces and 2) the judicial and administrative state apparatuses which limit the avenues in which neoliberal policies can be challenged (Tansel, 2017; Bruff ,2014). Using the conceptual framework provided by authoritarian neoliberalism, it will be shown that Tunisia’s security first approach to a public health crisis has been used to further insulate neoliberal economic policy from social and political contestation.

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