Transitional Justice, Structural Violence, and the Limits of the Tunisian Experience: the Case of the Victim-Region Concept

Abstract

Three years after the Tunisian uprising that ended Ben Ali’s authoritarian rule, the National Constituent Assembly voted law 53-2013(TJ law) to institutionalize the country’s journey of transitional justice and to establish the Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC) as an independent truth-seeking body. In July 2020, the Commission’s final report was published in the Tunisian Gazette. The 2000-pages document, celebrated as a milestone in post-uprising Tunisia, is the result of more than five years of work and multiple collaborations with different parties including local and international civil society organizations (CSOs) and expertise amid political instability.

Under article 10, paragraph 3, of the TJ law, the definition of victimhood is extended to include any region that suffered marginalization and systemic exclusion. In a country marked by crystallized fault-lines and severe regional disparities, art. 10 para. 3 became known as the victim-region concept. This niche aspires to address social injustices and their geographic manifestations under collective reparation of damage and the establishment of guarantees of non-recurrence. The vagueness of the law was leveraged by elite actors, particularly NGOs, to tackle violations of economic and social rights (ESRs), which is an emerging trend in the field of TJ that calls for the widening of its scope beyond the traditional focus on political and civil rights. The victim-region niche hence presented a site of bargain opposing competing agendas of involved state and non-state actors.

This thesis argues that these actors’ approach(es) to the victim-region concept failed to grasp the complexity of Tunisia’s political geography of marginalization. The interpretation and instrumentalization of this niche hindered its potential to challenge the status quo, and consequent methodological and discursive limits put possibilities of genuine change in jeopardy. As a chiefly discursive field, resulting accounts could equally accentuate a narrative of victimhood fueling already existing social divides while depoliticizing the problem and overlooking the intricacy of its root causes and consequences, hence serving the perpetual reproduction of the system in place rather than its dismantlement.