On democratic glossaries: ‘soft power’ and hard markets in post-revolutionary Tunisia

Abstract

ABSTRACTInside Tunisian civic training programmes funded by foreign donors in the post-revolutionary period, democratic training collapses into neoliberal frames of being and doing. This paper traces the ‘soft power’ that imbues the glossaries of democratisation with a specifically economistic logic. It argues that this economistic logic influences the shaping of an emerging civic public in Tunisia along international objectives despite the translation of the civic training lexicon into standard Arabic or the Tunisian dialect and the multilingual code-switching of the training sessions. Engendering this young civic public as a counter-public to earlier articulations of civic awareness and practice – that are now construed as unruly, violent, and unproductive – the internationally approved glossaries of democratic deliberation and civic action recalibrate democracy as predominantly the space for free competition, production, and consumption. While not unique to Tunisia, the Tunisian case urges us to think of the paradoxes of democratic transition in places where the state simultaneously strives to build institutions of liberal representative democracy and simultaneously alters the meaning of liberal representative democracy along neoliberal lines.