The financial character of policing in Tunisia: collusions, extraversion and the criminalization of informality

Abstract

This article attempts to shed light on the development of a financial/security assemblages in Tunisia, from an international political sociology perspective that looks at the development of practices of security and policing from a transnational and postcolonial vantage point. Financial policing in the Global South nowadays takes largely shape through the combination of anti-money laundering (AML) and counter financing of terrorism (CFT) agendas, which are systematically and racially coupled to target Asian or African contexts and, as such, largely exclude money and profits benefitting high capital concentration contexts and actors that is usually laundered for tax evasion. To advance the argument, the article first aligns with theoretical sociological accounts that deconstruct and overcome methodological nationalism and exceptionalism of analyses of coercive power in Tunisia and the region. It contributes to these perspectives by mobilizing together concepts of entanglement, assembled and collusion for understanding the practices and effects of the AML/CFT agenda. These concepts serve to illuminate the co-constitutive (entangled) character of these practices, while bearing their negotiated dependent extraverted configurations, but also their complex and networked (assembled) character. Finally, they serve to identify relations of legitimation (collusions) that follow horizontal lines while enabling, in particular critical junctures, discursive and material manipulations used to recentralize power vertically, ultimately repositioning the ‘security custodians’ around central presidential power: an effect rendered particularly sharp by the self-coup of 2021 and its unfolding consequences. The article then attempts to give empirical salience to the theoretical argument by tracing the processual developments of financial and pre-emptive intelligence from transnational forms of blacklisting (which affected Tunisia in 2018) to profiling, tracking, fund freezing practices that unfold contextually. This process generates three visible effects in the Tunisian context. Firstly, it generates a legal expansion of the financial policing assemblage, including in its repressive outcomes, and the making of exception that has to be understood in its performative, experimental and relational character, and not as ontologically absolute. Secondly, the related creation of new institutions that, although having little power on their own and being substantially controlled by the presidential power and that of the Ministry of Interior, are embedded in transnational networks and serve to channel extraverted strategies vis à vis donors and external partners. The Commission National de Lutte Contre le Terrorisme (CNLCT) and especially the Commission Tunisienne d’Analyse Financière (CTFA), this latter receiving the bulk of attention here, with all their different functional and political significances, are a case in point. Experiments with new technologies, such as blockchain, come into play here (and in line with a broader trend visible in the whole African continent) not only as extraversion practices to reassure investors in European countries and international economic institutions, and consequently exit sanctioning lists, but as they strengthen the contemporary experimental and infrastructural character of 'security' which maintains and reproduces its regimes. Finally, the third effect considered is the disqualification and criminalisation of the informal economy, considered here through the observation of how hawala channels and exchange networks for money, good and people circulation acquire centrality to legitimize these attempts at control, whose effectiveness must be relativized, but which nevertheless have violent and disqualifying consequences for vulnerable economies at the Tunisian border and beyond. This process is accelerated by the progressive conflation of informal money circulation channels with mobility and migrant transit, and of money couriers (passeurs de fonds) with smugglers.