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More than six years after the revolution that ousted former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia’s border regions remain hotbeds of social discontent and agitation. Aggrieved youth increasingly express their anger through fiery protests, street violence, and in some cases violent extremism. In response to this ongoing social unrest and terrorism, the Tunisian government has developed hardline security policies, whose effects often exacerbate social tensions, political violence, and militancy. Breaking this vicious cycle requires Tunisia’s government to rethink its approach to the border regions.

The State of Tunisia’s Fragile Borders

• Many youth in Tunisia’s border regions have lost confidence in the democratic transition and have developed feelings of deep frustration, anger, and hostility toward state authority.
• Years of protests are hardening into demands for a new social contract that would produce a more equitable redistribution of state resources as well as a transparent and inclusive process to manage Tunisia’s natural resources.
• The state’s inability or unwillingness to reform its modes of governance—as well as its tendency to attack and stigmatize protesters as troublemakers, smugglers and terrorists—has contributed to the growing politicization and radicalization of youth.
• The prolonged disconnect between the state and Tunisia’s marginalized regions is dangerous, threatening to plunge the country into violence that could see the country slide back into repressive authoritarianism.

Recommendations for Tunisian Authorities and the International Community

• Acknowledge the border regions’ decades-long experiences of socioeconomic discrimination and political abuse and validate their historical figures, symbols, and contributions to Tunisia. If accompanied by a genuine regional development program, such gestures can contribute to reconciliation between the aggrieved periphery and the dominant eastern Mediterranean coast.
• Support strategies that increase agricultural competitiveness, reform landownership, and improve the management of natural resources. The investment of a fair portion of the profits from local resources into local projects can improve the livelihoods of local communities.
• Reform the internal security apparatus and criminal justice sector, and design rehabilitation and reintegration programs for the hundreds of Tunisian fighters returning from foreign theaters of conflict.
• Support and empower the work of the National Authority for the Fight Against Corruption (INLUCC) and the Truth and Dignity Commission. Reducing corruption, restoring justice, and providing compensation to victims of repression will bolster lasting and sustainable stability.

Introduction

Social inequality and regional asymmetries are deepening the chasm between Tunisia’s restless periphery and its eastern Mediterranean coast, with the potential to undermine the country’s democratic transition. Tunisian coastal elites fear and misunderstand the bitter resentment in the border communities, making it harder to secure the country from continuing terrorist threats. The violent extremist groups based in these communities feed on a deep well of disillusionment with the democratic transition and prey on the growing sense of emasculation, disempowerment, and helplessness among Tunisian youth. The Tunisian government’s narrow focus on combating extremist ideology is distracting from addressing the real drivers of radicalization. Studies show that the lure of violent extremist groups, such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State, has more to do with the promise of empowerment and restored dignity than with ideology or religious conviction.¹ Since the 2011 revolution, Tunisia has experienced an evolving array of security threats, particularly along the country’s fragile borders. This paper will evaluate Tunisia’s security-based approaches to border control and provide recommendations for addressing the dangerous divide between the youth in Tunisia’s border regions and the state.

Dynamic Threat of Militancy

Since the end of former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s authoritarian rule in January 2011, the Tunisian government has been playing catch up against a continually shifting terror threat. The Tunisian revolution greatly disrupted the security landscape, initially marked by political disorientation andregional upheaval. The postrevolutionary period provided disparate Salafi groups with a sudden opportunity to sow the seeds of another revolutionary movement in the soil of poor neighborhoods and allowed them to take advantage of the widespread disillusionment among the youth, particularly in the border regions. Salafists of every stripe came to the fore, but it was the so-called Salafi jihadists who most took advantage of the political transition. Powered by the release of hundreds of Salafists from prison and the return of several prominent sheikhs to Tunisia from their sanctuaries in Western Europe, they began spreading their roots in the poor and marginalized areas where state authority was lacking.²

One of the challenges that faced the Salafists was how to transform the heterogeneous Salafi-jihadi networks into a fixed structure with a central authority and identified leadership. Many radical Salafists coalesced around the hardline group Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia (AST), founded in late April 2011 by former prisoner Seifallah Ben Hassine, known as Abu Ayadh. Abu Ayadh prioritized central control over the growth of Salafi jihadism, fearing counterproductive actions might hurt the movement.³ These concerns were quickly realized when the movement became mired in controversies over vigilante violence against art shows, mausoleums, and liquor stores.⁴ Despite claims by Abu Ayadh that Tunisia was no longer a land of jihad, Salafi proselytizing and violent discourse became increasingly combative toward other Tunisians whose lifestyles the Salafists rejected.

The rise of this violence reached its culmination in September 2012 when raging mobs set fire to the U.S. embassy and the American Cooperative School of Tunis. Salafi vigilantism proved destructive to the movement as Tunisia’s main Islamist party, Ennahda, which led a governing coalition from October 2011 to January 2014, hardened its security approach, targeting AST’s structures, grassroots organizations, and social activities. The tougher approach prompted the Salafi jihadists to shift their focus away from aggressive, sometimes violent, proselytizing to directly challenging state authority and attacking its key institutions. By doing so, the Salafi jihadists hoped to weaken the credibility of the state security forces by proving to disgruntled Tunisians that their government was unable to stop the Salafi-jihadi attacks.

This attrition strategy escalated in 2013, with a vicious cycle of provocation, retaliation, and repression. Tunisia’s then prime minister, an Islamist named Ali Larayedh, blamed AST militants for the assassinations of two Tunisian political figures and the killings of several members of the security forces.⁵ Nationwide reprisal operations against suspected militants’ hideouts and safe houses revealed weapon caches for future attacks. In the midst of this escalating war between the state and AST, small and violent militant groups connected to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) were upping the ante in the western regions bordering Algeria. After the classification of AST as a terrorist organization in August 2013 and the resultant massive security crackdown on the movement and its sympathizers, groups such as the Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade (an AQIM affiliate) positioned themselves as a rampart against the state’s policy of criminalization of Salafism and suppression of dissent. They did this especially in the most disenfranchised neighborhoods and regions of the country.

The defeat of AST accelerated the fragmentation of the Tunisian militant landscape. Under the assault of state forces, AST ceased to exist by late 2014. This left behind an ideological void and a large, disgruntled constituency, whose members either went dormant, operated underground by integrating smuggling networks and building social linkages in Ben Guerdane close to the border with Libya, or joined the Syrian or Libyan theaters of war.⁶ Other Salafists continued the fight against the government’s “tyranny” by linking up with the Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade near the Algerian border.

The Tunisian government must adopt a new approach that analyzes the risks of militancy in the political, social, and economic context in which they occur.

Up until AST’s defeat, the focus of the Salafi-jihadi movement was on destabilizing state institutions while mobilizing the legions of Tunisians dissatisfied with the democratic transition. The failure of this political strategy led to a dramatic shift in approach that embraced hitting civilian as well as military targets.⁷ This new strategy was amplified by the deepening reach of the Islamic State franchise into Libya. In 2015 alone, three major attacks in Tunisia were claimed by the Islamic State—at the Bardo National Museum in the capital of Tunis (twenty-two deaths), a beach resort at Sousse (thirty-eight deaths), and on a Tunisian presidential guard bus in downtown Tunis (twelve deaths). And in March 2016, dozens of Islamic State–trained sleeper cells staged a dramatic assault on Tunisian security forces in Ben Guerdane.

The Tunisian security forces successfully repelled this attempt to seize Ben Guerdane and to inflame a rebellious populace into open revolt. However, the scale of the attempt and the collusion of some Ben Guerdane residents illustrate that militant groups have the potential to expand in Tunisia’s border regions. Such an evolution requires the Tunisian government to adopt a new approach that is not limited to law enforcement and military actions. The key is to analyze the risks of militancy in the political, social, and economic context in which they occur. In Tunisia, socioeconomic triggers (alienation, discrimination, and stigmatization) and regional asymmetries are important predictors of youth violence and radicalization, particularly in the border regions.⁸

Underpinnings of Radicalization

The current government’s approach to terrorism has the potential to fuel further radicalization.

President Beji Caid Essebsi likes to dismiss violent militancy as something induced by alien fanatic barbarism.⁹ Such an ideology-focused approach ignores the underlying drivers of militancy. It also limits the government’s ability to assess the threat in a systematic way. Government actions that ignore the social, economic, and regional underpinnings of militancy will influence the trajectories of terrorism in Tunisia.¹⁰

A dispassionate assessment of Tunisia’s problem with militancy points more toward socioeconomic and regional factors than it does to religious fundamentalism. The rare sociological studies conducted on militancy in Tunisia show that the young Tunisians most sympathetic to AST hailed from the poorest neighborhoods and were the least religiously observant.¹¹ Aggrieved youth sympathize with jihadists because they tend to share the same underprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds and inhabit the same blighted neighborhoods.¹²

Radical ideologies might be influenced by regional context and geopolitical grievances, but they are an expression of their local environs. This is especially true for the latest generation of Tunisian militants who were not around for the first wave of battles in Afghanistan in the 1980s and were too young for the second round of major fights, which began after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States and intensified with the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. This third generation of militants, who came of age with the 2010­–2011 Tunisian revolution, is best exemplified by the perpetrators of the dramatic terrorist attacks that hit Tunisia in 2015. They were born in the 1990s, had a taste of repressive authoritarianism, and then stumbled into the politics of revolt that put an end to the repressive rule of Ben Ali. They were disappointed by the inability of the postrevolutionary government to deliver for them, and the revolutionary thrill quickly gave way to the embrace of Salafi jihadism as the primary vehicle of resistance.¹³

Today, the youth who become militant tend to be better educated than their average countrymen, but unemployed or underemployed.

Today, the youth who become militant tend to be better educated than their average countrymen, but unemployed or underemployed.¹⁴ They are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.¹⁵ Many, including the three perpetrators of the Bardo and Sousse attacks, hail from impoverished backgrounds and marginalized regions.¹⁶ Intense feelings of insignificance in the Tunis suburbs or the poor outskirts of Kasserine Governorate allows radical groups that combine social and preaching activities to make inroads at the expense of the state.¹⁷ Before AST’s defeat, joiningthe group was tantamount to joining a revolutionary movement capable of rupturing thegenerational and institutionalorder.¹⁸ The movementwas a welcome home for those on the margins of society looking for a way to vent their frustrations with the democratic transition and their dashed hopes.

The failure of the democratic transition to improve the economic conditions for young Tunisians has led many to feel that the system is rigged against them. A 2014 World Bank report on removing hurdles to youth inclusion found that 68 percent of urban and 91 percent of rural youth have no trust in the political system.¹⁹ Political leaders remain largely older, Francophone, and middle class while the majority of Tunisians are young, Arabic-speaking, and disempowered.

Coping with disappointing outcomes differs from one individual to the next. But the Tunisian experience shows that anger at the persistence of social exclusion and regional disparities, combined with exposure to radical Salafi preachers, are important factors in understanding youth radicalization. As frustration grows, some individuals become more prone to nihilism, as the high rates of suicide and self-immolation in the most impoverished neighborhoods and regions demonstrate.²⁰ Others become susceptible to the heroic charms of jihadi warriors on the battlefields of Syria, Libya, or Kasserine’s Mount Chaambi,which is near the Algerian border.²¹

The challenge for Tunisian government officials is to understand this youth revolt. Viewing Islamic fundamentalism as the main driver of radicalism misdiagnoses the problem. Anytime there is a terrorist attack, the state cracks down on suspected radicals. Salafists complain of degrading treatment, unlawful raids, arbitrary arrests, and judicial harassment. Families of suspects and fighters who have returned home to Tunisia also complain of persecution and systematic police abuse. In the absence of a deradicalization program or a policy of social reinsertion, such a heavy-handed security approach is counterproductive. Worse, it is “pushing people to terrorism,” says Ridha Raddaoui, a lawyer and co-author of a recent report on terrorism in Tunisia published by the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights.²² The same concerns have been raised by international rights groups who warn that abuse in the name of security only compounds the security threats the country faces.²³

The persistent stigmatization of impoverished communities and the trauma associated with aggressive and intrusive policing instill in young people a profound bitterness toward state authority.

Tunisian prisons—notorious for overcrowding, poor sanitation, and torture—are becoming perfect settings for radicalization. This was brought into stark relief by the dramatic transformation of a twenty-five-year-old Tunisian from rapper to Islamic State fighter. Maurouane Douiri, known as Emino, was a womanizing singer who liked to post photographs of himself in front of a sports car with scantily clad women.²⁴ But after an eight-month stint in prison for hashish possession, he underwent a rapid and dramatic lifestyle change. In one year, he abandoned rap, changed his attire, and announced his allegiance to the Islamic State in a Facebook post in March 2015.²⁵ Before his radicalization in prison, he had criticized police violence against Tunisia’s youth. It is this police repression, argues his former lawyer Me Ghazi Mrabet, that is responsible for Emino’s conversion to radical Salafism.²⁶

The persistent stigmatization of impoverished communities and the trauma associated with aggressive and intrusive policing instill in young people profound feelings of humiliation by and bitterness toward state authority. This frustration is often expressed in protests, street violence, and violent extremism, especially in the long-neglected border regions that bear the brunt of the government’s ironfisted security policy.

A Region in Turmoil: Tunisia’s Southeast Border

The fact that Tunisia’s southeast border is seething with pervasive discontent and antigovernment hostility is not new. The region has always been hounded by exclusion and deprivation. From colonial rule to the reign of Ben Ali, the southern periphery was marginalized and stigmatized as a zone of tribalism, dereliction, and unruliness. The French imposition of arbitrary borders and the confiscation of land and forced sedentarization of nomads in a region with weak agricultural potential disrupted the pastoral livelihood of the region’s population.²⁷ The reaffirmation of this asymmetrical squeeze by Tunisia’s first president after independence, Habib Bourguiba, generated an enduring sense of injustice and rebellion toward the center.

Aside from a few jobs in the army and local government, the southern populations have had to fend for themselves through work in the underground economy.

The first act of defiance came on the heels of independence in 1956 when the southern regions sided with Bourguiba’s political nemesis, Salah Ben Youssef, a southern nationalist leader who contested the dominance of the state apparatus and resources by elites from Tunis and the northeast coast.²⁸ The same political antagonisms were revived in the 2014 presidential election when the impoverished south voted massively against then presidential candidate Essebsi, a central fixture of the hegemonic power structures that have ruled Tunisia since independence. In both cases, the populations of the south were expressing discontent at the prevailing economic paradigm that has failed them. From Bourguiba’s authoritarian statism to Ben Ali’s crony economic liberalism, the southern regions found themselves at the losing end of an extremely lopsided economy.

Aside from the few jobs in the army and local government that the state doled out as political patronage, the southern populations had to fend for themselves through work in the underground economy. Families in the border region with Libya eked out a precarious existence mostly through occasional day labor in informal cross-border trade and trafficking. Tunisia’s rocky relations with deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, killed by rebel forces in October 2011, accelerated the informalization of cross-border trade. The occasional border closures and expulsion of Tunisian workers from Libya opened the door for tribal cartels to develop lucrative cross-border services. The Twazin tribe of Ben Guerdane and their allies in the Nwayel tribes in Libya developed vast informal markets in currency trading, human trafficking, and smuggling of a range of subsidized Libyan goods from fuel to flour and sugar. The 1993 imposition of United Nations sanctions on Libya pushed people on both sides of the Tunisia-Libya border to rely on smuggling for their livelihoods.²⁹

The Ben Ali regime had tolerated, if not encouraged, the growth of such illicit centers of commercialization as safety valves, relieving societal pressures that might have otherwise exploded into civil unrest or massive migration into the more developed eastern coastal cities. There were, however, two significant caveats to this informal agreement. The tribal cartels forswore engagement in drug and arms trafficking and committed to help the government protect the border from infiltration by drug and arms dealers. When the government broke the principles of the tacit agreement, the border region sank into civil unrest. In the summer of 2010, informal cross-border traders and smugglers revolted against both the closure of the Ras Jedir border crossing into Libya and attempts by Ben Ali’s notorious in-laws to impose an exit tax on Tunisians crossing the border.The rioting and violence ceased only when the president canceled the tax and ordered the opening of the border crossing. The same scenario occurred in early 2015 after the Tunisian government imposed a $15 export tax on foreigners, causing Libyan authorities to retaliate in kind.³⁰ Deadly protests forced the authorities to suspend that border tax as well.

The fall of the Ben Ali regime disrupted cross-border markets, trade networks, and standards of behavior. It also upset the traditional internal and external hierarchies of tribal power. The dominant tribal elites and smuggling cartels were rivaled by once-peripheral tribes and young adventurous actors. Taking advantage of the disorientation of the security services and disorganization of the border economy, the new actors expanded trading to previously prohibited goods such as alcohol and drugs. The introduction of violent extremists into the mix further muddles the black market landscape and makes it crucial to distinguish between innocuous informal networks of cross-border traders and entrepreneurs of organized crime and violence. Unfortunately, Tunisian authorities and the media increasingly tend to lump all kinds of illicit trafficking together as endangering the state’s security. This tendency to criminalize the shadow economy alienates the local populations and the economic actors the government needs to help manage the border. It also aggravates the social crisis brewing in the south.

The rash of terrorist attacks in Tunisia and the Islamic State’s determined push into the country’s southern territory empowers the government’s security-first approach in the border areas. The March 2016 attack in Ben Guerdane increased border militarization to deter terrorism and stem the mushrooming smuggling trade. The government accelerated the building of a 125-mile antiterror barrier along its border with Libya. The barrier, which Tunisia calls a “system of obstacles,” is made of sand banks and water-filled trenches to prevent vehicles and people carrying contraband from crossing the border. To keep militants from entering Tunisia through Libya, the wall will be equipped with an electronic sensor system and fortified by observation towers and drones.³¹

This militarization of the border, however, is not likely to be very effective until the government becomes serious about tackling the root causes of insecurity in the south. The building of a wall will neither stop terrorism nor stem the flow of smuggling contraband into the country. Indeed, recent history suggests that closing off the southeastern border only encouraged the smuggling business. In the 1980s, Ben Guerdane became a major smuggling hub precisely when the border with Libya was closed. Border militarization will affect only the most vulnerable people who are dependent on trade in contraband and who lack the means and networks to circumvent border checks. The most powerful and well-resourced smuggling rings use the main roads and benefit from the connivance of Tunisian border patrol agents and other security officials.³²

Conventional wisdom in Tunisia blames Libya for the country’s security woes. Many Tunisian officials believe the threats are primarily external and hence require a primarily security-based response.³³ This approach prioritizes reinforcing border surveillance and developing the capacities of the intelligence agencies and security services to better detect and prevent the cross-border movements of militants and traffickers from Libya. The Tunisian authorities’ focus on border reinforcement and increased checks over the Libyan frontier is important, but it risks deflecting attention from the root causes of insecurity. As a result, the socioeconomic problems that fuel political discontent, social unrest, and violent extremism have so far received only lip service from the state.

The socioeconomic problems that fuel political discontent, social unrest, and violent extremism have so far received only lip service from the state.

The traditional approach to counterterrorism has become a fixture of Tunisia’s policy toward its southeastern periphery. In 2014, Essebsi successfully ran for president as the candidate most capable of restoring stability and security to Tunisia. For many in the south who rejected his candidacy, Essebsi’s tenure as president is equated with punitiveness and territorial stigmatization. Essebsi’s denigration of the south—he called his opponent, a southerner named Moncef Marzouki, “the candidate of jihadists” during the 2014 presidential election—confirms the suspicion of many that the political elite is deliberately allowing their regions to rot.³⁴ Essebsi had already courted controversy in September 2011 when he spoke of the civilized regions of the littoral, implying that those of the south were uncivilized.

The result is that Essebsi’s promises of tackling lawlessness along the borders have collided with the harsh reality of communities whose livelihoods depend on the free movement of people and goods. The transborder dimension of social and tribal relations between Tunisia’s southeast and Libya’s west makes any disruptions to cross-border trade an explosive affair. The communities in Tunisia’s southeast have solid family, economic, and cultural ties with western Libya. It should not be surprising that blocking those interactions often leads to protests and rioting. Most southerners believe that the political system is controlled by the northeastern elite whose aim is to perpetuate their structural marginalization and exclusion. Instead of addressing the conditions of uneven regional development, the government is seen as impeding the only source of revenue available to border communities. The violence is therefore less about opposing state control of its frontiers and more about the lack of a viable alternative to illicit trade.

The successive postrevolutionary governments have failed to make even the slightest dent in the southeast’s woeful lack of basic infrastructure services. With the exception of the island of Djerba, a tourist haven located at the southern end of the Gulf of Gabès, much of the southeast is beleaguered by low levels of development. For example, the governorate of Tataouine, which has become a flashpoint for protests against marginalization, has one of the highest numbers of unemployed graduates in the country (58 percent).³⁵ Despite the vastness of its territory (25 percent of Tunisia) and its oil fields, which account for 40 percent of Tunisian production, the region is held back by poor physical assets such as roads, hospitals, and schools. This deficit stifles economic activity and social services delivery even in areas that have experienced significant industrialization. In the governorate of Gabès, which lies along the southeastern coast and boasts one of the largest industrial zones in Tunisia, the rate of unemployment and illiteracy is much higher than the national average. Worse, in a region choked by industrial pollution and unsafe working conditions, the lack of access to hospitals and healthcare speaks volumes about the degree of marginalization experienced by local communities.³⁶ “Al-sha’b yureed al-bii’a-esselima” (the people want a clean environment), has become a common refrain during protests over pollution by the phosphate industry.³⁷ Locals complain about rising infertility, frequent miscarriages, and high rates of cancer and respiratory and cardiovascular disease.³⁸ They also blame the phosphate mines and refineries for depleting local water sources, damaging seaside palm oases, and harming the livelihoods of farmers.³⁹ 

To the dismay of the poorest regions, the successive postrevolutionary governments proved incapable of correcting these deficiencies.⁴⁰ The Islamists, in particular, who suffered repression under the old authoritarian regime, were expected to break with the policies that favored the littoral. In its two-year stint in power, Ennahda increased the public funds destined for the poorest regions by 30 percent. But extensive delays with the infrastructure projects—due to both structural and political causes—derailed the government’s plans. The result is that the amounts spent were less than their prerevolutionary levels.⁴¹

The successive postrevolutionary governments have failed to make even the slightest dent in the southeast’s woeful lack of basic infrastructure services.

Conflicts between the central government, local representatives, and governorate authorities also slowed the pace of investments and capital expenditures. At the central level, a lack o