Development by popular protection and Tunisia: the case of Tataouine

ABSTRACT

Recently a debate re-emerged between Adel Samara and Samir Amin on the state role in delinking – subjecting a social formation’s relationships to the world-system to a domestic, popular law of value. I suggest the arguments turns on the agent helming development. Amin’s agent is slightly more ambiguous than Samara’s, reflecting de-linking is modelled on postrevolutionary planning in Maoist China, with an explicit state role, whereas Samara, theorizing development under military occupation, spurned the state. The article assesses the arguments against contemporary Tunisia. It shows how flourishing Tunisian struggles track Samara’s development by popular protection (DBPP). The subject of history is masses engaged in struggle with state-mediated accumulation. It focuses on Tataouine’s 2017–2018 ElKamour protests. It argues Amin (1) articulates an antisystemic ideology, crucial amidst ideological disarray; (2) offers ideas for changes in financial architecture – holding programmes amidst capitalist advance; (3) build up the delinking framework which DBPP expands.

KEYWORDS:

• Samir Amin
• Adel Samara
• state theory
• world-systems theory
• political ecology
• development

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Divya Sharma, Corinna Mullin, Phil McMichael, and three incredibly careful anonymous reviewers for comments, and to the American Institute for Maghreb Studies for supporting research for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I develop Samara’s meaning later in the discussion.

2. I follow (Arrighi & Drangel, 1986) in their characterization of the semi-periphery and include Tunisia in this category. This requires a slight modification of the formal conceptual frame of Amin, who generally did not use semi-periphery and assimilated the semi-periphery to the periphery. In this sense the combination of Amin and Arrighi does not trouble the former’s conceptual framework, it rather adds a certain level of precision. I note also that I use ‘Tunisia’s periphery’ to refer to the regions of the country far from the more developed coastal metropolitan governorates.

3. Amin also considered technology socially-neutral, in that he did not see that certain technological forms in their very engineering already reflected a given set of social interests (Amin, 1983; cf. Noble, 1978).

4. The aid-dependent Gaza Strip, incapable of feeding itself, lacks the physical prerequisites for such a strategy.

5. Bearing in mind that bourgeois democracy is by and large the harvest of working-class struggle.

6. (For reflections on the difficulties, obstacles, and lock-ins of this process in the Venezuela context, see Mantovani, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by American Institute for Maghrib Studies.

Notes on contributors

Max Ajl

Max Ajl is a Development Sociologist at Cornell University. He is based in Tunis, where he is researching state agricultural development policy during the era of state-directed development. His fields of expertise include comparative international development, world-systems theory, Middle East political economy, and rural political economy. He has published in Journal of Peasant Studies and Review of African Political Economy, and edits Jadaliyya's Palestine and Political Economy pages.