The Force of Obedience

The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia - by Béatrice Hibou

Published 2011 by Polity Press pp 380 ISBN 978-0-7456-5180-4

This highly original book is a detailed analysis of the everyday mechanisms of domination and repression that enable political regimes to function and to secure the submission of their populations. It takes modern-day Tunisia as its object of analysis but this book is not just a case study of a particular country: it is a brilliant analysis of the politics and economic life under which we all live today.

Hibou combines two intellectual traditions, drawing on Weber and Foucault, in order to scrutinize the modes of government and the apparatuses that regulate the concrete exercise of power. Starting from an analysis of the Tunisian economy, she lays bare the mechanisms of subjection. She explains how the debt economy, the tax system, the management of privatizations, and the organization of social solidarity and welfare all create processes of mutual dependence between the governing and the governed. As a result, repression and police control appear to play a less central role than the accommodations, calculated stratagems, day-by-day compromises, and reciprocal interdependencies which, together, secure the daily legitimizing of the regime.

Above and beyond the case of Tunisia, this brilliant work unveils the processes through which authoritarian regimes are perpetuated. It sheds light on the mechanisms of domination at work in apparently democratic states too.

Béatrice Hibou is Senior Research Fellow at CNRS, Paris