Surviving Democracy: Power-Sharing and the Politics of Police Reform in Tunisia

Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Speaker: Onur Kara, PhD student in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Discussant: Dr. Ferdinand Eibl from the Department of Political Economy, King's College London. 

Tunisian parliament remains suspended following a presidential declaration in July 2021, and the fate of its democratic transition remains more uncertain than ever. A striking aspect of this crisis has been the return of authoritarian coercive measures: following a decade of reform efforts and international assistance, Tunisian security forces once again made the headlines for repressing social movements and their perceived impunity. The Tunisian experience is illustrative of similar cases worldwide as police reforms following authoritarian rule often remain insufficient, fail outright, or collapse after a period of seeming success.

Why are some security forces so successful in avoiding democratic reform? Based on in-country fieldwork and document analysis, this discussion will point toward the importance of elite pacts as opposed to dominant explanations such as threat perception or the failure of foreign-funded reform projects. In particular, Onur argues that the power-sharing agreements which marked the Tunisian transition since its beginning have reduced reform capacity of successive governments, caused further instability within the security bureaucracy, and allowed former regime officials to integrate themselves into the post-authoritarian order.