Representation and Management of Tunisia’s Food Crisis: The Interplay Between Domestic and International Factors

The debate on the politics of food and regime stability is essentially split into two antagonistic perspectives. Those who claim that food is a regime stabilizer, as many autocrats have relied on food to secure their internal consensus; and those who explain that the need for food tends to produce instable social conditions, eventually leading to political unrest and regime transition. By focusing on the recent 2022 Tunisian food crisis, this article departs from unilateral understandings of the interaction between the politics of food and regime stability. It does so by combining insights from comparative politics and international relations, and drawing on various waves of interviews with experts, journalists, academics, NGOs actors, and international organizations officials that have been conducted both in Tunisia and online over the last year. This leads to two main contributions. First is a representation of the various and multiple accounts that domestic and international actors have given of the Tunisian food crisis. By exploring two key dimensions – that is, the geographical level of the crisis (either domestic or international) and its causes (either contingent or structural), the article maps the intellectual debate. Second is an account of how Kais Saied’s authoritarian rule has used the food crisis to delay key financial decisions and to depoliticize the mounting of food prices, consolidating a new power bloc based on the state apparatuses, such as the bureaucracy, the Ministry of Interior and the army, and capable of passively co-opting the organized labour movement, anti-Political Islam leftists, and the poor. Saied has indeed adopted a wait-and-see strategy, aimed at accommodating internal demand by constructing a sovereigntist, anti-Western rhetoric, and at the same time aimed at yielding room to international institutions’ (as the FAO and IMF) pressure on financial matters. Although the article focuses on Tunisia, it aims at developing insights that could travel to many other countries of the Middle Eastern region, which remains deeply affected by cyclical food crises, and the Global South more in general.