Regimes of Discontent: Women, Identity Formation, and Claim-Making in Rural Tunisia

Regimes of Discontent: Women, Identity Formation, and Claim-Making in Rural Tunisia

How do gender regimes shape claim-making? My doctoral project examines how rural conflicts over land and livelihoods are reshaping state–society relations from the vantage point of those rarely centered in accounts of Tunisia’s political development: the diverse women who live in historically marginalized regions, rely on precarious land-based labor, sit on the frontlines of the climate emergency, and who are politically and analytically compressed into the largely undifferentiated category of ‘rural women.’ Situated against more than a decade of democratic backsliding, my research interrogates how gendered and class-based inequalities, land-use conflicts, and environmental degradation interact to produce new patterns of governance and contestation. Grounded in immersion-based fieldwork and informed by comparative and interdisciplinary insights that bridge agrarian and gender studies with political science, my project offers a fresh account of rural politics in contemporary Tunisia while generating analytical leverage on unequal development and state–society relations under authoritarianism.