The Islamic State project is finding some consensus in countries where political deadlock reduces our social lives to a primordial level. Social and economic frustration stays at an all-time high level, even in a country like Tunisia.
We must say that this scenario is both similar to and different from those in other countries of the region where authoritarian regimes fell in 2011.
The choice is so easily reduced to a zero sum calculation between security and democracy: the ‘apparatus’ having a considerable interest in making people feel sufficiently insecure to renounce the democratic process in exchange for security. An interview.
An Islamic bloc is indeed emerging, but more than an occulted project of Islamization, it is a process of activation of the material and moral resources of a conservative middle class summarily excluded until the 2011 revolution.
Mutual fear may prevail and the use of force be felt necessary. Exactly this plays into the hands of the parasites inside the apparatus who are busy transforming themselves into a self-governing body within the state (especially the Interior Ministry) that can exploit, if not directly manipulate,
