Inclusion and social contracts in Tunisia: Navigating the complexities of political and socio-economic transformation

Societal demands for more politically and socio-economically inclusive social contracts are growing globally. In Tunisia, despite a celebrated highly inclusive political transition process, the country was back on what many cite as an authoritarian path one decade on, with strong societal support. As analysts have observed, the expected and hoped-for inclusive socio-economic outcomes did not sufficiently or expediently follow, and societal buy-in into the transition process unraveled. While such democratic reversals are not uncommon, and transitions are notoriously neither linear nor smooth, the Tunisia case offers important, nuanced insights into questions of how inclusion functions as a driver of change in social contracts, what types of inclusion matter to people at different stages of a transition process, and the challenges and potential entry points for achieving more sustained and transformative outcomes. Drawing from interdisciplinary literatures to tackle this complex, multi-dimensional topic, an analytical framing is developed to assess inclusion in processes (primarily political and civil) and outcomes (political, civil, and especially socio-economic) driving change in Tunisia’s social contract, and the nature and sustainability of change. Findings reveal how and why inclusive outcomes (and related, desired large-scale shifts in social contracts) necessitate structural, transformative measures and addressing of core grievances – in this case, grievances that drove Tunisia’s revolution.

These findings offer nuanced evidence and theoretical insights, demonstrating how societal expectations of inclusion encompass both process-oriented participation and outcome-oriented deliverables, with the latter influencing social contract stability and legitimacy. At a time when traditional assumptions about social contracts are being challenged globally, understanding how societies evaluate and potentially reshape these fundamental state-society bargains has profound implications for scholars of development, democratization, social change and peace, particularly regarding the relationship between political transformation and socio-economic inclusion.