Professional Guardians? Transnational politics and practice of security and reform in (post)revolutionary Tunisia

This thesis examines the politics and practices of international security interventions aimed at security sector governance and reform in Tunisia. It conceptualises these interventions as processes of security professionalisation and analyses them through an International Political Sociology perspective that foregrounds the transnational, relational and practice-based nature of contemporary security governance. Post-2011 Tunisia is treated as an extended case, with particular attention to Western-led Security Assistance (SA) and Security Sector Reform (SSR). Rather than assessing whether reform succeeds, the research asks how professionalisation is enacted, how it unfolds diachronically, and what the Tunisian case reveals about contemporary security assemblages. The analysis shows that SA/SSR operates through the articulation of material provision, knowledge production and relational networking, generating power effects across local and international scales. Four interrelated effects are identified. First, professionalisation contributes to depoliticisation by framing security as a technical and managerial domain centred on training and capacity-building, even though normative and operational objectives remain deeply intertwined. Second, it reinforces transnational hierarchies and relations of extraverted dependency, embedding the Tunisian security sector within flexible assemblages of donors, instruments and funding channels aligned with global security priorities. Third, the thesis challenges the assumption that violence results from insufficient reform, showing instead how contemporary rationalities of integration and preemption contribute to harm, particularly through the intensified surveillance and control of marginalised populations and spaces. Finally, professionalisation generates processes of subjectification: training, standards and reform narratives promote a paternalistic and martial ethos that legitimises a strong security guardianship grounded in expertise, efficiency and protection. These dynamics reproduce long-standing patterns of external intervention while remaining flexible and adaptive. Contemporary security assemblages operate through experimentation, improvisation and selective appropriation by local actors, creating spaces of friction as well as continuity. Tunisia thus provides a strategic vantage point for understanding how technical governance is intertwined with the coercive management of social conflicts within a broader postcolonial and racialised political economy. Theoretically, the research contributes to IPS and Critical Security Studies by conceptualising security as a contingent set of practices rather than a bounded sector. Methodologically, it adopts a qualitative, interpretivist design combining interviews, extended ethnographic fieldwork and document analysis, organised around three analytical axes: materiality, knowledge and relations. This approach captures how infrastructures, technologies, expertise and networks assemble security governance in practice, and how reform unfolds in tension with the post-2011 politics of dignity (karama). Overall, the thesis shows how contemporary security professionalisation simultaneously reproduces historical hierarchies and generates new sites of struggle within an evolving transnational field of governance.