Members’ area

Debora Del Piano

GEM-DIAMOND doctoral fellow

ESR 4 – EU grand strategy in a competitive system: European liberal democracy in a multipolar world

Host Institutions

Democracy Reimagined: A Reflection from/for both shores of the Mediterranean

Supervisors

  • Raffaele Marchetti
  • Anders Wivel

Research abstract

This dissertation explores EUropean interventions in Tunisia after the 2011 uprisings through a decolonial lens. It traces, in particular, how liberal governance has been produced, promoted and contested, asking what recent contestations reveal about its internal contradictions and its entanglements with imperialist practices of domination, both material and discursive. It does so by moving across both macro and micro dimensions of analysis. On the one hand, it examines the broader international institutional and epistemic frameworks through which the Tunisian ‘transition to democracy’ unfolded, with an eye on the ways it was steered and constrained along specific trajectories, particularly by the EU. On the other, it traces the more subtle and less visible processes through which the same frameworks came to inhabit a more local and even personal level, in the choices, hopes and beliefs of domestic actors themselves. To grasp this trajectory requires holding together these different scales: the structural and the personal, the geopolitical and the everyday, the architectures of power and the lived practices through which they are enacted and contested.

Research Question(s)

How did the post-2011 Tunisian 'transition' become shaped by a particular model of liberal governance, and what does its trajectory reveal about the imperial continuities embedded within contemporary EU interventions?
How did the European Union define and institutionalize the meaning of 'transition' after 2011? And how did it shape its possibilities and limits?
What does the Tunisian experience reveal about the current 'crisis of liberal democracy'?

Social Relevance of your Research

The social relevance of this research lies in its contribution to contemporary debates on liberal democracy in a moment of its crisis, while shifting the analytical focus beyond the institutional dimensions that have traditionally dominated these discussions. Rather than approaching democracy primarily through elections, constitutional arrangements or processes of institutional consolidation, this research draws attention to the social and material conditions through which democratic experiences are lived and contested. By centering questions of social reproduction — including employment, livelihoods, access to resources, economic security and everyday forms of dignity — the research highlights issues that are often treated as secondary within dominant accounts and understanding of democracy and 'democratization', yet remain central to how people experience political systems and imagine alternatives. Through the Tunisian case, it demonstrates that struggles over democracy are inseparable from struggles over economic organization, inequality and historical relations of dependency.
Debora Del Piano (LUISS/UCPH) is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Doctoral Fellow at LUISS University and University of Copenhagen. Her work explores democracy and ‘democratization’ in the MENA/SWANA region (with a current focus on Tunisia and EU 'democracy support'), as well as their epistemological foundations, drawing together theoretical and methodological insights from International Relations, Democratic Theory, European studies and Middle East and North Africa Studies.
Del Piano, D., Forthcoming. "The Western World Cannot Be the Sole Arbiter of What Democracy Is or How It Is Modelled and Engendered". Interview with Larbi Sadiki in Coman, R. and Ponjaert, F. Dissensus over Liberal Democracy: Key Conversations with Leading Voices. Springer.
Del Piano, D. & Somdeep, S. Forthcoming. (De)coloniality and pedagogy. In Coman, R., Paternotte, D. and Ponjaert, F. (eds) Impact and Social Sciences: A Conceptual Index.