Existing scholarship on the mobilisation of housing documents in low-income neighbourhoods has mostly focused on how residents’ engagement with state bureaucracies signals ‘incremental citizenship’: by collecting property documents, deciphering them and visiting local bureaus, the citizens of marginal urban neighbourhoods have been described as political actors aspiring for more citizenship rights (Das 2011: 330). This approach has broadened our understanding of how state practices are reproduced and even ‘mimicked’ through documentary practices and, more generally, how the state takes shape in marginal urban areas (Das 2011). Drawing on the epistemological role of documents as ‘facets of statecraft’ (Das 2011; Gupta 2012; Hull 2012; Navaro-Yashin 2007), the purpose of this article is to highlight how, in post-revolutionary Tunisia, the handling of property documents does not simply signal a desire for the state (cf. Street 2012), but triggers contrasting affective dispositions towards it. In the neighbourhood of La Petite Sicile in Tunis, as I will show, documentary practices at once reproduced ‘imaginings’ of the dictatorial state as a haunting figure (Sansone and Bonanno 2025), strengthened hopes for transitional justice and elicited ambivalent affectivities for the post-revolutionary state. Building on anthropological scholarship that has focused on the ‘excessive’ role of legal documents as material repositories of state affects and phantasies (Navaro-Yashin 2007; see also Aretxaga 2005), this article contributes to a body of literature concerned with understanding transitional societies through the prism of urban materiality and its affective dimensions (Malmström 2019).
On the one hand, I expand on Yael Navaro-Yashin's consideration that documents are material artefacts with ‘messy and excessive potentialities’ (2007: 95): beyond their mere bureaucratic functions as providers of citizens’ needs, documents are objects of fantasy with psychical and affective value. Building on Navaro-Yashin's (2007) claim that documents elicit ‘state affects’ and help reproduce the state as a ‘real’ affective presence in people's lives, this article focuses on the affective properties of documents and thus makes an intervention in the current debate around the epistemological affordances of urban materiality in transitional societies (Malmström 2019; Pilò and Jaffe 2020). Anthropological scholarship has stressed the social relevance of non-human matter (Appadurai 1986; Bennet and Joyce 2013; Coole and Frost 2010; cf. Miller 2010) to look at urban politics as a ‘socio-material co-production’ (Pilò and Jaffe 2020: 8), whereby politics is mediated through matter such as infrastructure or technology (Harvey and Knox 2015; see also Körling 2020). I extend this proposition by zooming in on property documents as material artefacts through which post-revolutionary affective politics are articulated in the city.
On the other hand, sociopolitical changes in the Middle East and North Africa region have been studied by looking at the role of urban objects in transmitting an affect across spaces and times. In her ethnography on post-revolution Cairo, Maria Frederika Malmström (2019) suggests that mundane objects and spaces in the city are effective heuristic devices for studying sociopolitical change in its sensuous, affective dimensions. Expanding on the question of whether a focus on urban materiality can broaden our understanding of politics in this region (see also Nassar 2023), this article puts forward an approach to legal documentation as a repository of political affectivities in Tunisia's post-revolutionary period. By political affectivities, I understand the ‘various dispositions, feelings, moods, or sensations people experience’ (Parks 2014, para. 5) towards the state through their encounters with legal documents. I argue that attending to the relationship between urban material transformations, documentary practices and political affectivities in La Petite Sicile sheds light on the temporal and affective complexities of social experience at times of change and complicates historiographical accounts of the Tunisian democratic transition.
Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the low-income neighbourhood of La Petite Sicile, Tunis, between 2014 and 2016, the article attends to how local residents attempt to clarify a thorny legal conundrum concerning their housing rights through documentary practices. Specifically, it investigates practices and affective investments related to the production of documentary evidence around eviction orders in the neighbourhood and residents’ entitlements to housing. By looking at the moral and affective dispositions inhabitants have developed towards housing documents before and after the revolution, I describe how this legal conundrum lies within and reproduces a context of perceived uncertainty and opacity, prompting the residents to experience the post-revolutionary state with contrasting affects. I will show how different factors contributed to the case's opacity. First, the complexity of property relations in La Petite Sicile made it difficult to determine who had rightful ownership – whether it was Leonidas, a company based in Liechtenstein responsible for the evictions, or the current inhabitants. Second, some citizens struggled with mastering the conventions of bureaucratic documentation required to contest the eviction threats (cf. Cody 2009). Third, the involvement of the previous authoritarian government in developing La Petite Sicile and executing the evictions was seen as obscure and difficult to interpret. Last, the post-revolutionary period brought uncertainty and a sense of legal ‘disorder’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: vii), leaving residents to navigate a complex and ambiguous legal landscape.
I start with a historical overview of how the eviction case unfolded in La Petite Sicile before and after the fall of the dictatorship (2003–2016). I then look ‘through’ a set of documents and documentary practices and explore how they affectively ‘index the state as a particular kind of entity’ (Hull 2012: 253–260). In so doing, first I describe how documentary practices prompted imaginings of the dictatorial state as a haunting figure; second, I show how, in the post-revolutionary period, the same practices strengthened hopes of the achievement of transitional justice; third, I illustrate how documentary practices reproduced contrasting affective dispositions towards the post-revolutionary state and the state legal apparatus. Finally, I suggest that the different political affectivities catalysed by engagements with property documents in La Petite Sicile invite us to rethink transitional temporality in Tunisia.
La Petite Sicile de Tunis
The handling of property documents in La Petite Sicile is situated in a historical material context of ‘legal disorder’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), which started with the foundation of the neighbourhood in precolonial times and continued through the years of the French protectorate to the present. The neighbourhood lies on what was once a sebkha (marsh) extending from Lac Sud de Tunis to the central Place de L'Horloge. In 1865, the Ottoman bey governing Tunisia granted thirteen hectares of this swamp to a wealthy Italian family named Fasciotti. In exchange, the Fasciotti family reclaimed the area by draining the swamp and filling it with debris.
With the establishment of the French protectorate in 1881, construction sites for public works, industries, mines and agricultural works began to attract a large workforce from Malta and southern Italy, especially Sicily (Russo 2018). At the turn of the twentieth century, Italians outnumbered French colonial settlers in Tunisia (Montalbano 2018), a fact that their descendants still recall with pride.
The family matriarch Carlotta Fasciotti allowed Sicilian migrants to build small houses on the reclaimed swamp in exchange for a reasonable rent (Giudice 2016). This arrangement came with conditions: the houses should not be meant as long-term dwellings in case of a possible sale. They could not have flooring, had to be modest in size and were to be destroyed once the lease expired (Giudice 2003).1 Between 1865 and 1900, hundreds of makeshift one- or two-room houses began covering the area, which soon came to resemble a Sicilian village, hence the appellative of La Petite Sicile (Little Sicily) (Russo 2018). By the time the French occupied Tunisia in 1881, La Petite Sicile was already an established working-class neighbourhood with homes, warehouses and artisans’ workshops. The men in the area mostly worked as artisans and in construction (Giudice 2016). Several of my interlocutors described it as a genuinely communitarian place, where Italians and Tunisians lived together peacefully, sharing intimate spaces, food and working environments.
With Tunisian independence in 1956, Prime Minister Habib Bourguiba nationalised agricultural lands and limited foreign workers’ rights as part of a gradual process of ‘Tunisification’ (Giudice 2016). Marinette Pendola (2004) describes how, through a series of legislations, many Italians were excluded from the labour market: for instance the provision of March 1958 replaced foreign taxi drivers with Tunisians in the so-called ‘emergency’ areas along the border with Algeria, where the war of liberation was taking place. Successive laws imposed on employers the obligation to hire only Tunisian apprentices and for commercial activities to be carried out only by Tunisian citizens. In 1964, lands belonging to foreigners were nationalised, affecting a large number of Italians. These changes made it hard for Italians to live and work in the country and in La Petite Sicile specifically. Furthermore, the Italian landowner Carlo Fasciotti, son of Carlotta Fasciotti, had to associate his inherited property in La Petite Sicile with a company named CEMAT based in Casablanca, Morocco. Meanwhile, the Italian exodus began. Many Italian families left their houses in the area to emigrate to Italy or France (Pendola 2004). Their houses were bought, rented or occupied by new Tunisian residents.
Some confusion exists around the legal terms of these initial purchases, especially those relating to Fasciotti's original plot. Some Tunisians acquired their houses from people who were not legal owners and were hence unable to register them with the land registry. Most of these new residents purchased, rented or occupied houses, ignoring that the land they stood on was still Fasciotti's property. After Carlo Fasciotti's death, CEMAT's assets were transferred to a company based in Liechtenstein called Leonidas, which became the legal owner of his remaining property. The new Tunisian residents of La Petite Sicile thus continued to live in the neighbourhood under legally unclear terms.
At the start of 2000, La Petite Sicile gained visibility as it bordered land that was marked for redevelopment. Aligned with increasing efforts to redevelop North African cities through a ‘megaproject approach’ (Elsheshtawy 2009), in 2007, the Ben Ali government launched The Mediterranean Gate, a luxury development on the southern shore of Lac Sud de Tunis financed by a subsidiary of Dubai Holding, which was founded by the government of Dubai. This megaproject aimed at establishing a functioning marina at this historical nodal site of maritime shipping through a luxury real-estate development on 830 hectares of coastline, which would include hotels, residential complexes, skyscrapers and shopping malls. The Mediterranean Gate was one of the several megaprojects initiated by the Ben Ali administration (Belili 2014). The project stalled in 2008, but post-revolutionary governments tried to revive it. The justification was that such megaprojects could help attain democratisation and the promises of the revolution by healing the economic crisis of the country and providing work for youth (see Barthel and Vignal 2014).
Even before its approval in 2007, The Mediterranean Gate had attracted local and international investors. In anticipation of this massive development, the Ben Ali government decided to redevelop La Petite Sicile, which was publicly described as an infamous and rundown neighbourhood in the city centre. Announced in 2002, the urban rehabilitation project would be carried out on eighty hectares of land and include a vast parking lot, two gigantic twin towers and a multimodal transport station, among other amenities. Such was the urban promise that, in the same year, Leonidas reclaimed several properties in the area, prompting a series of evictions and taking residents by surprise.
Residents who had ‘irregularly’ and unknowingly occupied land parcels owned by Leonidas began to be identified by municipal authorities and Leonidas representatives. They recounted how, between 2003 and 2005, several families received letters requesting their personal details, ostensibly for the carrying out of public works in the neighbourhood. However, it later became evident that these were needed for eviction: those who replied to the letters with their details eventually received eviction orders. The fact that the residents had never even heard of the existence of Leonidas made them suspicious. Some of those evicted or under threat of eviction started collecting documents which could testify to their right to dwell there, proving either their original property transactions, their continuous residence in the houses, or the legal unfoundedness of Leonidas’ claim.
Locating the Phantom Company
We lived in La Petite Sicile for forty-two years. My father bought the house and two shops, just over 115 square metres altogether. I was four years old. After forty-three years, my father was kicked out by the police in 2005. They told him that he had to vacate the premises within a maximum of ten days. He wasn't there at the time; my mother was in the hospital because she had some health issues, so the police came to the house. The neighbours called him to tell him they were kicking him out. He came back, protesting, but they beat him up and evicted him. Then he went to stay with his brother, where he's still living now at the age of eighty-five years. After four years, my mother had a heart attack and died. I still cry to this day. My mother died of grief over having lost her home.
Aside from causing the death of his mother, Nassime claimed that the eviction severely wounded his family's pride. He maintained that his family descended from ‘Jeddu Hassan, the forty-second descendant of the Prophet Mohammad’; furthermore, his father had been an influential figure in the history of Tunisian independence and had fought alongside Tunisia's first prime minister, Habib Bourguiba. ‘And this is how the state repays a family that has done well for its country’, he commented bitterly. These sentiments motivated his continuous search for documents that could bring clarity to a situation he deemed unjust. In fact, whereas other evicted inhabitants returned and ‘illegally’ reoccupied their homes after the revolution, Nassime decided to do things properly. Confident in his claim to the ownership of the house, he had collected several documents that could bring clarity to the eviction case and prove his dwelling rights by shedding light on the crookedness of Leonidas, responsible for bringing misery to his family. For this reason, he had collaborated closely with Hamdi, the owner of a refrigeration equipment company based in La Petite Sicile. Like Nassime's father, Hamdi had come to occupy his current workplace after its Italian owner had fled the country. In 2005, while expropriations were underway, Hamdi found himself in a legal battle with Leonidas over the lot he was occupying. Claiming it as its property, Leonidas had urged him to leave. Hamdi, like Nassime, started to meticulously collect documents that could prove that he occupied the property legally and that Leonidas had no legal claim on the lot. The two had worked together: while Hamdi was more active in tracing documentation by physically going to offices, drafting official letters of complaint and contacting other neighbours facing similar issues, Nassime raised public awareness by speaking to journalists and managing a Facebook page named ‘La Petite Sicile de Tunis’. This page was regularly updated with all kinds of documentation, from research papers on the history of the neighbourhood, to lists that Nassime had compiled with the details of the people still risking eviction, to property certificates of evicted residents. Another set of documents that seemed particularly important to Nassime and Hamdi comprised research materials on Leonidas.
While narrating the eviction, Nassime handed me a printout of an internet search describing Leonidas as a chocolate factory located in Belgium. No other information on Leonidas could be found online, he explained, and this made him even more suspicious. Rather than thinking that there might be two companies called Leonidas, one of them a chocolate factory, he was inclined to believe that the chocolate factory was a cover for the real, untraceable one. This, to him, was the first tangible proof of the company's deviousness. It seemed that proving Leonidas’ legal unfoundedness was of greater importance to him than actually locating it.
Why did the transfer of ownership happen and precisely by whose hands? Who owned the company after Carlo Fasciotti had relocated to Morocco? If CEMAT was the true legal owner of our homes, why did it not announce the change of ownership to us, as it should have done legally?
Foreigners need authorisation to buy property in Tunisia. At a point in time, there was a copy of the authorisation that Fasciotti had obtained from the municipality. Hamdi went to the municipality to ask for the document attesting to Fasciotti's original ownership because this goes against what Leonidas wants to do… yet there's no copy of it anymore.
Nassime said that Fasciotti's property authorisation document was made to disappear to cover any trace of legal ownership prior to that of Leonidas. In his view, the absence of this document was to prevent further investigation into the possibility that Leonidas’ ownership rights were unfounded, and perhaps not even related to the Fasciottis’ initial parcel. Nassime believed that the local authorities had purposely destroyed this document to favour Leonidas.
How is it possible that an offshore company, in a tax haven, owns one hectare of land in the city centre of Tunis? We want evidence! In front of the entire world. Leonidas is there, but does it exist? Did it ever exist?
Following this difficult research, Nassime and Hamdi concluded that Leonidas ‘existed on paper because it had a commercial title (titre du commerce) but not on the ground (sur le terrain) because the company registration certificate in Tunisia was missing’. To Hamdi and Nassime, the obstacles to locating Leonidas reflected its crookedness: the link between its invisibility and its corruption was self-evident, as was the involvement of the previous dictatorial government.
State Phantoms
Anthropological research on evictions has often framed the absence of legal documentation through the lens of ‘vulnerability’, highlighting how the lack of formal documents leaves residents defenceless against forced evictions, as they are unable to legally contest their removal (Roy 2003). James Holston (2009) underscores how informal settlers in Brazil's favelas, despite decades of occupation, are displaced when the state reclaims land for development, largely due to their lack of formal property titles. Other researchers have examined how residents navigate this absence of documentation to secure certain rights: Abdou Maliq Simone (2004) explores how residents of informal settlements in African cities create informal agreements, social networks, and alternative forms of documentation to build some degree of legitimacy and security in urban contexts. Leslie Bank's research on urban spaces and housing politics in South Africa (2011) illustrates how activists in the anti-apartheid and post-apartheid movements employ documents – such as photographs, petitions, and testimonies – to challenge eviction orders and prove long-term residence in disputed area. While this body of work rightly highlights that documents are not simply administrative tools but deeply political artefacts capable of legitimising or contesting eviction, my approach departs from a governance-resistance dichotomy to examine the absence of documents from a different perspective. Building on Teresa Brennan's theory on the transmission of affect, Navaro-Yashin (2007, 2012) argues that legal documents, as material artefacts, exert stately affects. Proposing to study documents beyond their intrinsic meaning or form (cf. Riles 2006) and as providers of citizens’ needs, Navaro-Yashin approaches documents as material objects that elicit an affective charge. Drawing on Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup and Tim Flohr Sørensen's claim that what is materially absent has agentive value in producing bodily, sensuous or affective responses (2010), I propose that the absence of documents can similarly generate stately affects. This was particularly so in the context of political change in post-revolutionary Tunisia, where several popular narratives emerged to make sense of the changing political environment. Rather than debunking these narratives, I hold them as revealing people's conflicting affective dispositions towards the state (cf. Fassin 2011) and central to residents’ state imaginings in the post-revolutionary period (Sansone and Bonanno 2025). Specifically, in La Petite Sicile, missing documents augmented emic narratives and imaginings of an omnipresent dictatorial state acting in the guise of a phantom company.
Nassime and Hamdi's attempts at locating legal documentation and the moral political considerations these unsuccessful attempts brought to the fore prompted them to etch out a state narrative outlining a particular ‘interiority of the state’ (Aretxaga 2005: 228). Their narrative strove to bring light to the opacity surrounding the previous eviction case and held Ben Ali's kin accountable on the basis that his family members were known for their dodgy and opaque affairs. For example, Nassime and Hamdi believed that the family of Ben Ali's wife, Leïla Trabelsi, owned Leonidas, specifically Leïla's eldest brother, who was in Canada at the time. According to Nassime and Hamdi, the Trabelsi family was synonymous with unrestrained corruption in the country, with Leïla being known for having installed her family members in positions of power after ascending from a low social position to the powerful role of first lady. Leïla's eldest brother, Belhassen, was a controversial character in Tunisia's popular political imagination, if not the most scandalous member of the governing family. Having extensive holdings in the country, he was rumoured to have been involved in numerous corrupt schemes, including property expropriation, embezzlement and extortion of bribes. Following the revolution in 2011, he fled to Italy by yacht and then to Canada, and was convicted of corruption in absentia and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 2015, at the time of my fieldwork in Tunis, he had been denied refugee status in Canada and mysteriously vanished. Already implicated in national corruption scandals, it seemed unsurprising that Belhassen Trabelsi also achieved the status of moral culprit in La Petite Sicile. Indeed, when state illegibility fosters the production of gossip, it ‘quickly absorbs contrary evidence into a conspiracy of even grander proportions’ (Nuijten and Anders 2007: 19).
My intention here is not to prove or disprove residents’ suppositions, which might have elements of truth as well as exaggeration. Leonidas and the state authorities involved in the eviction case may well have acted on deceitful grounds. Echoing Begoña Aretxaga, I am not concerned with the truth value of residents’ claims but with the ‘truth effects of the stories which themselves constitute an immediate, affective, charged political reality’ (2005: 228). In the process of producing evidence on Leonidas’ misdoings through documentary searches, Nassime and Hamdi made the previous dictatorial state real and reproduced it as morally devious and implicated in the eviction case. The gaps in their reconstruction narrative – the missing or undecipherable information – elicited the production of a moralised mystery around Leonidas and the state figures involved with it. The narrativisation of absent documents held the state to be morally corrupt, phantomic and omnipresent.
Leonidas’ illegible actions and its elusive presence incited inhabitants’ negative moral positioning vis-à-vis the state. In that circumstance, the supposition of what was morally wrong was accrued through negative evidence or the absence of knowledge that residents did not and could not possess. Unable to find evidence on Leonidas or trace its representatives, Nassime and Hamdi could make sense of the situation through amplified moral evaluations of the phantom company and the state's involvement in the eviction affair. While I do not mean that the state and Leonidas were excessively moralised or seek to make a value judgement about my informants’ suppositions, I argue that their hypotheses acquired more volume in a context where the eviction case's liability was not discernible.
Documentary practices also reproduced the state (in the guise of Leonidas) as a phantomic element. Following the inability to locate Leonidas, the inhabitants of La Petite Sicile started referring to it as la société fantome (the phantom company), alluding to its phantasmatic quality. The presence of Leonidas in the neighbourhood was mostly felt through the rumours circulating among residents that somebody had come on the company's behalf to collect information on them. Residents claimed to have never had direct contact with the company, even though people like Nassime and Hamdi wished to. Given these rumoured undercover visits, inhabitants were suspicious of unidentified people coming to the neighbourhood to ask questions. My own first entry into the neighbourhood as a researcher raised concerns that Leonidas had sent me to spy on the residents. Before I could start my fieldwork, different residents called me in for formal interviews where they asked me about my background, plans and intentions. Mainly, they tested my sincerity. In this respect, residents perceived Leonidas and its associated state figures as invisible but, at the same time, omnipresent, capable as they were of appearing in an unknown guise. The inability to retrieve documentation on Leonidas strengthened this supposition and the collective feeling of threat.
By producing interpersonal suspicion and collective fear, the dictatorial state, in the guise of Leonidas, continued to hold inhabitants captive even years after the dictatorship itself was toppled.
New Legal Hopes
Approaching legal documents, not only as tools of governmentality or citizenship through which claims are made, but as material objects that are handled, searched for, aspired to or despised, enables us to foreground the mutable meanings and affective resonance they hold as they are transacted in specific contexts of social relations across time (Navaro-Yashin 2007). As state material culture, documents have genealogies with shifting affective valence (cf. Downes et al. 2018). In La Petite Sicile, property documents retained memory of the contexts where they originally circulated. When the eviction case erupted in the early 2000s, they arbitrarily enabled some residents to reclaim their homes while leaving others hopeless. Residents in La Petite Sicile kept stressing the arbitrariness of the whole event: that some had been successful in retaining their homes, while in possession of the same documents, seemed to have been only a matter of fortune, right friendships or bribing. Despite the regime change in 2011, the same documents continued to be perceived by some as having arbitrary legal value. But for others, they acquired new scope and elicited hope of legal resolution at a time of transitional justice (al-ʿAdāla al-Intiqāliyya). For instance, Hamdi noted how his folder of documents gained a new purpose as he could use it to appeal to the Instance Vérité & Dignité (IVD, Truth and Dignity Commission). Independently instituted by law in 2013 and launched in 2014 by the then-president, Moncef Marzouki, the IVD was meant to facilitate the transition to the rule of law by revealing truths about human-rights violations committed by the past regime and determining the state's responsibility for these violations. Along with the Ministry of Human Rights and Transitional Justice and the Transitional Justice Law, the IVD was mobilised by the post-revolutionary state to deliver reparation, truth, justice and state accountability, and to promote the transition from dictatorship to democracy (Han 2021; Lamont and Pannwitz 2016).
Looking at people's engagements with claim forms during the South African land restitution process, Christiaan Beyers notes how transitional justice refigures the state by ‘interpelling victims of past wrongs as moral subjects of the (new) state’ (2017: 67). In Beyers’ analysis, claim forms were held as privileged sites for observing the relations between the transitional state and the moral reasoning of newly constituted citizens. Something similar could be observed in La Petite Sicile by looking at the new valence that housing documents acquired in the post-revolution period. In 2017, after years of unsuccessful attempts to bring the eviction case to the attention of the municipal authorities, transitional justice measures proved useful to Hamdi, who handed over his carefully assembled folder to the IVD. Just after he did so, I met him in his office. He looked truly joyful and hopeful that the situation could now be resolved. His suspicions about Leonidas being the corrupt hand of the previous dictatorial government could now be proven within the framework of this tribunal. In fact, in line with the IVD's purposes, the eviction case could potentially be turned into a state violation case and resolved under the new political ethic guiding the country, which values transparency and is set fiercely against corruption. Hamdi's renewed hope in his folder of documents reiterated the temporal assumptions of transitional justice, whereby events have ‘an overall beginning, middle and end, in which injustice and violence are replaced with law and ultimately peace and justice’ (Turner 2017: 70).
These assumptions, which upheld transparency and legal properness as higher moral values, also became central to the ways inhabitants started to reason around the legal quandary in La Petite Sicile. For example, I was struck by an animated conversation between Hamdi and a local architect who had been involved in the eviction case in the early 2000s. As the two exchanged views on local housing problems, they agreed that, given the intricacies of the case, a political decision should be taken regarding La Petite Sicile. The architect claimed that the government could resolve the issue by expropriating and nationalising properties owned by foreign companies such as Leonidas. But Hamdi fiercely disagreed. Highlighting the value of legal transparency, he argued that what mattered the most was to have legal evidence of foreigners’ land purchases, proving that owners acted according to the law. While the attribution of (il)legality was surely a complicated matter in La Petite Sicile, at the time of my fieldwork, any social behaviour in the area was judged through such binaries. Nassime expressed a similar enamourment with the rule of law when commenting on his decision not to return to his family home after the revolution: ‘Many residents in La Petite Sicile have reoccupied the homes they were evicted from after the fall of the dictatorship, and even occupied adjacent lots’, he said in a derogatory tone. ‘But I want to return only after my situation is legally resolved.’
Jean and John Comaroff (2006) outline what they call the paradox of the postcolonial world, where postcolonial states are often characterised by disorder, informality, and lawlessness, yet at the same time exhibit an obsession with the rule of law: in contexts of repeated constitutional writing, appeals to rights, reinvented procedural democracies and litigated inequity claims, faith in constitutions becomes common because it marks a break with the past and its torments. Niels Blokker also notes how transitional sociopolitical contexts tend to be marked by a ‘constitutional patriotism’ or a new democratic political culture based on ‘popular sovereignty, individual rights, and association in civil society’ (2005: 387). Hamdi's folder of documents acquired a new affective valence once it became integrated into a new ‘culture of legality’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), which was fiercely opposed to corruption and exemplified by the establishment of transitional justice institutions such as the IVD. The possibility of appealing to the IVD offered moral legitimation to existing accusations and claims regarding the housing situation in La Petite Sicile. But it also meant that legal evidence in the neighbourhood was perceived as something provisional that needed ongoing recontextualisation and reiteration: it did not constitute proof in and of itself, but generated hope for change only insofar as it could be recognised within a particular context.
Contrasting Affects
While transitional justice measures gained prominence as practices of state legitimisation, they also impelled criticism and ambivalent reactions in political, academic and popular discourse (Gready and Robins 2023; Han 2021). In La Petite Sicile, appealing through the IVD was a practical avenue to attaining housing rights within an uncertain political context. While signalling hope for transitional-justice institutions, this process worked side by side with contrasting dispositions towards the transitional state (cf. Beyers 2017). In fact, hopes surrounding property documents were juxtaposed with disenchantment towards the post-revolutionary state and its legal apparatus. This disenchantment emerged as eviction threats resurfaced in the neighbourhood after the revolution, particularly among those residents who, unlike Nassime and Hamdi, lacked the knowledge of legal conventions that would enable them to confront and counter these threats. Adding to Comaroff and Comaroff's argument on the fetishisation of the rule of law in transitional times, I here stress the ambivalence that characterised inhabitants’ affective dispositions to legal documentation at a time of political transition.
In La Petite Sicile, residents seemed aware that their documents had a double edge: some of those who had previously purchased their homes had not been able to register them because the land on which their houses stood likely belonged to a different owner, like Leonidas. They had probably bought their homes from illegitimate owners. Henceforth, it would be difficult for property certificates to be of any legal value in reclaiming their properties. However, these residents were hopeful that Leonidas might turn out to be an illegitimate owner too, as this would mean that it had unlawfully reclaimed their homes. In this respect, the documentation could either prove their right to dwell (in the case of a successful appeal against Leonidas) or disprove it (if Leonidas were the legitimate owner). Furthermore, in a political context where the rule of law was still perceived as ineffective, claims of housing rights were seen as arbitrary. As a result, property documents evoked mixed reactions towards the legal system.
This was powerfully expressed by one of my closest informants, Yoursa. A widow in her fifties and the mother of four children, she lived in a small house near the neighbourhood's main road. Her father had migrated to Tunis from a village in the south and bought the house from its Italian owners after they had relocated in the 1950s. After her mother died, Yousra lived in the same house with her father, husband and children until they were threatened with eviction in 2005. With their lawyer's help, Yousra's family collected documents that attested to their housing and property rights: her parents’ property certificate and proof that they had lived in the house for almost forty years. Thanks to this evidence, they managed to win the case in court. I met Yousra more than ten years after the court case. Her father and husband had died, and she had remained in the same house, caring for her children. Surprisingly, it seemed that her victory had not assuaged her worries as she continued to envision a possible future eviction. She had a curious disposition to the documents that had brought her victory. Even though we developed an intimate friendship and she trusted me from the start, she stipulated that she would never show me the file, which she kept hidden in an upstairs room. The possibility of exposure made her feel anxious. I suspected that her documentation was partial, and that this embarrassed her: like many others, Yousra was probably aware that her father had purchased the house without knowing that the land it stood on actually belonged to Leonidas. Although the documents had helped to regularise her situation, winning the case did not allow her to feel legally protected from Leonidas. It seemed that she trusted neither her documents’ ‘objective’ or legal value nor the state legal apparatus in which they had circulated. She recounted how, back in 2005, the eviction procedure had not been carried out in the same way for everyone. Some families had been spared eviction, while others had not. Some had been able to keep their businesses by bribing the authorities; in these cases, their documentation had only had a persuasive role.
Foregrounding the affects of anxiety that legal forms elicit, Navaro-Yashin describes documents handled by Turkish Cypriots in the internationally unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as ‘phantasmatic objects with affective energies which are perceived as real’ (2007: 81). She argues that, more than emblems of rationalised bureaucratic practices, documents should be read as materialisations of political fantasies, whose transactional value oscillates between the made-up, fictional dimension of statecraft projects and the fetished and ‘real’ perception of state presence that they activate. In contrast, Yousra did not perceive her property documents as having ‘objective’ or legal value, mainly because, like many others, she did not trust the state legal apparatus. Instead, to Yoursa, documents pointed to the ‘non-rational underside’ (2007: 84) of legal processes and decisions in the country: they were the material reminders that her legal victory was most likely unsound since it was granted in an arbitrary and corrupt state judicial system. When I met her, even after the political situation in the country had drastically changed following the revolution, her documents continued to act as material reminders of an illegible, unpredictable and corrupt political dimension, in which their circulation would have similar arbitrary agency. Alongside the new hopes for legal justice elicited by a new culture of legality, documents continued to index the absence of a just and transparent legal/political context in which residents could securely claim their housing rights.
Conclusion: Contrasting Affects and the Multitemporality of Transition Politics
In La Petite Sicile, property documents were not just the means through which state rationalities were transferred, subjectivities transformed, or citizenship claimed, but the material repositories of heightened political affectivities vis-à-vis the state. In the previous sections, I have explored how the handling of property documents in La Petite Sicile elicited a range of stately affects. I have shown how, on the one hand, documentary practices and the difficulty of resolving a thorny legal conundrum in the neighbourhood reproduced a context of perceived ambiguity and suspicion which was pervasive in La Petite Sicile. In this situation, the dictatorial state was narrativised and made ‘real’ by searching for documents that could attest to Leonidas’ illegitimate claims. While missing documents prompted local inhabitants to morally denounce the state, they also reproduced the impression of a phantom state's presence in the neighbourhood, triggering suspicion and anxiety. The state and the company, while distinct in their formal functions, were deeply intertwined in people's affective experiences. The company's role in threatening evictions also signified the state's neglect. At the same time, the state's legal system failed to reassure all residents. While property documents renewed residents’ hopes for justice and legal resolution in the post-revolution era, they were also physical reminders and manifestations of a corrupt political dimension. Hopeful dispositions were mixed with the realisation that the state was still unable to work in accordance with the rule of law. The company's involvement in eviction threats during the transitional period testified to this and reinforced residents’ scepticism towards the post-revolutionary state.
To conclude, I briefly return to the argument posed in the introduction, that urban changes, legal practices and political affectivities enable an ethnographic critique of theological narratives of transitional time. Post-revolutionary sociopolitical change in Tunisia has largely been read through paradigms imported from policy and political discourse, in which the new democratic era is rigidly posed beyond an authoritarian one (Cavatorta 2012). Yet, an ethnographic focus on urban change during transitional times invites us to reconsider the historicity of transition not as ‘a linear succession of tenses where the past prevails, but as a framing to understand how social past and futures resonate in the present circumstances’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005: 261–263). The contrasting dispositions of the residents of La Petite Sicile reveal juxtaposed temporal experiences of political transition (Birth 2008; cf. Ssorin-Chaikov 2006), which are foregrounded through a sustained focus on the affective ways by which my informants relate to property documents. In this respect, I suggest that affective, imaginative and temporal qualities of legal documents fall together into what Navaro-Yashin calls their ‘messy and excessive potentialities’ (2007: 95; Sansone and Bonanno 2025): in acting both as material traces of the past and as a set of promises, property documents in La Petite Sicile create particular ‘state imaginings’ (Sansone and Bonanno 2025), whereby the perception and image of a phantom dictatorial state exist alongside the post-revolutionary state. Through engagements with property documents the state is felt, narrativised, temporalised and made real, and thus enabling a better understanding of the experiential and temporal complexities of urban life during sociopolitical change.
Acknowledgements
This article draws on my doctoral research project and is financially supported by ESRC NWDTC and a President's Doctoral Scholar Award from the University of Manchester. I wish to thank my interlocutors in Tunis for generously sharing their life experiences with me. I extend my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on this article. For their helpful comments, I thank the participants of the ‘Cities: Materialities, Temporalities and Affects’ panel at the BRISMES conference (2022), organised by Aya Nassar and Sara Salem; as well as the participants of the workshop ‘Ambivalent States: Political Authority in the Middle East’ at the University of York, organised by José Ciro Martínez. I am particularly grateful to Ahmad Moradi, Lana Askari and Diego Valdivieso for their helpful feedback on this manuscript; last but not least, I thank Letizia Bonanno for her comradeship.
Notes
Existing historical secondary sources (Giudice 2003; Russo 2018) do not reference these conditions as being formally listed in a rental contract. From my interlocutors’ accounts, I inferred that such arrangements were likely verbal or informally agreed upon.
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