“I was in exile before leaving the country” Studying Forms of Abeyance and Disengagement Through Exile

One of the main challenges posed by the under-exploration of continuities and transformations in forms of collective action has resulted in a lacking understanding of how forms of micro-abeyance and disengagement occur, how these are intertwined or separated in the activists’ trajectories, and most especially, how they can inform us on the moments in which collective action instead occurs. This contribution aims, therefore, to further explore moments of disengagement and abeyance on the micro-level, aiming to study continuities and transformations when collective action is suspended or when it is instead reactivated in the activists’ biographies. To this purpose, this paper brings to the analysis an innovative contribution both on the theoretical and empirical level, proposing a study of micro forms of abeyance and disengagement through the lens of exile. It draws indeed not only from classical studies on trajectories of disengagement and reconversions (as in Fillieule and Neveu, 2019), but also from the literature that considers a variety of other moments of “suspension” of activism, as exit from political prison (Shirlow and McEvoy, 2008) or clandestine militancy (Della Porta, 2013) – or other experiences of reflexivity and pause, as the Covid pandemic has been. This contribution informs theoretically this literature by addressing disengagement and abeyance through the study of political exile, considered as a moment of suspension of activism, one in which space, temporalities and identities have been or need to be negotiated. To the purpose of the analysis, this paper draws from a rich empirical material. It looks at the life histories of Tunisian activists who have undergone three different political states – namely the regime of Ben Ali, a revolutionary period between 2010 and 2011, a transition after 2011 (and a potential fourth, given the recent hybrid regime after 2021), one of which have corresponded to different forms in which activism was conducted – considering the clandestine action, the high intensity forms of activism during the revolution, and the dissolution of activism between 2013-2015. Looking at twenty life-histories collected between 2020-2022 mostly in France, as well as ethnographic observations conducted in Tunisia between 2018-2019 and in 2022, the paper closely analyses the micro transformations or continuities occurred in these trajectories, how they are connected to both the meso (the activists’ fields) and the macro levels (the structural transformations of the state), and how they can inform us on how disengagement and micro forms of abeyance relate to the political exile of activists. One of the main findings of the paper will show how, in discussion with the extant literature, discontinuities and transformations in the activists’ trajectories have taken place before the moment of exile itself and how it is the previous histories and ruptures in the political trajectories to shape the later forms of exile. This is indeed only one of the contributions that can be brought from studying continuities and transformation of dis(engagement) through the lens of exile.