 This is great, okay. So I guess let's get started so we can leave some space if there's some comments or questions from the audience that will be some space too or just have a broader discussion amongst us. So again, formal welcome everyone, Ferdinand and Honor in particular for being a part of the new voices seminar series and for the audience members too for coming along and listening. My name is Amanda Chisholm and I am a senior lecturer across the school of security studies. Also organizer and chair of this seminar series and the series itself is designed to amplify the voices and expertise of our early career researchers across the school and to showcase the diverse research that our PhD and our early career researchers are doing. And so with that, I'm so excited to have Honor here and Ferdinand as a discussant. So Honor is a PhD student in the department of war studies and his research interests cover the development of coercive institutions, authoritarian rule and Middle Eastern politics more broadly. And most recently he was the guest editor for Striped Journal 2021 Joint Issue with the Institute of Early Eastern Studies. So Honor, welcome. Thank you. The title of Honor's presentation today is Surviving Democracy, Power Sharing and the Politics of Police Reform in Tunisia. So as I said, Honor is joined by Ferdinand Ibel who is his discussant and Ferdinand is a senior lecturer in political economy and the program director of the MA Politics and Economics of the Middle East. He completed his PhD in the department of politics and international relations with the University of Oxford. He also holds an MFIL in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA in political science for the university. Oh my goodness, I don't think I can pronounce that Ferdinand. Can you pronounce the, you hold a BA in politics from the university? Yeah. So it's called Einstein English and it's and together with the French university, UPRN. So it was a dual degree, but never mind. It seems like half a century ago. Does it? Well, I mean, it showcases the diversity of your, you know, your expertise, but also the specific focus on the Middle East. So perfect discussant today. No doubt, no doubt there'll be some vibrant conversation. Without further ado, I'm going to pass the virtual floor over to you, Honor, to share the screen or you have some slides to share. And yeah. And so the floor is yours. Perfect. Thank you very much. Let me just put up the slides and it should be working right now. Can you see them? Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Okay, that's perfect. Hello everyone and thank you very much for actually sharing your lunchtime with me. Just a bit of a caveat. I know I start when I signed up for this, I was a PhD student and actually ended up finishing my PhD while writing this paper. So I should have updated that, but that's perfectly fine. So I will actually get right into it. In the next 45 minutes or so, what I would like to do is I will just give you a present my research question and perhaps give a bit of an overview towards the case. And I realized that many people might not be familiar with Tunisia. Then I will present my theoretical framework and I will finish by presenting some empirical evidence from across the board and talk a bit about what can we actually gather from this and what further work can be done from this project. So I first started doing this paper actually around 2019 when I realized that the police repression has been you know slowly creeping back to Tunisia. And that was before the president, Kai Said's incumbent take over in 2021. The problem with police reforms is, as you see in the literature, is that they fail very, very frequently. Many efforts fail outright or they remain symbolic. In other cases, what happened is they become deleted into the reform attempts that end up not being much of institutional change. Others unfortunately are rolled back after years of seeming success and this is actually happens in many places. We have examples from Latin America and we have examples from South Africa. Some of them are treated as success stories, for example, and Tunisia was actually one of them until very recently or sometimes almost a decade or more than we see those projects unfortunately failing, which is an interesting. And the problem is that happens at the background of democratization. You know, police reform is quite problematic everywhere as we can probably see it recently. Democracies are not immune to this problem as we have seen in the United States last year and also even in the United Kingdom this year, which has been what's going on with the Metropolitan Police. In the case of a democratic transition, however, this is the crucial problem. This is about the consolidation of the democracy. This is about the survival of the democracy and survival of usually what is a very brittle political transition. And the problem is it seems that the relationship between democratization and police reform is not very consistent. So my question is why authoritarian police forces managed to avoid reform so often, right? And I delve into this debate, if you like, by a single case study of Tunisia or the democratic Tunisia, if you like. And my method is process tracing. What I do is that I start from my independent variables, which is the case of Tunisian power sharing and I trace it all the way to the failure of police reforms. So my case here, what we're talking about is the case of what we can't call the democratic Tunisia. As many of you might have know, Tunisia was the first country to experience the so-called Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011. After they started their democratic transition in January 2011, there is a period of 10 years until president Said's incumbent takeover in the summer of 2021, which we can actually analyze as a case of democratic transition. Some people say that the transition has no end as a failure. Some people say that it is still continuing but I am going to cut my analysis in the year of 2021 just for the sake of privacy and also in order to avoid the target problem. And when we restrict our case like that, Tunisia is actually very interesting because when you take a look at the VDAM data, it is actually one of the two major cases of democratization in the last decade, the older one being Armenia. In a decade which was marked by democratic regression pretty much everywhere in the world, Tunisia stood out a couple of outliers. And Tunisia also is quite interesting because it's a country whose internal security apparatus which is based on the Ministry of Interior whose photograph you can actually see in the bottom right hand of the slide. It was more dominant than its armed forces. So most of the research in Middle East and North Africa actually focuses on armed forces and militias, right? So the Tunisia is quite exceptional as we probably need to focus a bit more on its police forces and the internal security forces as opposed to its military. Although excellent for has been done on military is quite recently or understanding of policing, unfortunately it's lagged behind. And finally, Tunisia is a case of pacted transition which provides a comparable case with the case of what happened in the Eastern Europe in the 1990s or the Southern Europe in the 1980s or you can also give some parallels with the Latin America in the previous decades as well. So the case has some broader relevance in terms of thematic. So it reflects some challenges of democratic consolation. And for the Arab world as well, it actually allows us to trace whole state coercion actually in a world in the Arab world in the decade after the Arab Spring. And finally, and perhaps some, most importantly for some of you, it is quite important from a policy perspective as well because from the simple reason that we have very poor results relative to the timer funds allocated to the police reform in Tunisia which includes several million dollars from the EU, a full-fledged community policing reform program from the United Nations and at least funding coming from 600 nations is constantly spent in 10 years to very little effect. As I said, the extent literature actually gives us already a couple of explanations. So one good thing if you like with the Arab Spring is that the post 2011 security sector reform researchers many of them are actually led by NGOs and international organizations. They received an unprecedented access, especially until 2013. This line of researchers actually provided us a line of empirical information which was unprecedented and previously not available. And they actually pointed towards some of the key variables that I'm talking about today, such as the political polarization or the structure of the internal security apparatus. But the problem with that of the search, if you like, is that it has very strong normative underpinnings. It tends to equate lack of reform with failure and it tends to undercount institutional change which is not necessarily democratic. What I mean by that is that those authoritarian police forces in order to survive, they actually change quite a lot inside the transition. They innovate, they form new partnerships. And this line of research as because this line of innovation is usually not very democratic, sometimes undercounts it or tends to disregard it because they are looking for signs of democratization. This is perfectly fine from their own perspective from an academic perspective, you need to be more considerate. That being said, the single most powerful explanation Tunisian security reform right now is the perceived trade-off between the security sector reform and the counter-terrorism. Some of you might know that Tunisia has been fighting counter-insurgency and in the several ways of terrorist attacks which started actually quite soon into this political transition. And especially around 2015, after the beach attack ensues and a couple of high-profile attacks, counter-terrorism in Tunisia become a major issue and it started attracting an incredible amount of attention from the Western security services as well. There are a couple of papers here. I think the Ruthana Santini's work is the best example of this. And you can also check the Nikbotito's paper on the perceived trade-offs and how political elites actually present this security versus other reforms trade-off to the public to reduce the pressure they have on security reform. We also have a couple of other explanations such as most of the parties work on bureaucratic resilience and other reporters work on the failure of individual reforms. This line of literature usually emphasizes the failure of individual reforms and they emphasize the resilience of the bureaucratic apparatus in the face of reform. But there are a couple of weaknesses with this line of in-car if like. The first is the question of timing. It is true that the shift of counter-terrorism actually made a major impact on Tunisian course of apparatus. However, as I argue in the next few minutes, the shift actually started happening long before the security threats presented themselves. Secondly, even after the counter-terrorism threat started to subside after 2018, we did not see a return to reform. So I think this explanation on counter-terrorism actually all threats actually cannot explain and everything. Secondly, there is the issue of causality. It is true that there is empirical research citing that an active insurgency or active security threats are likely to reduce the probability of reform, but the causal relations between them are quite undetermined. For example, we have a couple of cases. Take Ukraine, for example. They were able to enact a police reform while dealing with very similar issues. And despite the fact that they received, they perceived a very clear trait from Russia, which is currently being materialized, they were able to run a successful program. Now here actually brings the question of my own explanation, if you like. This is an explanation actually based on the institution of literature and it's an explanation based on path dependency. What I argue essentially is that coercive institutions, the police and military in general, they are exceptionally path-dependent institutions. They are very difficult to form because of the initial investment that is required and specialist training is required and the money required. And they are also exceptionally, perhaps even harder to abolish. They can be even more dangerous. The problem is when you try to abolish them, those forces are very likely to show very serious resistance to reform, which can take several extra legal measures, which can happen in the form of coup attempts or the coup on of disobeying orders or in the form of many other forms of resistance they can actually put off. And it can be even more dangerous. There are several older cases in the literature where any attempt to establish reform or an attempt to establish some of these coercive institutions actually cause a significant amount of violence. So for many governments actually, the default option is not to do any reform at all. It's an accommodation. Taking this into account, most of the literature on police reform actually say that you need an external shock for this reform. This is, in many cases, a violent encounter between the state and the security forces, sorry, between the citizens and the security forces. The literature on Russia, for example, says that in the Marat's work, you need a transformative violence between the state and the citizens. Or in the Gonzalez's work, you need a crisis, a high-profile crisis, which will actually change the opinion of median water. So the politicians will be actually compelled to undertake reforms that are otherwise too risky or quite simply a way to, you know, expensive to implement. That being said, a political transition, such as what Tunisia experienced, is should be the perfect opportunity for that, right? They had this opportunity due to the regime change. They had the opportunity to break the path dependencies. And they also had a significant amount of reasons to make reform because of the violence inherent in the Arab Spring as well. We sometimes tend to think Tunisian uprising as a peaceful event, but this was actually not the case. There has been a significant amount of casualties and people thought that the police was using snipers or mercenaries. And in general, the security sector reform was actually one of the highest items in the agenda in the immediate aftermath of the uprisings. And think this, even in the case of no real demand from the public, in a political transition, the incoming elite needs reform themselves. In many cases, a political transition means that you have people that are previous to subjects of state repression, which is the case of Islamists and the Anata Party in Tunisia, that now became part of the formal politics. And those people need to reach a form of accommodation with the security force, which has been tasked with repressing them until very, very recently actually. And you can extend this argument to the other forces as well. Yet there are quite a bit of aspects to actually prevent reform, right? The first things first, political transitions are inherently uncertain. Rules are not set in piece. Nobody really knows what's going to happen in 10 years and people seek guarantees and deals, right? And this is further exerberated by the fact that I think this is from the grants, Wright and Phyllis' 2010 database. The failure rate of political transitions around 50%. Half of political transitions actually do not end up being democracy. They either get stuck in some form of hybrid regime or they simply transition into another authoritarian regime, which is my Tunisia might be experiencing right now actually actually the period of 10 years. But in the period, it is actually very, very problematic, especially when you combine it with the inherent resistance from the security institutions. So this brings us to the question of, first, how we can observe the reform and how we can actually have this, how this, you know, new democracies can actually neck reform. The observation is rather straightforward. In my PhD research and the next research, my best method I found is to take a look at the staffing decisions, right? Who gets hired, who gets fired and under one circumstances, people get promoted. You can trace it at the entry level and you can trace it at more senior levels of the security bureaucracy rate. If you check other similar cases such as what happened in Ukraine and Georgia and also partially Brazil as well, almost every single instance of successful reform requires a very high amount of staff turnover. And this was the case in the Eastern Europe as well, such as the illustration how those, they had in the end of 1990s, they required vetting, they required a very incredible amount of staff turnover, which is a very laborious process, but to a large extent at least it has been successful and the second one team in all of them. And the second one is the organizational structure, which is inherently about which organizations answer to which ones and how the organizational charts has changed over time. I believe that using a combination of two, we can actually trace reform, which is something not very easily traceable because everyone has an incentive in saying that yes, we did reform, but in order to understand it in a more natural way, if you like, I found that those two variables usually work the best. And to understand how the incoming government can actually push for reform in the face of these odds, I present this very simple model if you like. In an ideal scenario, what happens is you will get a programmatic police reform. There is a reform program, there are white papers, everything happens to a specific and given process, right? It is a top-down reform usually, but it needs to include the public input as well, but it more or less forms the coherent program. That often requires a unified government or a single actor, which is actually able to overcome institutional inertia. You can think of the African National Congress in South Africa or the solidarity in Poland in those cases, there was at least one group within the transition, which was actually the multiple significant amount of power, which allowed them to get significant amount of standing and political power, which allowed these political actors or the new coming elites, if you like, to overcome significant amount of resistance. The problem is empirically those cases are minority. In the vast majority of transitions, revolutionary coalitions, if you like, often breakdown and polarization rather than unity is known. And there are a line of research from Sebelius' work saying that the polarized governments and the fractured governments are more likely, are less likely to enact more dangerous reforms because they usually don't have the same amount of reform capacity. This is because you're introducing new veto actors and they are not like they're unlikely to have, they're unlikely to be able to get enough power or they all do in domestic recurring if the coalition will simply prevent it. In a worst case scenario, what you happen is, you might get to speak together in the form of a top power sharing or coalition agreement, but they cartelize as the slutters work and they establish a party cartel, which is more or less independent from the public fields. And what happens is that they actually have very little incentive to push for any reform. Yet this is not to say that it is all doom and gloom for coalition and power sharing governments because it was paper, for example, say that power sharing governments can still enact reform, especially if you can do site payments and actors have sufficient guarantees that will allow them to keep their position in the future. And what I briefly argue is that in Tunisia, party cartelization happened and they were able to do the site payments to make sure that all actors receive a form of compensation. However, this lighter fact on sufficient guarantees was never achieved and this has caused the reforms to ultimately fail. This actually brings us to the case of the democratic transition in Tunisia, right? So the policing is probably one of the defining characteristics of Tunisia under Ben Ali, right? There is a very limited amount of literature specializing on the Interior Ministry under Ben Ali's Tunisia and it usually defines as a black box, if you like, which is run by competing cartels. Mapping those cartels specifically has been impossible so far, yet we know that they are quite unstable and we know that at the level of directors impact that they actually were able to control their own networks if you like competing networks specifically. And the policing has been quite authoritarian and quite obsessed with the regime security. To the extent that it is low policing functions such as investigative powers has been quite low as the regime overwhelmingly that diverted its sources to a specific kind of policing, right? And what high and low policing functions but by high policing, I mean the intelligence and internal security functions and by low policing, I mean the regular investigative functions and the public order functions were actually done under the same body, right? Against that background, the Arab Spring made it very clear that this structure needed to be reformed, right? The Spring itself, so the initial mobilization in December 2010 actually happened in the background of police service. It happened in the city of Zait and the protests partially became widespread because the police violence actually agitated citizens even further. So in the end of the day, what happened is that you have an internal interior ministry which felt defeated to a large extent and they was unable to actually protect itself against any form of, any form of reform attempts. There's actually a significant amount of evidence checking that there are reports of police stations that are being burned after the uprising. Several of the officers actually refused to go on patrols because they believed that they will be insulted. Attacks against police officers were common and there is actually even one figure as officials believe that the policing effectiveness around one year after the revolution is actually around 30%. And that problem continued especially in the less developed regions in Indonesia because the government was not able to restore this efficiency of policing efficiency and that actually become a prolonged problem in the region. Against that background, the transitional governments were actually able to push for some reforms, right? And they actually deserve some mention here. First thing first, the first interim minister for our tragedy was able to dismiss like 42 higher ranking officials including the entire general staff of the Director General of National Security which is the highest commissioner body in Tunisia. And they were able to actually abolish a couple of departments including the Directorate of State Security. Now that couple of waves of purges was influential because it caused some of the people that are most associated with the Ben Ali regime to be changed and perhaps more important it actually allowed the incoming elite to claim that the so-called political police in Tunisia was no more and the surveillance of political opposition no longer existed in Tunisia. However, this was this approach, if you like run into very serious political obstacles very soon. The first is the fact that none of this none of these initial moves were made in the framework of framework of either repair registration or a coherent transitional justice framework. They are done actually under the state of emergency. As a result, some of those purges were actually ephemeral. The Fireheart Regist, the first minister actually lost his office in a matter of weeks because now he actually run into the opposition with local networks and his predecessor actually revoked some of those purges. And even years after some of the higher ranking officers that were purged they were able so you don't get their sentences reduced or quite simply get decisions revoked because they won another case in the administrative court because they said that this state of emergency decisions were not valid and they actually violated their employment rights in Tunisia. As a result of what happened is that starting from 2016 we see a return of some of these officers in the form of advisory posts. And furthermore, what happened is this we suddenly saw that the political will for maximum security reform has disappeared and this was not always the case. And not that the biggest party after the revolution and the so-called Islamist party they actually pushed for a much more comprehensive reform and illustration law for a while but after seeing the dangers of social law in terms of political polarization they actually took a step back. And similar events also happened. There was a comprehensive white paper for policy reform published in 2011 but this time when Enata came to power due to political considerations they ended up rejecting that as well. So it became clearly very close it became very clear that the political will was missing. Even by the start of 2013 when we interviewed politicians it became clear that everyone was saying that any reform would have to wait for the next elections or even the writing of the constitution. So not much would happen at that stage which was actually a very good opportunity. And that brings us to the issue of consensus and power sharing in Tunisia which is the main reason why that happened. The issue is that the Tunisian transition actually took power sharing qualities almost immediately after Ben Ali's departure, right? The Yad Panashur Commission which kind of set the rules of the transition made it clear that the Tunisia would go through in the context of proportional vote representation in the elections. They formed commissions and they tried to give guarantees to as many groups as possible. The proportional vote in particular was crucial because in the absence of a political party which can actually gain a very clear majority that pretty much guaranteed that coalition government would actually root Tunisia. And this process actually continued afterwards. When a set of crisis actually hit Tunisia in 2013 the ultimate resolution was the Establish a National Reconciliation Commission in 2013 which actually granted Enlata and its biggest competitor, Nida Tunis, informal veto rights over hecosis. And this agreement was further if you like, consolidated in the cartridge arrangement of 2016 which established a national solution government in Tunisia. So what we see is that wherever there is a political crisis in Tunisia the number one solution was to, you know pull back to what they call as a consensus governance which increasingly took the ingredients of a power sharing deal. And this is actually not bad. Truth is the power sharing deal probably saved Tunisian democracy in a couple of key episodes in 2013 just after the coup in Egypt as there were similar calls in Tunisia. And it actually generated a degree of stability in the country which was lauded. I'll first step on, you know, famous the Wharton article about injustice in tolerations which allowed this so-called deal between Islamists and secularists which and claiming that, you know this was something unique to Tunisians for that time being because, you know, that deal simply failed in other cases, most notably in Egypt. And people also say that this kind of model if you like, which expanded to other countries which actually, you know, got the couple of key NGOs a noble peace price in the end. But the problem is in older aspects this has been extremely problematic. The number one problem here is the fact that it creates the Wharton compromise and this transition those are actually taking from other words which is more critical of the transition and that did not actually create enough socio-economic reforms which all of the country to go ahead, right? And what I would like to do right now is that to form some connections between those political reforms and specific decisions that are making within the security bureaucracy. There you go. So the number one problem with this power-sharing agreement is the which is the staffing decisions. As I said before, we can actually analyze it in two ways. One is the recruitment at the lower levels. So as Tunisian security apparatus started recruiting new members with security force, what happened is that the issue become immediately extremely politicized. Media started making publications stating that Islamists are actually trying to infiltrate if you like the security apparatus and Islamist actors in the other hand started saying that the security apparatus were inherently against them and they're actually actively working against them which might be correct actually to a large extent. And that kind of debate unfortunately become even more acrimonious over time as the opposition claimed that Ennatha had a parallel security apparatus inside the Interior Ministry and there was a dark room in the Interior Ministry which actually conspired with Ennatha against their own, against their political opposition. The result is what happened is the hyper-publicization of security governance, right? Decision making become extremely complicated and discontinued even after the passing of the constitution. Because of the consensus, they were not able to agree on much many many rules with sensitive security reforms. So a lot of issues were actually led to customary practice. As a result, in the next five years or so what happened is there was a constant become between the Prime Ministry, the Presidency and opposition parties and they have been trying to overreach and step over their mandate often breaching their constitution. And we have seen moves from the Presidency and we have also seen moves from the Prime Ministry and others as well. But the result in general was a significant amount of stability in security bureaucracy, right? It is possible actually to take a look at this from the higher levels of security bureaucracy as well. The problem is Tunisia had 10 Interior Ministers in 10 years and due to the very acrimonious nature of this security, the very acrimonious nature of the staffing process, they found a solution in recruiting people from the previous generation actually. So around 50% of highest level directors in the Tunisian security bureaucracy and especially in the level of the general director of national security are actually officers that are recalled from retirement. And these networks are very unstable because of the political competition they usually last in their office in just over a year which is much, much shorter when compared to the average tenure of a security officer under Ben Ali. And the problem is it's unbecame obvious that those networks are actually being well influenced by other actors beyond their constitutional mandate. Some people claim that the specific directors close to the President. Others claim that the specific directors actually close to the Islamist Party. And in the overall, sometimes because those coalition actors cannot decide on a good candidate, positions were left vacant or the only thing they could do was to, you know just agree on a rather weak candidate that would be a placeholder. And it was not possible to push for reforms in that specific environment. There was even in one case actually one security officer was so annoyed by the process that they actually called the promotion process a rooster fight which has been going for several years and made, you know, any proper reform project impossible. And this is very bad form of perspective of project management as well. Because first, nepotism means that outgoing directors all usually bring their stuff with them and their connections because they do not want a director coming from another support network if you like to inherit what they have. And secondly, the shared rotation of directors meant that funding for security sector reform projects usually overlasted their main connection in the ministry, which means that you got the reform and you started working with the ministry but usually ended up working for two perhaps three different directors which is actually very conductive to reform. And the second major issue is the protestor movement being heavily marginalized. The problem here with the Arab Spring is that it actually never ended, right? So protest numbers in Tunisia after 2010 remained remarkably higher when considered to the authoritarian era. From a perspective of democratization this is perfectly fine and even accepted. The problem is this was a significant challenge for the police force as a permanent shift in state society relations and they did not know how to deal with that. And the reason and the main, and as a result what happened is that that actually caused significant amount of protestor violence and it caused a couple of events that actually should have caused the police reform as they are scandals in the traditional sense. As you can see that by 2018, the reform towards the police force in Tunisia was actually as low as 26%. This is actually comparable to the Latin American levels just before they started their reform. However, to scandals as we say they did not evolve into reform. And this is because party cartelization in Tunisia meant that in order for this coalition between settlers and the so-called settlers and so-called Islamists to survive it had to be detached from all ideological and usually the social demands coming from their bases. So they had a very strong incentive in both parties to suppress dissent from the population which caused both secular and Islamist actors to apply this plate for a call and even support security forces in the face of clear protestor violence. In this environment, any form of reform was pretty much impossible. And the final point I would like to make here is that the bureaucratic resistance, right? This party cartelization over time meant that the trust in democratic process in Tunisia was decreasing over time and this has been a problem for a long time actually. But the problem is in every single survey poll especially after 2013, Tunisian security bureaucracy despite everything that's been going on ranks constantly higher than the trust in elected bodies which allowed this police unions which emerged after 2011 to become much more stronger. What happened is the police officers themselves motivated by the trauma of the revolution and the necessity to protect the Romani interests started unionizing and took a page from the protestor handbook. There's a couple of examples in the slide that actually protests by the security forces themselves. And they very soon established themselves as some sort of low level veto actors. The problem is for these actors those piecemeal reforms available in the absence of a programmatic reforms actually quite easy to defend. Sometimes they could actually conduct promotion decisions. In other cases they actually elected extra legal resistance. For example, they refused to deploy. In a few cases they actually used violence against protesters. In a couple of cases they directly threatened their superiors. And what happened is the only way to prevent these reforms for the elites is actually to threaten them with the military court which did not always work. And by 2018 they pushed us first trying to legislate infinitely using a couple of very aggressive legislation and they were actually able to establish themselves as key partners. And that brings us to the conclusions. I quite simply argued that the consensus might have saved Tunisian democracy for at least 10 years but it has actually killed the reform. That bureaucracy and police force today enjoys a level of autonomy and political maneuvering which was simply unthinkable under Ben Ali. And they are actually much stronger in some aspects when compared to what was available under Ben Ali's rule which actually should force us to think of what we mean by the security force assistance and what are the actual consequences of some of the security aids these countries has been receiving. And I also argued that these institutions they are not mere authoritarian legacies. Police forces in order to adapt themselves to the new institutions they can actually innovate quite a lot. And the importance of what the actual decisions make during the transition era politics is actually more important. So we probably need a more actor-based approach to understand these processes. And I do realize that the incremental institutional change still occurs. So some of the things I'll say might be invalidated in the next 10 years or so because this is what happened in Latin America. Police reform seems to be stagnant for 30 years until it suddenly starts which will be up with the case. And finally, the next steps for this research would be to find a dissemination including publishing actually this paper and fixing the missing data problems coming from the COVID measures. And what I would like to do in the future is to extend this research agenda even further so it will actually become a comparative study perhaps beyond the MENA region preferably taking a look at comparable cases of political transition. So yeah, thank you very much. The draft paper is going to be available in my website. I'm on my Twitter as well actually probably next week. I just need to fix a couple of things with the data and so on. So looking forward to your questions. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Dr. Kara. Sorry, I didn't realize you had finished your PhD. That's fabulous. And what a fantastic presentation, very detailed. So I guess we'll pass the floor over to Ferdinand at this stage. Ferdinand has, you know, for any commentary. And again, for the audience members, please do raise your hand if you'd like to ask the question live or just type it in the Q&A chat box. So Ferdinand, I'll pass the floor over to you. Yeah, thank you, Amanda. And thank you, Honour. This is an absolutely fascinating paper. As somebody who studies Tunisia, I still, you know, learned a lot from the paper because police forms are not necessarily something that people, especially during a transition context, you know, pay a lot of attention to. But it's absolutely vital, especially now in a context where authoritarian backsliding is likely to kind of put the security apparatus back on our research agenda. You know, it is also with you. I agree with your fundamental argument and that the Tunisian consensus may have saved democracy or the transition in 2013, but had so many negative knock-on effects and ultimately may not have even saved democracy because if you think about the one of the effects of this consensus-driven transition was that they couldn't nominate a constitutional court, which would have been exactly the institution that could have held, I say, back in his attempt to kind of undo Tunisian democracy. So there's a certain tragedy in there. And looking back, I wasn't Tunisian in 2013. There was a lot of polarization that there was indeed a danger of this process really going pear-shaped. But it is hard to pinpoint a moment where it would have been easy to kind of untangle this consensus-driven politics again. There was a certain kind of dynamic also in the sense that both major political acts has benefited from this. Okay, so there's much about sort of the broader argument. Let me go into the details a little bit. I've got sort of two types of comments on the paper slash presentation. One, a set of comments relating to questions of research design, how you package your material, how you're trying to turn this into sort of a paper that would come out in a very, very good political science journal, and then some more kind of empirical questions related to the case study that you present. So in terms of the research design, I think from my point of view, I would like the comparative aspect to be actually quite more explicit. You do this very often implicitly. There's Latin America in the background. There is Eastern Europe in the background. But I think you could actually go all the way and make this sort of a paired comparison, or at least have a very strong shadow case study that kind of shapes our expectations and allows the reader to somewhat gauge the processes that have been going on in Indonesia in light of other cases. I think analytically that that would be very helpful and maybe contrast to Indonesia with the case of successful reform may provide a good backdrop here. I was also not sure whether you would think to Indonesia is actually a least likely case for this type of reform to succeed or a most likely case, which sort of from a comparative politics research design point of view is important. Least likely case because of the deteriorating security situation, terrorism, and all of this. But then in your presentation, you made the point very strongly that the transition itself actually opened a window of opportunity and could have turned to Indonesia sort of into a most likely case of success. So I think if you guide the reader's expectations at the beginning of your paper a little bit better in terms of how likely was this ever going to succeed given the structural conditions in which this transition unfolded? I think that would have been helpful. In the presentation, you highlight the kind of key variable much more in the paper there is, you actually have a number of factors that are sort of highlighted as potential causes. And I found this somewhat confusing. So I think it's important that you kind of hone in on one or two really determining factors. And I think there again, the comparative aspect could help you because it may highlight the importance of some causal variables more than others. And sort of from a process tracing point of view, I wasn't quite sure whether this is theory generating process tracing or theory testing process tracing. If it's theory testing process tracing then the theoretical expectations need to be front loaded much more and made much, much stronger because then you have a framework either developed by other people or by yourself and then you go on and test about it and I would want to know as reader what type of evidence would challenge your theoretical framework or in fact corroborate it? If there's a theory developing one then I would expect more sort of, I would expect some section towards the end where you pull it all together and some sort of a framework, analytical framework that could be applied to some other case study. So the moment you don't do either and I wasn't quite sure what type of process tracing you're actually engaging in. And I think once you've made this decision you can actually streamline the paper recording. Secondly, I think that's more sort of a meta question but I think it is important for your overall theoretical argument. The agency structure question struck me as something that's quite important here on several levels. Well, first of all, a lot of your argument seems to be about replacing old agents with new agents. And then you highlight that this is how Eastern European countries did it. And I don't know the literature well enough I can't gauge what extent this was really the determining factor in performing their police. It seems to me that this has to be part of the package of measures that one adopts. But I was wondering to what extent sort of the structures of accountability and in this context it's also judicial reforms play an equally important role in reforming and reforming in police force. I mean, one is obviously get rid of the torturers get rid of the most of the worst people in the security apparatus. But then the other thing is if the judicial system doesn't have any control over the police force if citizens can't take a police officer to the court for abuse of power, for torture, for things like that, even a newly recruited police officer may very easily be socialized into a culture of not lawlessness, but impunity. That would be the word. And in a way, you don't touch upon the parallel attempts in Tunisia to reform the judicial system at all. But I think it is important to discuss this in this context. Yeah, and so now moving more to sort of the things related specifically to the case study. I think you highlight a few key reforms but there is a lot going on in the paper. So I would quite like to know as a reader what were the kind of crucial moments? What were the critical moments where reform could have happened in this decade and didn't? Was it the white paper that was kind of watered down? So when we're within this kind of critical junctures, many critical junctures, I'd like to have a better map. Your argument, and I think you highlight this in the paper, goes against some of the stuff that's been written about trust amongst opposition actors in Tunisia. Nugent's argument is very much that because they all faced repression, secular actors and Islamist actors, there was increased trust and that enabled them to carry out this transition process till the end, whereas in Egypt, because there was so much distrust between secularists and Islamists, actually the transition stored. So I think you have to position yourself a little bit in this debate and whether you think there was actually a lot of trust or not and to what extent then Nugent and others who've kind of made this point are wrong. Training of police officers is again, something that doesn't seem to come into play. It's about hiring, but has the training actually changed? Has our police academies operating differently in the first transition context? If not, then that's very easy to kind of just describe in a paragraph as something that was not touched upon, but this in and of itself is actually interesting. If you recruit north of 20,000 police officers into your security apparatus in the transition context, you would want to ensure that they get some sort of training in what it is to be a police officer in a democratic context. Now, the paper doesn't really tell me whether this happened or not or whether this was kind of watered down. So I would like to see a bit more on that. The other kind of big omission and that goes back to agency in the paper at the moment for me as international actors. And this is kind of surprising because you highlight them in your presentation at the beginning is what has sort of been quite important in this context, both in terms of having leverage because they're provided money and you talk about a fully fledged UN program to reform, but in the actual kind of argument that you build, they are entirely peripheral and it may well be that they were entirely peripheral but it's still a bit puzzling that those who kind of provide the money have to come zero leverage over the process. So in and of itself, it would be interesting how kind of actors within the Ministry of Interior kind of blunted the potential influence that external actors could have had on reforms, right? So you can integrate them into your framework. And then, yeah, let me highlight two things before I conclude. Well, the first thing is that higher trust in police and military as opposed to elected institutions I've heard this a lot over the last decade and specifically with regard to the Middle East and I would just like to know whether this is actually a Middle Eastern thing or whether this is a global phenomenon that actually may even happen in established and very consolidated democracies. If that's the case, then maybe we shouldn't make such a big deal about this because it may just be a background variable that happens anyway because people for some reason mistrust elected officials more than unelected officials. So I think it's important that we kind of look at these figures in comparative perspectives and also these figures contradict to some extent what you said about, contradict the opinion polls that you presented about trust in the performance of the police, which wasn't very high. So I was a bit confused about this. And actually in the interest of time, let me stop here so that on around some opportunity to respond to this. But all of this shouldn't, you know, I still want to underline the fact that this is a very strong paper and I think it has the potential to really be published in a very good journal. Great. Thank you very much. I'll try to be brief. I will actually try to answer the questions of the comments in the reverse order. I've been taking notes about the trust issue. You might well be right. I probably need to check it. And maybe that might have to be removed and about the inconsistency in the data about trust. I actually, that puzzles me quite a bit because I realized that the Arab parameter data and the independent survey data in Tunisia do not fit each other. And I actually asked a couple of questions. They don't know it. They don't know either. Why? Everyone is sure that their data is the best of course, but yeah, you're right. Maybe there is an inconsistency problem there. That part should be reversed. About the international actors, you're right. I actually was trying to make it into a separate paper, but maybe that needs to be incorporated a bit more, especially given the UNDP's commenting policy program at least needs to be analyzed a bit more in detail. About Elizabeth Nugent's paper and the issue of the level of trust between actors. I was actually thinking about her work a lot when I was writing this. And yeah, I think they are wrong that and ultimately it's from probing wrong. And I will edit the section of the paper to underline the fact that the trust was perhaps better than Egypt, but still nowhere at the level where there actually needs to be like, it is actually like a middle ground solution. It's still better than Egypt, but no, it's still, I mean, it's not, it simply was not enough at least. This is what I can say. And about the case, say the kind of case, I would actually say the yes to Tunisia is the most likely case scenario. Especially between the period of 2011 to 2013, definitely is the most likely case scenario. And I will do it a bit more further. But finally one interesting about the issue of comparative politics versus the areas to this paper, that was actually a problem I had a lot because I wasn't sure where to submit this paper. So if you are going to submit this to like a general political science journal, you're right, like it's to be like a material testing paper. I actually started this as a paper which will go for areas to this journal. And I realized the comparative element is quite strong. And you're right, I think a harsh decision has to be made there very soon. And I will aim to do that within this month. Thank you very much. I mean, given the detail and richness, you know, you might even think about a book. Is there enough detail there or enough empirics there to make a book? That would be great. Only issue is that as I briefly mentioned, there is a data problem due to COVID. So confirmation, actually what I have in my own database, if you like, is a bit more detailed, but there are a lot of gaps and some of them can't be filled without further fieldwork. So maybe a postdoc. Oh, it's a postdoc, right? Yeah, hopefully. Oh, my goodness. Well, I can't wait to see where it does end up landing in print eventually. We're out of time, unfortunately. So no time to broader audience questions. But, you know, Anur and Ferdinand, I want to thank you so much for such a detailed and rich presentation. And Ferdinand, your enthusiastic comments, I think, also indicate how excited you were about the paper as well, too. So thank you both for your engagement and being part of the seminar series. And, yeah, Anur, keep us posted what happens with the paper. So to the audience, thank you for listening in. And I want to wish everyone a great afternoon. So and watch this space, you'll be circulated through social media, the recording as well, too. So thank you again and have a great afternoon. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye.