In the text of his presentation from the Tunis workshop, Max Ajl spoke about Tunisian radical agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami. Ajl celebrates an approach which emphasized the specifically ecological aspects of uneven development and the specifically ecological aspects of resistance to uneven development.

With American-supplied aerial reconnaissance, satellite surveillance, and troop presence, Somalia has now been under military occupation for thirteen years. Samar Al-Bulushi analyses the involvement of regional bodies and states in the project of endless war in Somalia.

The Tunisian student movement played an important part in the country’s liberation struggles and has continued to play a vital role in the decades that followed political independence. However, Moutaa Amin Elwaer argues that the student movement often defends an elitist conception of society, which silences indigenous knowledge accumulated over the centuries, with a perspective not radically different from the national consensus.

At the workshop in Tunis, Malek Lakhal presented a scathing critique of ‘capacity building’ and ‘awareness-raising campaigns’ promoted by Northern NGOs that rely on orientalist tropes of lacuna and deficiency to reinforce how Tunisians – and the Global South generally - are perpetually ‘lagging behind’ or ‘catching up’ and in need of western tutelage and knowledge.

Continuing the series from the Tunis workshop in January, Corinna Mullin looks at the conditions of the Tunisian university from the period of the anti-colonial struggle to the era of neoliberalism. Drawing parallels with universities and activism elsewhere on the continent, she examines how these conditions have shaped resistance within and beyond the university.