Notes on Tunisia

Summary

I spent almost three weeks in Tunisia, visiting the cities of Tunis, Bizerte, El Kef, Tozeur, Tataouine, El Jem, Sfax, Sousse, Monastir, Kairouan, and a few smaller towns in between. At first, I thought this post would be heavy on travel and light on history, but I got carried away on the background reading and surprisingly interesting politics of the country. Modern Tunisia is another one of those one-time democracies that recently fell into an authoritarian quasi-dictatorship, like Turkey’s Erdogan, El Salvador’s Bukele, Hungary’s Orban, etc. But compared to those examples, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied feels like more of an accident, a product of a flailing, random political trajectory that no one could have predicted. The fact that a guy like this ended up running a country like this in this way is more baffling than scary or exciting. Before travelling, I read “Tunisia, a Country Study” in the Handbook series commissioned by the U.S. Army and published in 1987 (I’ll refer to this as the “Handbook”). Other historical and contemporary sources are linked within. Overview Population (2023) – 12.2 million Population Growth Rate (2023) – 0.7% Size – 63,170 square miles (a little bigger than Bangladesh, a little smaller than Wisconsin) GDP (nominal, 2023) – $48.5 billion (a little more than Latvia or Vermont) GDP growth rate (2023) – 0% GDP per capita nominal (2022) – $3,978 (comparable to the Philippines or Bolivia) GDP per capita PPP (2023) – $12,600 (it is SUPER cheap there) Inflation rate (2020-2025)- 5-10% Biggest export – “Insulated wire” Median age – 31 Life expectancy (2023) – 74 Murder rate (2020) – 4.6 per 100,000 Founded – 1957 Ethnicity (2022) – 98% Arab, 1% European (mostly French) Religion (2020) – 99+% Muslim Corruption Perceptions Index – Rank #92/180 Index of Economic Freedom – Rank #149/184 On the Ground I chose to go to Tunisia for the weather. Trinidad and Tobago wasn’t too bad but Guyana and Suriname were horribly, awfully, brutally hot and humid...