The needs of labour in times of transition: a case study of sharecroppers in Tunisia

Transformative justice has emerged in recent years as both a critical response to transitional justice and as a new practice agenda for challenging social-economic harms in post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies. While the transformative scholarship is relatively new, it falls short of providing a way to capture the underlying mechanisms by which people’s needs are frustrated. This study explores this epistemological gap through an examination of the everyday injustices, grievances and priorities for change among a group of sharecropping farmers in Cap Bon, Tunisia. A critical realist philosophical and methodological research framework was adopted, and a total of 42 semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed using techniques from grounded theory. The examination reveals a set of unmet or frustrated needs among this group of people that arise from their insertion into particular social relations that subjugate and exploit them. Enduring social structures and their properties are analysed for how they a) underpin need frustration among this particular group; b) act as a source of resentment directed towards local actors and the state; and c) shape farmers’ priorities for change. The study contributes to the development of an approach for examining the causes of enduring social-economic harms experienced by groups and communities in transition societies, and for generating new knowledge about relations and structures in concrete cases that might become objects for transformative change. Through this process, transformative justice is reconceptualised in terms of a wider body of theory, moving transformative theorising away from a narrow focus on its critical response to transitional justice and towards knowledge development for transformation.