PhD Thesis
Title: Regimes of Discontent: Women, Identity Formation, and Claim-Making in Rural Tunisia
Expected Completion Date: 2027
PhD Supervisor & Co-Supervisor : Elisabeth Prugl & Christiana Parreira
How do gender regimes shape claim-making? My doctoral project examines how rural conflicts over land and livelihoods are reshaping state–society relations from the vantage point of those rarely centered in accounts of Tunisia’s political development: the diverse women who live in historically marginalized regions, rely on precarious land-based labor, sit on the frontlines of the climate emergency, and who are politically and analytically compressed into the largely undifferentiated category of ‘rural women.’ Situated against more than a decade of democratic backsliding, my research interrogates how gendered and class-based inequalities, land-use conflicts, and environmental degradation interact to produce new patterns of governance and contestation. Grounded in immersion-based fieldwork and informed by comparative and interdisciplinary insights that bridge agrarian and gender studies with political science, my project offers a fresh account of rural politics in contemporary Tunisia while generating analytical leverage on unequal development and state–society relations under authoritarianism.
Profile
Dhouha Djerbi is a PhD candidate at the International Relations/Political Science department and an affiliate with the Gender Center. Her research interests include contentious politics, rural state-building, and gender politics. Her work has appeared in Middle East Law and Governance, Antipode, Journal of Peasant Studies among others; her fieldwork has received funding from l’Institut de Recherche sur Le Maghreb Contemporain, the Project on Middle East Political Science, the American Political Science Association and the European International Studies Association.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
- Rural Politics
- Contentious Politics
- Gender and Development
- Social Reproduction Theories
- Field Methods
- Qualitative Methods
Selected Works
- Djerbi, Dhouha. 2025. “Countercurrents to the Green Energy Transition: Contested Development, Procedural Injustice, and Sovereignty Struggles in Tunisia’s Green Hydrogen Contention.” Journal of Labor and Society 1(aop): 1–54.
- Djerbi, Dhouha. 2025. “Property and Land Rights”. The Sage International Encyclopedia of Politics and Gender. Ed. Lia Roberts.
- Djerbi, Dhouha. November 2025. “’We Want to Breathe’—Dispatch from Gabes, Tunisia.” Middle East Research and Information Project.
- Djerbi, Dhouha. 2024. “The Social Reproductive Roots of Agrarian Contention: Gendered Labor amid Peasant Struggles in Tunisia.” Antipode.
- Darwich, May, Pascal Menoret, Aseel Azab-Osman, Ansar Jasim, Dhouha Djerbi, Peter Habib, Samer Abboud, Ibrahim Rabaia, and Lourdes Habash. 2025. “Asphalt, Water, and Power: The Politics of Infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa.” Middle East Law and Governance.
- Djerbi, Dhouha. 2024. “Tunisia’s Amilat: Agrarian Crises and the Feminization of Casual Agri cultural Work.” In Gender and Agrarian Transitions: Liberation Perspectives from the South, eds. Dzodzi Tsikata, Paris Yeros, and Archana Prasad. New Delhi: Tulika Books.
Fellowships, Grant and Awards
- American Political Science Association Centennial Center Research Grant
- American Political Science Association Women, Gender, and Politics Section Support Grant
- European International Studies Association Fieldwork Support Grant
- Project on Middle East Political Science Field Grant
- Center for Maghreb Studies in Tunis, Tunisia, Non-Resident Research Fellow (2022-2024)
Project: Maghrib from the Peripheries: Property, Natural Resources, and Social Actors in North Africa
OTHER WORK EXPERIENCES
- Gender Advisor to the German Office to the African Union in Addis Ababa (2021-2022)
- Intern for the Water Integrity Network (2020-2021)
AFFILIATIONS
- Gender Center