ABSTRACT
Based on 14 months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2019, this chapter presents biographical sketches of a handful of young men from Kasserine, a historically marginalised city in interior Tunisia, and makes a contribution to studies on the state, democratic transitions, masculinities and migration. All men face major obstacles to the realisation of manhood, understood as decent, respectable and ‘modern’ life. In their precarious existence, oscillating between various states of unemployment and semi-employment, between legal and illegal labour, the young men in their inability to realise the socially accepted values of masculinity represent the implications of the neoliberal condition. Yet the chapter argues that the young men have, for the most part, not internalised their precarious condition, but instead understand it as social and state failure. The chapter also demonstrates that, even though their lives are characterised by waiting, none of the young men are passive even if their actions often reinforce their marginalisation.
