Sources and data collection practices

This thesis draws from a number of original and existing sources. Elite data were collected under the ‘Violence, Elites and Resilience in States Under Stress’ project, which supported the recording and classification of thousands of individual political elites across the African continent and the Middle East. For each of the political elites, relevant socio-political identities were identified, in an effort to isolate patterns of inclusion and representation in the highest political offices. Importantly, the boundary problem in elite studies requires that elites are selected according to explicit and reproduceable criteria. In this thesis, the temporal and functional scope of the elite data vary according to the specific research question and methodological considerations, and is discussed in each of the analytical chapters presented below.

Data collection was conducted using publicly available sources, including monthly bulletins of cabinet composition as well as official government documents and online media articles. Information were triangulated in order to verify their reliability and further supplemented with interviews with experts. In Chapter 4, data on government ministers and secretaries of state in Tunisia from 1987 through 2018 were collected using the weekly issues of the ‘Official Journal of the Tunisian Republic’ to reconstruct the monthly composition of the cabinet, along with international and local magazines providing information around the socio-political profile of the cabinet members, including political affiliation, regional origin, socio-professional background and age. Hard copies of Tunisian magazines were available in the library of the Centre d'Études Maghrébines à Tunis where I conducted fieldwork from January to April 2017. Data on African cabinet ministers in Chapter 5 were drawn from the African Cabinet and Political Elite Dataset (ACPED), which tracks political and ethno-regional identities in several African countries from 1997 and 2018. In Chapter 7, difficulty of getting full, consistent information about wartime Yemeni political elites suggested that the focus of the paper was limited to a few dozen national political elites, i.e. individuals occupying a position

in one of the political, military and security institutions in the Sana’a-based government.

However, data collection for Yemen extend to hundreds of wartime political elites affiliated to all camps and active between January 2018 and June 2019.

For violence data, used extensively in Chapters 5 and 8, the main source is the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which collects geo-referenced data on conflict events in African countries from 1997 to real time (Raleigh et al. 2010).

ACLED data are collected using a variety of local, regional, national and international news sources, constituting the most comprehensive public collection of disaggregated conflict and protest data for African states. Events are disaggregated by date, location, type, and groups involved, allowing for analyses of overall violence levels, subnational patterns of violence and individual armed groups’ activity.

ACLED data were used in recent studies analysing several dimensions of conflict, including electoral violence in Africa (Wahman and Goldring 2020), territorial control in civil wars (Bhavnani and Choi 2012; Reeder 2018), social unrest in North African countries (Ketchley and Barrie 2019), changes in subnational power structures (Raleigh 2016; Raleigh and Dowd 2018), and armed group fragmentation (Dowd 2015). The use of a rigorous and transparent coding methodology reduces the risk of reproducing reporting and coding biases through consistent inclusion criteria and extensive sourcing (Raleigh and Kishi 2019).

In addition, targeted interviews with members of Tunisian and Yemeni political elites were carried out during fieldwork in Tunisia and Lebanon between January and April 2017, and in two rounds in June 2018 and October 2019. In total, around forty semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were conducted with current and former cabinet members, high rank party officials, members of parliament, and a variety of tribal, civil society and policy actors engaged in the political process in Tunisia and Yemen. The results of the interviews were interpreted taking into consideration the position of the researcher vis à vis foreign elites, and the potential agendas each of the elites might pursue in meeting with external researchers (Herod 1999). Three interviews with Algerian experts were conducted via email in relation to the Algeria section for Chapter 6.

Additionally, participation to parliamentary sessions in Tunisia and passive attendance to workshops and public events, as well as informal discussions with elites and experts, provided further benefits to the research during fieldwork. Whilst not all of these

interviews are not included in this research project due to ethical considerations, they nonetheless provided a unique opportunity to engage with the wider socio-political context of these two countries, and to verify and cross-check information obtained in other interviews.

During the research, I adhered to the ethical standards set out in the policies of the University of Sussex. I obtained ethical approval to conduct fieldwork in Tunis based at the Centre d'Études Maghrébines, avoiding research-related travel in areas south of the country as a result of a travel warning issued by the Foreign Office in the aftermath of multiple terrorist attacks targeting foreigners in Tunisia. During this fieldwork, all interviewees were asked to sign consent and information security forms to uphold research ethics standards. All of the interviewees’ identities have been anonymised at their request and, especially in Yemen, due to possible repercussions arising from the current security situation. Other interviews were conducted in Beirut and Tunis during the ‘Exchange’ sessions organised by Middle East Wire in Tunis and by the Sana’a Centre for Strategic Studies in Beirut, which provided arenas to meet a wide range of political elites under ‘Chatham House’ rule. Additionally, these sessions allowed verifying and cross-checking sources to avoid over-relying on unilateral information. Despite their short duration – around one week – the ‘Exchange’ sessions and the lack of control from the researcher over the individual elites invited to them, they contributed to obtain valuable insights into the dynamics under examination in this research project.

4. Non-party ministers and consensual politics in Tunisia