The Spatial Politics of Blockades: Disrupting Phosphate Industrial Production in Post‐2011 Tunisia

ABSTRACT This article examines blockades targeting the phosphate‐processing industry in the Gabes region of Tunisia following the uprisings of 2010–2011, questioning their contributions and limitations. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019, it foregrounds the spatial dimensions of blockades, conceived as ‘generative refusals’ that simultaneously intervene in industrial flows and produce socio‐political space. By focusing on territorially embedded and relational spatial practices, the article examines various cases of blockades involving fishermen, unemployed residents and inhabitants of particularly exposed areas, showing how protesters mobilise situated spatial knowledge to intervene in material and logistical flows, while grounding claims in locally differentiated experiences of industrial harm. The article demonstrates that blockades generate political effects along three registers: creating visibility for otherwise marginalised grievances, opening negotiation channels with state actors and, under specific conditions, securing concrete concessions. It also challenges approaches that interpret blockades primarily through the logic of strategic chokepoint targeting, showing that actors frequently engage in opportunistic or substitutable targeting focused on sites that maximise political leverage. Finally, it complicates readings of blockades as fostering broad anti‐extractivist or anti‐capitalist solidarities, highlighting how territorial anchoring both enables mobilisation and generates fragmentation and impaired collective negotiating power—dynamics further exacerbated by selective state responses. The article thus advances debates on blockades by providing a grounded and politically nuanced understanding, attentive to socio‐spatial inequalities, legitimacy claims and the ambivalent effects of territorialised mobilisation.