DescriptionPrimarily, this dissertation explores the link between dictatorship and pollution in Tunisia. Specifically, it argues that Ben Ali’s authoritarian neoliberalism produced unequal socio-natural relations between waste, certain bodies and landscapes, sustained and concealed these inequalities through the manipulation of data, corruption, infrastructure and a facade of state environmentalism. It charts the emergence of this socio-spatial inequality from colonization through to structural adjustment programs and thereby interprets them in the context of the uneven social, economic and environmental costs of industries and global markets. The study demonstrates that state environmentalism was a particular governing fiction that was central to the survival of the regime and which together with widespread corruption shaped environmental governance under Ben Ali’s rule. It then concludes that the waste crisis that followed the revolution was a rupture of political fictions that brought public secrets viscerally to the fore. This revelation lead to struggles over truths and meanings of the dictatorial past. Due to the physical ubiquity of waste and the reemergence of marginalized communities associated with it, this conflict was expressed in the language of waste, thereby shaping the post-revolutionary experience of Tunisia and turning it into the balad el-zible (country of rubbish).