Amid persistent inflation, high public debt, and reconfigured international power dynamics, economic security is no longer a geopolitical concept reserved for states. It has now become a line of defense that every Tunisian company must learn to build for itself.
A raw material that is surging, a foreign supplier that disappears overnight, and a customer that trims orders because its own country is going through a period of turbulence. These are the main shocks affecting Tunisian businesses, especially since 2020, when business leaders learned, often in a rush, what it means to operate in a global economy that has once again become a battlefield.
The pandemic, followed by the war in Ukraine, acted as a brutal wake-up call to a reality that many preferred to ignore: competitiveness is no longer enough; one must also know how to protect oneself.
It is precisely this question that a reflection note published by the Arab Institute of Business Leaders (IACE) tackles. The document directly questions the economic model that Tunisian companies need to preserve their gains, as well as the sharing of responsibilities between the State and the private sector in a context where the country’s budgetary room for maneuver has been substantially reduced.
A Brutally Reactivated Notion
Economic security is not a recent invention. The concept, theorized in the 1990s by experts such as Bernard Esambert or Christian Harbulot, denotes the capacity of a country, and by extension its companies, to protect its know-how, its market shares, and its autonomy in the face of a global competition that has replaced territorial conquests with the conquest of markets and technologies.
What the health crisis and then the Russo-Ukrainian conflict have changed is the scale and speed of the threat. What previously fell under strategic foresight became, in a matter of months, an operational concern for any Tunisian export-oriented SME dependent on a single supplier or a single market.
The Company Against a War It Did Not Choose
