Abstract:

The Malaysian political system is characterised by the connivance of powers, the intricate relationship existing between political, social and economic actors. The liberalization of the public sphere since the resignation of the 22 year-long leadership of Mohammad Mahathir has indeed paved the way for the emergence of civil surrogates of political parties. Political parties in fact use Malaysian civil society as a veil to hide and promote the rise of militants who are indeed sub-contractors of party-discourse and actions. Connivance militancy is a secret political arrangement by which a formal political actor (i.e: a political party, a government or a politician) sub-contracts legal and/or illegal political actions serving its interests and ranging from advocacy, to demonstrations and violence, to groups of individuals (Lemière 2013). This paper is drawn from a new and on-going comparative research in Malaysia (2008-2014) and Tunisia (2014) exploring the rise connivance militants in young democracies as a conjectural and/or systemic phenomenon. This paper based primary sources and ethnographic interviews will show how the end of the Mahathir era in Malaysia and the fall of the system of patronage in Tunisia may have reconfigured the system of political allegiance; it will also expose how connivance militancy is today formulated and shaped in both countries. In a longer term, this comparative perspective aims at defining a general pattern of connivance militancy in transitional regimes from two different areas of study and in spite of national specificities.