Applying Principal-Agent Theory to Security Force Assistance: The Atypical Case of Post-2015 Tunisia

This article applies the Principal-Agent model to Security Force Assistance (SFA) in Tunisia, problematising some of its assumptions and advancing complementary notions to capture evolving international and national security practices. By investigating how post-2015 SFA contributed to the reconfiguration and evolution of domestic actors, national strategies, and debates on security in the context of regime change, we argue that it epitomises a counter-intuitive success story of principals-agents' dynamics leading to increased security performance. Meanwhile, SFA evolved from an emergency and state-centric approach, to a partially diversified set of practices embodying more comprehensive and bottom-up understanding of societal and human security.