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