Critique internationale - Content
[The US Military after Irak]
The American counterinsurgency in Irak represents a watershed for the United States military. Quite unlike the operations for which it had prepared itself since Vietnam, and in some ways counter to the ways in which it had understood war in those years, it has put tremendous pressure on the institutions of the Army, in particular. Its initial missteps reflected the disjunction between how the Army saw itself, and what its tasks really were. But to a remarkable degree the Army has adapted to its mission in Iraq, aided by the vast store of experience accumulated during the 1990’s, and by certain innate qualities of professionalism and pragmatism. As of this writing, at any rate, it remains a formidable, and on the whole healthy, institution.
[Demographic Issues in Palestine after the Gaza Withdrawal]
Since Zionism came about in the 19th century, demographics (immigration, emigration, marriage, birthrate and death rate) have played a major role in the establishment of the Jewish community in Palestine and, since 1948, in the consolidation of the state of Israel. Since the war of 1967 and the conquest of the entire Palestinian territory formerly under British mandate, two clashing demographics are at odds with one another: that of the Palestinians in the occupied territories (West Bank with East Jerusalem and Gaza until 2005) and that of the Israelis who colonize these territories. The former aims to preserve this territory for the benefit of its original inhabitants, the second to conquer it for the benefit of the colonists. Until the second Intifada in 2000, the Palestinian fertility rate had remained high. Since then a significant drop has brought it to below the level of that of the Israeli colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has been quite high and even on a rising trend. The causes for the drop in Palestinian fertility and those behind the persistently high fertility among Israeli colonists are studied. The perspectives for the West Bank population for 2025 underscore the rapid growth of the Israeli population to the detriment of the Palestinian population. What political consequences do these demographic changes hold in store?
[Lebanon 2005: Decompositions and Rearrangements]
The year 2005 in Lebanon was a year of great upheavals both as regards its relationship with neighboring Syria and its internal political equilibrium. Since the summer of 2004, Syrian influence has been in the West’s sights, particularly those of France and the United States. Damascus has been enjoined to stop interfering in Lebanon and to help disarm the Hizbollah and Palestinian factions operating on Lebanese soil. The assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, after his resignation, hastened the evacuation of Syrian troops. The following months unleashed popular mobilization unprecedented in the country’s history, but the hopes opened by this era of political emancipation were soon tarnished by the usual maneuvers of alliance-forging during the Spring elections of 2005. In the bellicose regional environment, the persistence of communitarian and political cleavages and vital questions such as the presidency of the Republic, continuing resistance and the future of Lebanese-Syrian relations perpetuate alarming scenarios for the future of Lebanon.
[Manipulation and Mobilizations: Spain from March 11 to 14, 2004]
The Spanish parliamentary elections of March 14, 2004 took place in a political context that could be described as out of the ordinary. This was the result of the Madrid terrorist attacks of March 11. As a consequence, the PSOE registered an unexpected victory against the PP. The present article seeks to understand and analyse the process of transformation from national mourning to protest vote against the Aznar government. His attempt at political manipulation by laying the blame for the terrorist attack entirely at the door of the ETA backfired. It contributed to motivate the leftwing electorate, who had abstained in previous elections, to return to the polls and vote for the PSOE. This was an unusual case of the less conventional forms of political participation and the traditional electoral process coming together in a common rejection of political lies
[Return-to-Work Policies in the United States, Great Britain and France]
This article analyses the political origins of the second wave of welfare reform includes policies designed and implemented in the early 2000s. The reforms investigated are the reform of the Minimum Insertion Income (Revenu Minimum d’Insertion) in France (2003); the White House ‘Working Towards Independence’ proposal, which strengthens current work requirements for welfare recipients in the USA (2002); and proposals for getting people on Disability Benefits back into the labor force in Britain (2002-2004). Despite their divergences, these reforms implement a stricter conditionality regime for welfare recipients because governments have become increasingly convinced about the need to reduce ‘joblessness’. Their other point in common is that relatively tight welfare policy communities composed of political appointees played a crucial role in the promotion of a new workfare agenda in the early 2000s.
[The Status of the Victim in European Policies Combating Trafficking in Women]
Although trafficking in human beings has appeared regularly on the agenda of Western governments, European institutions and international organizations since the beginning of the 90s, research devoted to this issue remains scarce. This article intends to remedy the relative disaffection of political sociology for trafficking issues by showing how they have become a European and international policy issue over the past ten years. Analyzing influences of the discursive dialectic between security and humanitarian approaches leads to posit a marginalization of the victim in European and international beliefs and practices. To what extent can a common policy against human trafficking be devised to counterbalance the competition of interests and a lacking sociology of the victim by conferring on the EU the role of mediator and catalyst?
No Abstract
[Zimbabwe: Land Hunger and the War Veteran-led Occupations Movement in 2000]
In 2000 Zimbabwe witnessed a dramatic nationwide land occupations movement led by veterans of the 1970s guerrilla war. The dynamics, geographical breadth, politics as well as the position of the state distinguished it qualitatively from preceding waves of land occupations. The war veterans’ growing disappointment over land and conflicts with the government they considered to have betrayed liberation objectives led to direct confrontation and eventually an about-face by the Zimbabwean state, also subject to tremendous international pressure to halt the controversial fast-track land reform. Although the authorities increasingly latched onto this land movement ‘from above’ after 2000, it nonetheless brought an end to white control of large farms. Yet for war veterans and farm workers, many questions remain as to the fairness of land distribution and the capacity of the current framework to eliminate social inequalities in the countryside.
[Demobilization and politicization of Polish farmers since 1989]
By opting for a form of economic modernization that was bound to profoundly transform the agricultural sector, the 1989 turnaround caused the social legitimacy of the peasantry to weaken. During the 1990s, the two main farmers’ parties, the PSL and the Samoobrona union nevertheless managed to repoliticize the “farmer issue.” The first focused on a representation of the peasant world based on a valuation of its identity and its political and social role; the second proved through the January 1999 strikes, that the peasantry was actually capable of significant mobilization. But the Samoobrona went further: by undertaking the task of political professionalisation, it has become a sort of catch-all party that addresses all social categories weakened by reform.
[Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST): in Search of a Better World?]
An analysis of transformations in the structures of the agrarian sphere in Brazil since 1964 can help to better understand the emergence and expansion of the MST (Movimento Sem Terra). The influence of movements linked to the progressive Catholic Church that have backed the landless rural workers’ mobilization, demands and organization, has stepped in where the trade union movement has proven unable to combat the concentration of property and social exclusion. The trajectory of the MST, its specificities, its forms of struggle and organization and the formation of behaviors and alternative values, reveal a socialist ideology blended with religious influences that is now turning toward the alternative globalization movement
[Agrarian Radicalism and Maoism in Nepal]
For over 10 years the Maoist revolution has been raging in Nepal. Rent by civil war, the country is witnessing the ruin of development efforts that until recently fueled nationalist illusions. The absolutist Hindu monarchies of the Shahs, whose religious and historical roots grow out of a long national past of warring conquest, is living out its last days in the face of the success of a new radicalism which, in scarcely a decade, has transformed farmers who worked the arid mountain soil with swing-ploughs into guerrilla fighters trained to use the Kalashnikov.
Éric Agrikoliansky, Olivier Fillieule et Nonna Mayer (dir.), L’altermondialisme en France : la longue histoire d’une nouvelle cause, Paris, Flammarion, 2005, 370 pages.
Stephen Peter Rosen, War and Human Nature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005, 216 pages.
Jon Elster, Closing the Books : Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, XII + 298 pages.
