Critique internationale - Content
[The Italian Left and the Movement for Illegal Aliens Civil Liberties]
In this article we analyze the formation since the late 1990s of a protest movement in Italy against the administrative detention of illegal aliens and the rising importance of this issue on the centerleft government agenda since its election in April 2006. To do so, we take interactive approach to the political process, refusing to view social movements solely as anti-institutional phenomena. After having pointed out the importance of the current debate within the government coalition with regard to the conversion of the CPTAs (temporary stay and assistance centers), we describe the emergence of radical protest action against detention over the past 15 years, presenting the composition of these mobilizations and their repertoires of action. The recent unification on the grounds of their common political culture and grammar is then described. Lastly, returning to the matter of the importance that detention has recently taken in the left's internal debates and attempting to identify the causes of it, we describe the new relations that have been established between parties and the immigrant civil rights movement, between centerleft party apparatuses and their peripheries, as well as the structure of the political opportunities they entail
[Catalonia’s New Autonomy Plan: Act Two of the State of Autonomies]
On June 18, 2006, the Catalan electorate ratified by referendum the new autonomy statute that now governs relations between the autonomous community of Catalonia and the rest of Spain. This new statute is of particular importance in that it announces a new era, Act Two of the State of Autonomies. Indeed, the scope of this reform not only covers Catalunya's relations with the rest of Spain, it also influences the relations each autonomous community has with the rest of the country and particularly the other statutory reforms underway, such as that for Andalusia. This analysis sets out to determine what Catalonia’s autonomous status reveals about this innovative form of territorial organization exemplified by a so-called “autonomic state” and in what way it particularly influences its evolution. The strategy that involves instrumentalizing a symbolic resource (“Catalan identity”) to legal (more self-government) as well as political ends (conquest and consolidation of local leadership) is actually highly successful; enough so to be picked up by other autonomous communities and be a core feature of Spain’s contemporary political formula.
[Food Crisis and Child Malnutrition in Niger: The 2005 "Famine" Reassessed]
The “famine” of 2005 in Niger received extensive media coverage in Europe, today acknowledged to have been excessive. This “food crisis” had several causes, the main one being unforeseen sharp price increases in a highly monetarized rural context in which ingenuity and migration have become essential strategies to purchase the additional grain now required each year. The crisis in Nigerian rainfed agriculture is in fact structural. Media attention also thrived on images of child malnutrition, which is actually chronic throughout the entire region and stems from a combination of economic, social and cultural factors. Mass food distribution (not targeting the poor) as a result of the media attention was interpreted by the local populations as a new form of “development rent” and has given rise to various strategies of captation. The analysis of this crisis discloses a complex reality removed from the misguided debates of the “humanitarian organizations vs. development institutions”, “economic causes vs. cultural causes” or “commercial cultures vs. food self-sufficiency” variety.
[The Antiwar Movements in Japan 1990-2005]
Going beyond the two traditional pillars of postwar pacifism in Japan – anti-nuclearism and anti-security treaty protest – this article examines the peace movements in Japan between 1990 and 2005 from three different angles: antibase activism in Okinawa; the elimination of violence against women in war; and constitutional preservation. It looks at the emergence of multiple overlapping pacifist discourses including gender, race, coloniality, and ecology. While the current antiwar movements draw upon the legacy of its antecedents in the 1960s and 1970s, they are much less dependent on the organization and socialist orientation of labor unions and more ready to draw upon global networks and human rights discourses.
[Waning Customs: Culture and Politics with the Advent of The Neoliberal Trend in the South Pacific]
The post-September 11, 2001 years have been characterized in Melanesia by the direct re-engagement of the former colonial powers (Australia and New Zealand) and by the obligation imposed on the young Oceanic states to implement neoliberal political and economic “reforms”. An “arc of instability” supposedly stretches from Timor to Fiji, with a string of “failed states” of which the dereliction can only be treated by military intervention and the establishment of structural adjustment plans considered as a cure-all. This article sheds light on this turning point in international relations and undertakes to analyze its local repercussions with respect to traditions, in a context in which Melanesian societies and cultures are now regarded with an openly critical eye by the former colonial powers. The decline of ethnocultural nationalisms in the region, enshrined as state ideologies in the aftermath of independence, has a number of parallels with the current situation of biculturalism, a state institution in New Zealand since the 1980s, which is also now in crisis
[Family Code Reform in Morocco and Algeria: What Progress for Democracy?]
The reform of the family code enacted in Morocco in 2004
and in Algeria in 2005, reforms aiming to modernize the family institution,
which as a result becomes more egalitarian for women and strengthens children's
rights, is the outcome of a long and complex political process. The
mobility of the positions and alliances of the actors in this process is a sign of
the magnitude of the political reconfiguration underway: appropriation of
the religious theme by all of the actors and semantic quarrels over the
grammar of reform; resulting paralysis of national representative political
bodies and mechanisms of appeal that refer to the scenario of authoritarian
modernization, top-down reform, as well as modalities that challenge the viability
of appeal procedures. Symptomatic of the judicialization of the political
processes, the largely open debate on the application of the reform accompanying
social transformations or, on the contrary, obliging society to conform
to models imposed from the outside has made the figure of the judge emerge
as the central actor in the reform.
Joel S. Fetzer, J. Christopher Soper, Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005, XV-208 pages.
Madawi Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 2007, XXI-308 pages
William Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003, 310 pages.
Malika Zeghal, Les islamistes marocains : le défi à la monarchie, Paris, La Découverte, 2005, 332 pages.
Marie Miran, Islam, histoire et modernité en Côte d’Ivoire, Paris, Karthala, 2006, 546 pages.
Daniel N. Posner, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005, XV + 338 pages.
