Critique internationale - Content
[Narenda Modi's Gujarat: Lessons of an Election Victory]
Narenda Modi's triumph for the BJP (Indian People's Party) during the regional elections of 2007 strengthened the hold of Hindu nationalism in this state. As long as Modi and the local Congress leaders occupied front stage, the election campaign was dominated by economic development and governance issues, given that Congress hesitated to attack Modi over the anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002. However, the campaign tours of national Congress leaders such as Sonia Gandhi brought this issue back to the fore, to the delight of Modi who reacted by posing as defender of law and order it in the face of the Muslim threat. Modi's Hindu national hostility is, however, merely his most salient trait. It is blended with a form of high-tech populism, a strong personality cult, a definite authoritarianism and constant praise for managerial governance. This combination has rallied around Modi the business world and the new middle class, whose anti-parliamentarianism is tending to spread elsewhere in India. The Modi phenomenon – an atypical within the BJP where individuals usually take a back seat to organizations – could well hail a transformation in the Hindu nationalist movement, even in Indian politics.
[NGOs and Minority Issues in Bulgaria: Beyond the Import/Export of International
Norms and Models]
Since the fall of communism, a vast body of literature has been devoted to the transfers to the east of international norms, rules and standards in public policy. Rather than view this process via the study of export rationales (alternately seen as virtuous or asymmetrical) or import rationales (supposedly passive or zealous), this article examines the concrete mechanisms through which "social problems," policies are devised and remodeled as the various local, regional and transnational actors take them up. Starting with a study of the role of NGOs in the construction of minority issues in Bulgaria, it highlights the multiple ways in which the categories and international priorities are shaped by Bulgarian leaders that have learned to use the international repertoire to position themselves on a competitive domestic market. The analysis also underscores the fragile, porous nature of borders between what is presented as pertaining to export or import due to the multipositionality of agents that are both "local" and integrated into transnational networks, even involved in formulating recommendations for so-called "export" institutions. In place of the "export/import" pair, it might be heuristic to substitute the notion of circulating themes and mechanism, while investigating their integration into local histories.
[Democracy Promotion Organizations and the Building of Indonesian Election Bureaucracies]
The political effects of the 1999 Jakarta visit of some one hundred representatives of democracy-building organizations can only really be measured in view of Indonesia's historical relationship to law and voting, which has its own historicity over the long term. This history is especially marked by the emergence within the anticolonial nationalist movement in the 1930s of theories hostile to competitive multipartism. Strongly influenced by the doctrines of spiritual leaders such as Ki Hadjar Dewantara, and included in the Constitution of 1945 by Raden Soepomo, these theories were the spearhead for the authoritarian disqualification by General Suharto's regime (1966-98) of the parliamentary order of the 1950s. In 1999, prior to the first election meant to do away with authoritarianism, those theories found elective affinities with the preferences for a majority voting system advocated by representatives from North American democracy-promoting organizations. The presence in Jakarta of these representatives moreover led to profound changes in the internal hierarchies of certain social-professional spaces and certain segments of the bureaucracy. The Reformasi in fact signaled the comeback of legal professionals in the political field, whereas the relationship with "democracy experts" of the NDI (National Democratic Institute) or the IFES (International Foundation for Election Systems) enabled subaltern personnel in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to gain ascendancy over their higher-ranking colleagues.
[Collective Demobilization in Cameroon: Between Post-authoritarian Regime and Extrovert Activism]
There is no denying that collective mobilization in Cameroon around the political and economic problems in the country, presided by the same chief of state, Paul Biya, since 1982, is very weak. A "post-authoritarian" regime and the strong political extroversion largely explain the dearth of social movements. The successive triumphs of the single party and its intimacy with the state apparatus have led to the domination of a power wielded by instilling fear. This negative assessment of power struggles between the authorities and any mobilized actors is coupled with a low level of autonomy in selecting and formulating causes to defend. The extroversion of collective action in fact leads to importing causes that are not specific to Cameroon. But appropriation of these causes in political or symbolic terms is prohibited in the post-authoritarian space: The restriction of political time to the here and now and the monopolization of political utterance constitute obstacles that are difficult to overcome to formulate common causes. Lastly, the state's obstruction of external collective actors prevents those who have mobilized from getting involved in public action. Furthermore, they must compete with international actors implicated in political reforms without challenging power relations.
[Salafism in France: From Islamic Revolution to Conservative Revolution]
For about the past 20 years, Salafism has become an incontrovertible actor in the re-Islamization of French suburbs. Despite reference to a historically ossified model, that of the pious ancestors (Prophet Mohammed's companions), the Salafist current is a dynamic one. This article intends to analyze the ideological transformations of the movement. Although there has been a weakening of the Salafist political line, the protest dimension remains one of the pillars of this school's doctrinal identity. Its ideological transformations are less linked to an internal revolution than to external political constraints and imperatives (state pressure, international context). That being the case, the ideological re-orientations of French Salafists are primarily a reaction to the call of an era, the state of political balances of power and the constraints they impose.
[Maghreb in the Identitarian Construction of Postcolonial Tunisia]
The image that Maghreban construct of North Africa is a little investigated subject. This study examines the question of Maghreban imaginaire from a South-South perspective on the basis of a systematic analysis of a corpus of twelve school history textbooks published in Tunisia between 1956 and 2005. This approach implicitly echoes current French debates on the way colonial history is presented to younger generations. It also attends to grasp the meaning of the various categories which are Maghreb, North Africa, the Muslim West, the south of the Mediterranean, etc., from an endogenous standpoint. The Maghreb is presented as a political rather than a cultural concept. This makes the North African space difficult to grasp, as it has multiple, sometimes even contradictory representations. One of the evolutions evidenced is that since "the death of Arab nationalist ideology," the "Mediterranean Maghreb" paradigm is now far from being the mobilizing myth shared by all Maghreban populations.
Panorama des principaux axes de la recherche sur le changement climatique
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2004, X-284 pages.
Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, Liana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006, XX-440 pages.
Sumit Ganguly, Devin T. Hagerty, Fearful Symmetry : India-Pakistan, Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2005, 224 pages.
S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent : Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007, 262 pages.
Robert W. Hefner, Muhammad Qasim Zaman (eds), Schooling Islam : The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006, 278 pages.
