Critique internationale - Content

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[Census and National Legitimacy in Russia and the post-Soviet Area]
Post-communism has not changed the way post-Soviet states use identity categories on the census. All of them continue to count their population according to an ethnonational criteria. The principle of self-determination, according to which a state is based on the historic right of a so-called “titular” nationality, has consolidated the hegemony of the nationality mindset. A primordialist vision of historical science as the ultimate means to gauge the authenticity of national claims remains prevalent in academic and political discourse. During post-Soviet censuses, the most important claims seeking to separate a group from a titular nationality were rejected by Russian, Ukrainian, and Tatar elites. These censuses have also shown an important decrease of Russian populations outside of Russia, due to an “acceleration decolonisation” in the South and an “identity reidentification” in the West, as in Ukraine. The Russian Census was open to public debates, a civic improvement that is called into question by the resurgence of authoritarianism in Russia.

[Naming to Control in Laos: From the Colonial State to the Communist Regime]
The various regimes that have marked the contemporary political history of Laos – the French colonial state (1893-1953), the Independent Kingdom of Laos (1953-1975) and, since 1975, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) – have all carried out ethnic censuses. The classifications that have been used over the course of these three political periods highlight the rulers’ desire to define the community they seek to dominate. For this reason, the census has performed a variety of different functions: helping to collect taxes under the French administration; an instrument in the service of the young Laotian state’s nationalist project following independence; and, under the present regime, a dual purpose tool for promoting cultural diversity and monitoring ethnic groups. At the same time, postwar census campaigns have created a space in which a number of so-called “minority” ethnic groups have been able to express their identity. The study of ethnic classification – whether as an instrument of power or a vector of identity – is essential to understanding the politics of identity in contemporary Laos.

[The Chinese in the United Kingdom, or the Illusion of Selective Immigration]
Ethnographic research conducted in both China and the United Kingdom shows that the public policy of the British state in the area of immigration is not a rigid constraint externally imposed on migrants. On the contrary, it is incorporated by the latter into their strategies, which leads them to migratory, employment and survival practices that produce the social phenomena (false asylum claims, illegal work, etc.) against which the aforementioned public policy claims to act. Far from reflecting the individual qualities possessed by a given candidate for migration, moreover, screening criteria (legal residence, educational background and so on) are merely administrative statuses supplied to clients by professionals in China and the United Kingdom in exchange for hard cash. Official rhetoric concerning “selective” migration only results in limiting the number of entrants, with no effect on their “quality”. Finally, it turns out that Chinese immigration to the United Kingdom tends to leave the ethnic sector and enter a “neo-proletarian” sector that plays a transitional role on the road to integration into the mainstream labor market, although conditions are sometimes more difficult for employees there.

[Sovereignty and Governmentality: The Greek-Turkish Rivalry in Eastern Thrace]
The question of the largely Turkish-speaking Muslim minority of Western Thrace is usually seen as a simple component of the “Turkish-Greek dispute”. With two competing state logics inscribed in the social body, it is worth retracing the processes that have resulted in the production of a “Turkish” minority and the politicization of village, linguistic and cultural membership. The case study presented here locates itself in the tradition of work concerning the “demographic engineering” that prepared and accompanied the creation of nation states after the fall of the Ottoman, Hapsburg and Russian empires. The production of state knowledge includes ethnic and statistical categories, censuses and cartography, the normalization of place names and even biological experiments. In the case of Eastern Thrace, an additional dimension emerged relating to the joint-management of the Muslim population by the Greek and Turkish authorities. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, we use the term ‘co-governmentality’ to describe the present configuration – non-conflictual, even though inherited from the Cypriot crisis – in which territory and population are related to one another as attributes of state sovereignty shared by two states.

Ivan Ermakoff, Ruling oneself out : a theory of collective abdications, Durham, Duke University press, 2008, 402 pages.