Critique internationale - Content
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[One Room, Many Fields: International Negotiations as a Field Site for Anthropological Research]
This paper discusses dimensions of fieldwork in complex fields as they present themselves in international institutions, especially in the United Nations and its many sub-organizations and associated committees. The paper seeks to complement the growing literature on the anthropology of the United Nations and the anthropology of the European Community with reflections on the specific methodologies applicable to research in such settings. On the basis of field research in the World Intellectual Property Organization, the paper shows how the complexity of the international research field may be addressed. Understanding the ethnographic parameters of this field site contributes to an understanding of negotiation dynamics and of international organizations.
[The Construction of International Norms Regarding Refugee Protection within the Executive Committee of the HCR]
Each year, the executive committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees adopts by consensus Conclusions on the International Protection of Refugees. These are regarded as universal standards in the area of asylum and are part of the multiple international recommendations that shape what some today refer to as a transnational legal order. The Conclusions contribute to specifying what attitude states should adopt towards the populations living on their territory. Drawing upon an ethnographic approach, this article analyzes the manner in which these global norms are constructed upstream within networks of transnational experts and multilateral forums. Who are the actors who participate in their definition and on the basis of what frameworks of action and reflection? How are they subsequently negotiated by diplomats occupying fundamentally divergent stances and representations? How, finally, are universality and consensus socially constructed?
[Indigenous Peoples in the United Nations: A New Actor in the Fabrication of International Norms]
This article examines the manner in which representatives of indigenous peoples use the platform of the United Nations and an international movement in ninety countries to construct the principles upon which they may be recognized as collective, rights bearing subjects. In 2007, this movement – largely unstructured but effective in terms of strategic alliances – successfully established a legal instrument at the level of the international community: the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In order to be moral and because they can have political, financial and legal consequences, these measures are capable of giving rise to significant transformations in the fields of politics, governance and autonomy. The need to participate in the activities of the United Nations allowed the formation of a collective native « us », structured a space for demands that went beyond the institution and related it to the field of human rights in other areas of public policy. By contributing to the fabrication of norms, this multi-headed policy actor furnished itself with a collective voice on the international scene capable of resolving the tensions inherent to spatial dispersion, linguistic fragmentation and political atomization. As an international entity, it raises a number of questions regarding locally observed discrepancies, modes of identification, state classifications and political and economic experiences.
[How the State and the World Bank Govern Involontary Displacement in Mumbai]
The new architecture of governance in countries that have borrowed from the IMF and the World Bank entails, on the one hand, an increasing transnationalisation of the state and, on the other, the involvement of supranational as well as subnational non-state actors in the making and implementation of soft law and policy. Among its consequences are a diffusion of power, a dilution of accountability and legal uncertainty as a result of a plurality of competing norms of different origin. These developments are ambivalent in their effects on state sovereignty and citizenship rights with policy being negotiated between international financial organisations and the national executive without either legislative deliberation or public debate. Unable to influence policy-making or implentation, protest by citizens turns to a judicial contestation both in state courts and international bodies, like the Inspection Panel of the World Bank. The chapter delineates some of these shifts in the constellation of governance and the practice of citizenship rights using ethnographic material from a World Bank financed urban infrastructure project being currently implemented in the city of Mumbai. It analyses overlapping sovereignties and fragmentation of citizenship rights along with the pragmatic judicial politics of slumdwelllers in their quest for justice.
[The Arab « Revolutions »]
Since late 2010 large-scale non-violent uprisings and their ripple effects have transformed the politics of the Arab countries to an extent not seen in decades. The autocratic rulers of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya were pushed aside while most of their counterparts elsewhere continue to face various forms and degrees of contestation. However, serious challenges to these authoritarian regimes have not (yet) entailed their complete and definite demise, with the possible exception of Tunisia. Developments on the ground illustrate that contestation from below, responses from above, and the transformation of individual political regimes closely reflect the history and the « nature » of each of the states concerned. At the same time they pose additional challenges to much critiqued but common assumptions about collective action in general and in Arab contexts in particular. On the other hand, the limited extent to which political regimes have been transformed so far partially supports recently contested assumptions about the resilience and longevity of authoritarian rule in Arab states. Whether or not developing into revolutions, recent change selectively echoes arguments about modernization and points to the continued topicality of Tocquevillian ideas
[Multiculturalism and Identity Construction in Chili (1990-2011)]
This article examines three emergent ethnic subjects in Chili – Afro-descendants, the Diaguita and the Palestinians – from the perspective of their respective organizations. A particularity of these organizations is that they appeared in the public space in the immediate wake of the multicultural policies that were implemented throughout Latin America over course of the 1990s in response to large Indian mobilizations. While these emergent subjects did not displace the Mapuche question – the first and largest Indian mobilization in Chili – their unprecedented place in public space was more than epiphenomenal. What was at stake was the way in which the new political economy of identities in Chili was organized. Indeed, their prominence must not be read as the simple unveiling of historically but hitherto invisible ethnic groups; it also to a large degree corresponded to the production of difference in the present. This sequence invites us to reflect on both the role of the state in the production of ethnic demands and the manner in which the demands of some play upon the demands of others.
[Why Intervene? The Just Cause Criterion in the Theory of Armed Humanitarian Intervention]
In general, the humanitarian justification for military intervention adopts the criteria of traditional just war doctrine: just cause, legitimate authority, good intentions, positive effect, last recourse and proportionality. There are at least three ways of approaching the first of these criteria, that of just cause. Some authors formulate it in terms of rights: since humanitarian intervention is defined as aiming to prevent or put an end to massive violations of human rights, determining the just cause is ultimately a matter of stating what rights are in question. Most authors formulate this in terms of acts of violence: they prepare a list of crimes that in their view constitute just causes of intervention. The third approach consists of phrasing the question in terms of harm, without necessarily specifying what rights have been violated or what crimes have caused harm. This position falls within the framework of a consequentialist perspective.
État des savoirs et pistes de recherche sur la violence politique
Nina Eliasoph, Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare’s End, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2011, XVIII-308 pages.
Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within. The Marranos. Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2009, 490 pages.
Adrian Favell et Virginie Guiraudon (eds), Sociology of European Union, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 266 pages.
