Critique internationale - Content
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[Narratives of Emergence: Rising Powers and the End of the Third World?]
One of the most important issues concerning today’s emerging powers is the impact of their rise on the concepts of the Third World and the Global South. This article examines the various ways in which emerging powers do indeed challenge many common assumptions about world politics and have de-stabilized many taken-for-granted political groupings and historical geographies. But it also highlights the limits of this line of argument. We can indeed understand much about emerging powers in terms of how they are seeking to navigate and best position themselves within an existing state-centric, liberal and capitalist order whilst accepting many of the underlying assumptions and values of that order. But the nature of that navigation has been shaped by their historical trajectory and by the developmental, societal and geopolitical context of their emergence.
[Transforming Global Security Governance: Emerging Countries and G-x Groups]
International cooperation is criticized by emerging powers as too Western-centric. Western powers themselves are equally critical of international cooperation for failing adequately to harness emerging powers. Existing theories of cooperation assume a stable geo-political order, led by countries with a shared conception of the scope and modalities of global cooperation. These assumptions are no longer justified. ‘Western liberal order’ is in a protracted process of transition. However, there is no new hegemon that would be able (or willing) to replace the United States and to push for a redesign of the global governance architecture from scratch. Emerging powers are engaging in global cooperation in their own way and on their own terms. In sum, while there seems to be a growing demand for effective global cooperation, there are no longer universally applicable concepts to analyze it nor a common language with which to describe it. This paper looks at the changing structural conditions of international cooperation in a period of order transition by examining the dynamics between emerging countries and G-x groups. It develops the argument that G-x groupings offer platforms to renegotiate the underlying constitutional bargain of the Western liberal order. The huge asymmetries of power in the post-Cold War international system and the substantial (structural) challenges of the Western liberal order has led to growing recourse to informal institutions. They have come to play a range of critical roles and occupy a vital space between multilateral governance on the one hand and traditional major power diplomacy on the other. This paper develops an analytical framework able to explain the changing nature of cooperation under power transition.
[Emergent Countries and Nuclear Proliferation: An Illustration of the Teleological Biases in International Relations and Their Effects]
What are the relations between the emergence of a state on the international scene and nuclear proliferation? The claim that the acquisition of nuclear arms systems is a condition or consequence of the emergence of a state is here called into question on the basis of a tripartite analysis. First, at the methodological level, Edward Carr’s original intuition concerning the teleological aspect of the discipline of international relations is reaffirmed by establishing on the basis of six precise indicators the homology between a received understanding of nuclear history as the history of proliferation and developmentalist thought, both of which are teleological. It is then demonstrated at the empirical level that many proliferating states have not in fact emerged while some emergent states have not chosen to acquire nuclear arms systems. At the policy level, finally, it turns out that the correlation between emergence and proliferation is not just incomplete and unsound: if its aim is to identify suspects of proliferation in order to better prevent the latter, it can in fact prove counter-productive.
[Franco-Algerian Dual Nationals: A New Relationship between Nationality and Territoriality]
Even though the statistics are still difficult to establish, dual nationality is now a determinant element in the relationship between France and Algeria. The particular Frenchmen and women who comprise the dual national population are bearers of both the memory of colonialism and of accepted constituents of French national identity. Does the transgression of national ties call into question the legitimacy of the Algerian separatist project or does it rather represent a new continuation of the colonial relationship? Whatever the case, it constitutes a promising arena of research in postcolonial studies.
[“Free Consent” in the Return of Congolese Refugees (DRC) and New Norms for the Application of Repatriation by the HCR]
Between 2005 and 2009, the UNHCR evoked the sole motive of “change of circumstance” in the country of return to justify and promote the repatriation of Congolese refugees to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, reductions in the assistance and protection granted to refugees by host countries has qualified the notion of “free consent” to return, which is nevertheless broadly emphasized by the legal texts governing the terms of voluntary repatriation. The UNHCR is today obliged to take the interests of sponsor and asylum-granting countries into account, generally at the expense of the personal and subjective preferences of refugees and at the risk of erroneous evaluation of the level of security in the region of return. A multi-situated ethnography conducted in host and return regions allows one to grasp the various motivations of refugees in light of the structural and political conditions in which - but also against which - they may be forged.
[Israeli Identity in an Era of Communitarian Mobilization]
The state of Israel can be seen as the product of an identity enterprise: the Zionist national project. However, since the 1990s and the Oslo period, this identity project has ceased to be hegemonic. Academic discourse on Israeli society has thus seen the emergence of two new projects capable of eventually overcoming it: post-Zionism and neo-Zionism. It today seems that the tension between these two poles of the Israeli identity landscape is no longer capable of capturing the reality of a society that should instead be understood as consisting of a multiplicity of communities. These groups - eastern Jews, Russians from the former USSR and Israeli Palestinians - simultaneously demand integration and the recognition of their cultural specificities by mobilizing various repertories of action depending on their degree of social and political involvement.
État de la littérature. L’islam et les musulmans en Europe : un objet périphérique converti en incontournable des sciences sociales
L’islam saoudien au prisme des sciences sociales
Nabil Mouline, Les clercs de l’islam : autorité religieuse et pouvoir politique en Arabie Saoudite, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle, Paris, PUF, 2011, 357 pages.
Omar Saghi, Paris-La Mecque : sociologie du pèlerinage, Paris, PUF, 2010, 284 pages
Stéphane Lacroix, Les islamistes saoudiens : une insurrection manquée, Paris, PUF, 2010, 360 pages.
