Critique internationale - Content
[This Divisive Peace: An Effect-Based Analysis of Mediation in Mali]
Why was the mediation process in Mali accompanied by the fragmentation of armed movements, which had in principle embarked on the path of reconciliation? In this article, I turn the central proposition of economic theories of civil war – that mediation is exploited by its actors – on its head. It is not the egoistic rationality of belligerents that causes negotiations to collapse. Rather, the measures established by mediation endogenously create the conditions for the perpetuation of armed conflict. The mediators’ belief that economic resources are crucial to bringing about peace resulted in the establishment of a mechanism that imposed a system for remunerating those who had engaged in violence, past or present. Mediation thus constitutes a site for converting military capital into political and/or economic capital. This individual compensation encouraged armed groups to no longer act collectively and created a system that invited actors to use violence as a way of accessing the state and international sector remuneration. These mechanisms ultimately reinforced and even institutionalized relations of domination, thereby contributing to worsening the crisis at the origin of the conflict.
[Making the Environmental Sector in Ecuador: Internationalization from Below and the Day-to-Day Life of Best Practices]
This ethnographic survey concerns the co-construction of Ecuadorian environmental policy by agents of the state and international cooperation employees. In order to understand the emergence of this recent and internationalized sector as well as its implications for public action, I examine the trajectories and everyday practices of its professionals. First, I describe their education and career paths, in Quito and the provinces, underscoring the existence of shared professional socialization and overlapping careers, whether their employers are Ecuadorian institutions or an international body. Then, this shared professional socialization allows me to highlight the process, characteristic of this sector, by which its international dimension is rendered invisible as well as the consequences that this has for the actors’ practices. Indeed, as the latter internalize the international dimension of their activity, they increasingly come to adopt a project-based mode of operation as well as a set of normative (if putatively neutral) participative practices.
[Dodging Criticism: International Financial Institutions and Anti-Poverty Policies in Brazil and Mexico]
How and to what extent do international financial institutions (IFI) drive public policy? More specifically, what role do the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank play in formulating the anti-poverty programs known as Conditional Cash Transfer Programs (CCTP) in Brazil and Mexico? The present article seeks to examine the “cognitive role” played by these organizations as well as to qualify two widespread theories according to which agendas are imposed by IFI and there are clear-cut lines of demarcation separating national and international actors. This study reveals that international financial institutions have joined a coalition of national and international actors defending the cause of human capital. Further, it shows that, in order to dodge criticism, anticipate the controversies that might arise in public opinion and ensure that reforms, once adopted, remain in place, this pro-human capital coalition has embraced several strategies seeking to underscore the irreducible autonomy of national actors vis-à-vis their international counterparts. It moreover underscores the competition among international financial institutions for preeminence and to receive intellectual credit for CCTP.
[Recognized and Little-Known Memories of Colombia’s Armed Conflict: The Case of the Trujillo Massacre]
While the construction of public accounts of violent pasts has been extensively studied, little attention has been given to the manner in which these accounts interfere with the representations of the groups for which they are intended and about which they speak. The present article draws upon the sociology of memory to study the relations between local memories of the massacre of the Colombian village of Trujillo and the historical memory of the same events developed by a nationally and internationally recognized victims’ association. Empirical study reveals that a discrepancy exists between this historical memory and the local memories. For the limited legitimacy enjoyed by the association in the village and the deterioration of relations between its members has opened the way to multiple ways of recollecting the massacre. In so doing, it reveals the limits of the Colombian state’s efforts since the 2000s to construct a shared narrative based on the suffering of victims: while recognizing their pain and constructing peace appear to be imperatives at the national level, the violence is seen as inevitable at the local level and is still sometimes justified by the inhabitants.
[Faced with Tunisian Authoritarianism, Is there Strength in Unity? Transideological Alliance Dynamics in France in the 2000s]
While the supposed “exceptionalism” of the Tunisian case – seen as the spearhead of the democratic transition in the Arab world thanks to “dialogue” and politics of “reconciliation” – has been quite rightly deconstructed, one must also acknowledge the existence of a long history of alliances between antagonistic actors, a significant portion of which unfolded outside the nation’s borders. In this article I explore the conditions of possibility of anti-Ben Ali regime alliances in France and the conditions under which it was possible to move beyond the ideological polarizations that have since independence separated the main Tunisian opposition forces, whether Islamist or left-wing. My examination of the concrete ways in which “distance” affected this type of improbable alliance reveals characteristics of the space of mobilization and the power relations at play there. Faced with authoritarianism, there is not necessarily strength in unity but it unveils the power relations at play in the architecture of these struggles in France.
[Between Constraint and Political Subjectivation: Women's Activism in Turkey’s Justice and Development Party]
This article draws upon interviews and observation among activists from the women’s branch of the AKP in Turkey to examine the possibilities for political subjectivation in partisan engagement. Contrary to a binary approach that would present matters in terms of oppression and emancipation, I study the effect of engagement on activist trajectories, including in their re-appropriation of gender norms. The notion of political subjectivation applies in three areas here: the transformation of everyday relationships to space and time; the negotiation of family roles and the attendant calls to order; and access to forms of symbolic, material and professional rewards. Studying the organisational framework of partisan activism confirms that subjectification takes place under institutional oversight, is limited by moral frameworks and is conditioned by party loyalty. Finally adopting an intersectional perspective reveals that the process varies depending on the social position of the survey subjects, revealing the internal heterogeneity of the AKP and the gap separating the party’s elite from its grassroots activists in point of their discourse, practice and careers.
[Bureaugraphying the UNHCR: An Encompassing and Empirical Approach to an International Organization]
In this article, I present the theoretical and methodological steps by means of which I developed an encompassing and empirical approach to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). By drawing upon an embedded ethnography and the analytical tools of political anthropology, I studied the organization’s internal operation and the relations enmeshing its agents and offices, an approach that also allowed me to grasp the organization’s global action in the 2000s. In addition to underscoring how using the methods of anthropology to study bureaucratic institutions contributes to the theoretical revival of the discipline, the term “bureaugraphy” highlights the role played by the organization’s material infrastructure in constructing the UNHCR as an object and in analyzing my data. Following an introduction regarding the renewal of studies devoted to international organizations, I explain how I was able to “uninstitute” the UNHCR and conceive of its splintered bureaucratic system as a field. I then show the manner in which I circumscribed the perimeter of my study and describe the processes by which I moved from localized observation to an encompassing analysis. Finally, I recount the process of epistemological distanciation necessary to identify the production of expert knowledge as one of the organization’s major forms of authority
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, New York, Nation Books, 2016, VIII-582 pages.
Ioana Cîrstocea, La fin de la femme rouge ? Fabriques transnationales du genre après la chute du Mur, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019, 306 pages.
Valérie Robin Azevedo, Sur les sentiers de la violence. Politiques de la mémoire et conflit armé au Pérou, Paris, Éditions de l’IHEAL, 2019, 268 pages.
Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2018, XIII-316 pages.
