Critique internationale - Content
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[Turkish Islamism Put to the Test of Municipal Power: Production of Spaces, Practices of Government and Management of Local Societies]
By promising to make a clean break with the past, standing up to what they described as a corrupt and unjust “system” and capitalizing on voter disillusionment with the established parties, Islamists conquered city halls across Turkey in the mid-1990s.Yet to what extent did they introduce new practices once they were in control at the municipal level? While Islamist city halls introduced symbolic changes in a gesture to Islam, their oppositional characteristics quickly gave way to the production of conservative spaces and a discourse of good management. Turkish Islamist city halls introduced new modes of government at the level of citizen consultation, transparency and integrity. More often than not, however, they tended to boast of these policies rather than actually implement them, thereby demonstrating continuity with earlier administrations. Finally, Islamist city halls took a liberal turn. Their alliance with the popular classes – from which they drew their principal electoral support – was the result of the large scale charitable operations they organized. These charitable activities also allowed them to bring associations, donors and entrepreneurial circles into their municipal networks. Beyond the particular case of the AKP, this examination of the practices of power allows us to reconsider the specificity of Islamist politics per se.
[Social Order and Islamic Government in a Pakistani Province (2002-2007)]
When Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) was elected to power in 2002, the conditions were unusually favourable for realizing his project of substantial social and political change in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Drawing on recent fieldwork, this article analyses the MMA’s impact on provincial governance both in relation to the internal dynamics of the alliance itself and with regards to its interactions with the military-bureaucratic state and the international donor community. In a context of strained relations with the federal government and tight fiscal resources, the MMA was forced to look for alternative sources of funding from the international donor community. Political pragmatism and a desire to be seen as a progressive political entity compelled the MMA to cobble together an agenda that equated Islamic political reforms with development policies favoring the poor. More tangibly, this agenda was reflected in the ways in which the MMA government altered established patterns of patronage in the province.
[Local Management by Hezbollah Mayors in Lebanon]
Although nearly 15% of Lebanese municipal councils are elected on their lists, little is known about Hezbollah’s municipal activities. A rapid overview of the question reveals how the Party’s mayors have had to combine several distinct institutional frameworks – partisan, legal and territorial – in their work of local management. This study concentrates on the place of Islamic thought in the priorities and values of municipal management in the case of three municipal councils led by party officials. Municipal councils extensively invest in Hezbollah communes, pursuing a program of dynamic development with the support of public and private networks as well as that of regional and international donors. The values guiding local development – professionalism and rationality – are anchored in concerns for effectiveness and scientific knowledge: they also present themselves as inclusive, privileging social proximity and the contributions of women and young people. Where it exists, Islamism depends on discourses of legitimization that are upstream from municipal work and is mainly concerned with providing moral justifications for social action. The specificity of local management by Hezbollah is thus not to be found in its use of Islamic values but rather in the strategies of political mobilization proper to the consolidation of the party’s “society of resistance”.
[Communal Management and Moral Clientelism in Morocco: The Policies of the Justice and Development Party]
During the local elections of 2003, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), Morocco’s leading “Islamist” party, made a remarkable breakthrough in cities. Its politicians, most of whom were just beginning their careers, learned the ropes of the political game in a context of decentralization that was reorganizing the scale of local government and transferring competencies to de-concentrated authorities and communal presidents. After having set out to conquer cities in the name of moral and religious values, PJD politicians quickly adopted a pragmatic approach to their functions, presenting themselves above all else as efficient managers of local affairs. In keeping with neoliberal injunctions, they underscored their professional training and areas of specialization. Religious references gradually shaded into the consensual language of order, with emphasis being placed on such notions as proximity, integrity and morality depending on the audience. Making a show of a type of moral clientelism, PJD politicians adopted an ideology of action in order to resolve the daily problems of voters. Presenting themselves as local affairs technicians, they also took on the role of men of goodwill and men of the party and thus became crucial to ensuring support for the party at the local level.
[The General and His Judges: The Uprising of Pakistan's Judicial Authorities]
On March 9th, 2007, President Pervez Musharraf suspended the president of the Pakistani Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had alienated the establishment in the preceding months through his judicial activism. In the following days, Pakistani lawyers took to the street and agitated for the reinstallation of Chaudhry. This protest movement was led by highly politicised lawyers with a long experience of agitation against military regimes. These activist lawyers also used their leadership positions within the country’s bar associations to mobilise their profession against Musharraf and more generally and controversially, against the Army’s involvement in politics. And although it started as a corporatist movement, defending the interests of the legal fraternity, this mobilisation gradually expanded to include a broad set of actors, from liberal NGO activists to the more conservative Islamists. This coalition remained weak and quickly imploded, particularly after the opposition parties and a fraction of the lawyers made an attempt to politicize the movement on an anti-army basis. Yet, this mobilisation attests to the resilience of the rule of law – and, more precisely, the ability of the law to become a focus point for the socially disgruntled - in a country that has been under the tutelage of the military for more than half of its history.
[A Chinese Consulate in Overseas France]
The creation of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) consulate in French Polynesia is part of wider efforts on the part of China to affirm its power in the Pacific against a backdrop of competition between the PRC and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan. One thus encounters the question of the “two Chinas” in French Polynesia, with the PRC attempting to win recognition of its property rights over consular grounds occupied by the ROC from 1945 to 1965. French citizens descended from the Chinese who immigrated during the colonial period have various interpretations of this controversy, though only a tiny minority see the future of the former consulate in global geopolitical terms. The analysis conducted in line with recent developments in global anthropology is based on a scalar variation considered from two points of view: while the conflict has emerged and been addressed at the local and global levels, the definition of the relevant scale is itself a matter of conflict. In a context of hegemonic transition, moreover, the controversy over the consular grounds reveals how a conjunction of policies favorable to the maintenance of ethnic frontiers can take place.
[That Obscure Object of Desire: Europe as a Nuclear Power]
What was the role of Jean Monnet’s transnational network in the negotiations that took place between Americans and Europeans following the signature of the March 1957 Euratom Treaty? More precisely, how was the question of supervision for fissile material use in Europe negotiated between the United States and the Euratom Community? In fact, Jean Monnet, the White House and the State Department jointly developed a tactic that consisted in obscuring the true nature of the European project in order to conceal the military and strategic issues involved. The choice of this rhetorical tactic was in part driven by internal American opposition (in particular that of the Atomic Energy Commission and Congress) to transferring competencies in the area of supervision from the Americans to the Europeans. Contrary to neorealist analyses of European integration, which all insist on the weak influence of transnational networks over government decisions, this analysis underscores their importance. In the case of Europe, such networks had less of an impact in intergovernmental negotiations over European treaties than in trans-Atlantic negotiations between the United States and Europe, particularly concerning the nuclear question.
Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules : The Construction of Global Finance, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2007, XI-304 pages.
Alan Greenspan, Le temps des turbulences, Paris, Jean-Claude Lattès, 2007, 677 pages.
Harald Welzer, Les exécuteurs : des hommes normaux aux meurtriers de masse, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, 354 pages.
Jean-Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché : enquête sur les postcolonialismes, Paris, Stock, 2008, 320 pages
Richard J. Shuster, German Disarmament after World War I : The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection 1920-1931, Londres/New York, Routledge, 259 pages.
