Archives - Publications and Beyond

Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan (Studies of the Americas), 2019, 261 p.

This book explores street art’s contributions to democracy in Latin America through a comparative study of five cities: Bogota (Colombia), São Paulo (Brazil), Valparaiso (Chile), Oaxaca (Mexico) and Havana (Cuba). The author argues that when artists invade public space for the sake of disseminating rage, claims or statements, they behave as urban citizens who try to raise public awareness, nurture public debates and hold authorities accountable. Street art also reveals how public space is governed. When local authorities try to contain, regulate or repress public space invasions, they can achieve their goals democratically if they dialogue with the artists and try to reach a consensus inspired by a conception of the city as a commons. Under specific conditions, the book argues, street level democracy and collaborative governance can overlap, prompting a democratization of democracy.

London, Routledge (Routledge Contemporary Africa), 2021, 392 p.

In the context of a global biometric turn, this book investigates processes of legal identification in Africa ‘from below,’ asking what this means for the relationship between citizens and the state. Almost half of the population of the African continent is thought to lack a legal identity, and many states see biometric technology as a reliable and efficient solution to the problem. However, this book shows that biometrics, far from securing identities and avoiding fraud or political distrust, can even participate in reinforcing exclusion and polarizing debates on citizenship and national belonging. It highlights the social and political embedding of legal identities and the resilience of the documentary state. Drawing on empirical research conducted across 14 countries, the book documents the processes, practices, and meanings of legal identification in Africa from the 1950s right up to the biometric boom. Beyond the classic opposition between surveillance and recognition, it demonstrates how analysing the social uses of IDs and tools of identification can give a fresh account of the state at work, the practices of citizenship, and the role of bureaucracy in the writing of the self in African societies. This book will be of an important reference for students and scholars of African studies, politics, human security, and anthropology and the sociology of the state.

Les Etudes du CERI, n°256, mai 2021.

The Seville Feria. A Sold-Out People’s Festival -- Although the Seville Fair is part of a lively tradition of popular festivals, it clearly distinguishes itself from others of its kind on account of its very exclusive nature. The festival is organised around casetas, small traditional-style fabric houses, the vast majority of which are private (only 1.7% of the 1,052 casetas are open to the public). Because it is a site of social exclusivity par excellence, a place for upholding family social capital (sometimes across several generations), the fair challenges the democratic society and triggers controversy and debate, especially when it comes to its management by the municipality. Its model of a sold-out party has also given birth to the phenomenon of a counter-feria, which developed during the moment of democratic transition around organisations of political opposition. Offering a history of the feria that splits up the group, that strips away its illusion and reinscribes it in the social and political trajectories of the individuals and groups that participate in it transforms this prominent object of local chronicles and tourist brochures into an object of social science that enables the examination of social and political networks.

Paris, Éditions Karthala (Recherches Internationales), 2020, 660 p.

Le Maroc inspire des lieux communs. Il serait un prototype d’immobilisme politique, dans la main autoritaire et conservatrice du « commandeur des croyants », en mal de démocratie, mais à l’ombre d’un islam somme toute modéré. Trente années d’enquêtes de terrain, d’entretiens, de dépouillement d’une vaste documentation primaire et d’observation participante permettent à Béatrice Hibou et Mohamed Tozy de montrer comment les changements démographiques et environnementaux, ainsi que les processus de naturalisation du néolibéralisme, ont transformé les façons de gouverner les hommes et les territoires du royaume. À partir des types-idéaux de l’Empire et de l’État-nation, les auteurs dégagent la pluralité des modes de gouvernement et de domination à l’oeuvre au Maroc en insistant sur leur osmose continuelle. Il n’est pas question d’un passage de l’empire chérifien (XVIIe-XIXe siècle) à l’État-nation, dont le protectorat français aurait jeté les fondements, ni de la perpétuation d’une tradition impériale résiduelle au coeur de l’État moderne. Il s’agit bel et bien d’un assemblage de ces deux logiques, qui déjà coexistaient dans les siècles précédents, et dont le jeu simultané est sous-jacent au gouvernement néolibéral contemporain. L’Empire et l’État-nation ne se présentent pas sous la forme d’une alternative ni d’une contradiction. Ils constituent deux ressorts d’une même domination qui ne se réduit pas à la seule figure du roi. Ils sont en tension continue, une tension dont procède l’historicité de l’imaginaire politique marocain et qui en tisse le temps singulier. Une démonstration fondamentale de sociologie historique comparée de l’État.