Contenu du sommaire : Retour sur les situations révolutionnaires arabes

In this paper, departing from a non causalist epistemology, we focus our attention on the study of revolutionary situations, instead of background conditions or revolutionnary outcomes which, as a literature review on the “Arab uprisings” shows, have received the lion's share of research in the field. Furthermore we argue that one should move away from describing the recurrent properties of revolutionary situations to study the sequences of action – here defined as complex chains of interaction – which contribute to produce these situations. Based on a comparison of various cases in the MENA region, we identify a series of relational and cognitive processes which can able us to better understand how revolutionary situations are produced and develop.

An ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the region of Sidi Bouzid, the birthplace of the Tunisian Revolution of 2010-2011, shows that, contrary to most analyses of the issue, one can not speak of the “spontaneity” of the revolutionary movement, nor in contrast bind it strictly to structural and exogenous “causes”. Interviews with the protagonists rather emphasize the presence of abeyance networks formed by political activists and trade unionists, finely articulated with local mobilizations of less politicized groups that are mobilized partly because of contingent factors. The article describes the conditions and the practices of politicization and of the de-sectoring processes allowing at the same time the transition to politics of heterogeneous social groups and finally the challenging of the regime.

Despite apparent unanimity among actors, individuals experience the revolutionary moment quite differently. Diverse dynamics of radicalization operate. In order to understand how a multitude of individuals who weren't in the opposition per se engage in collective action, one must avoid the “immaculate contestation” trap. Therefore I focus on 1/ increased engagement in contentious collective actions in the “inner Tunisia” since 2008, and 2/ emerging ambivalent counterconducts among different social groups, that are transformed under certain circumstances into anti-regime protests. Throughout repeated interviews carried out since 2006, the diachronic study identifies these mobilizations' grounds fundaments : socioprofessional situations, neighborhood and family sociabilities, generational stakes, past struggles' memories and repression experiences. Simultaneously, the ethnographic approach reveals how contingent are engagements in a both intense and fast-spreading uprising.

The events that shook Egypt early in 2011, since named the “Egyptian Revolution”, raise many questions. One of these interrogations is to understand how a population largely considered as apathetic and depoliticized, participated massively in street demonstrations. It is possible to safely consider that there is nothing particularly “revolutionary” in seeing experienced activists mobilize for the hundredth time. Nevertheless, revealing the mechanisms behind what pushed tens of thousands of Egyptians that had never participated in politics before to take the streets is paramount. This article tackles this issue by studying a localized mobilization of young Caireners during the “January uprising”.

Beyond the narrative which praises “the Moroccan exception”, an extensive contentious movement has developed throughout the country. Far from being the product of a domino effect, the February 20 Movement stems notably from a process of building assumptions of similarity, from the reactivation of more or less abeyant structures. A wide coalition has developed within a field of both alliance and opposition, at the intersection of formal political sphere and contentious politics, regardless of cleavages between leftist networks and Islamists. On a variety of scales involving the local, national, regional and international levels, an array of actions, interactions and events have contributed as much to the coalition taking roots as to the process of its erosion.

This article studies the mobilisations that have developed since the beginning of the Yemeni revolutionary process in January 2011. Built on shared and extensive fieldwork, it examines the interactions between emerging practices and the “structural properties of social systems”. It assumes the duality of the revolutionary process that appears both produced by the actors that carry it and constrained by a historical, social and political structure. This paper thereby questions the capability of the revolutionary event not only to generate innovations but also to emerge at the intersection of emerging practices and the process' confiscation by former mobilisation networks and institutionalised political actors.

In 2012, the French presidential election confirmed the geographical political changes that have been observed for the last fifteen years in France : progress of the left-wing in Western France and in city-centres, strong presence of the National Front in the working class suburbs and in the suburban areas, and decrease of the right-wing, except in the service-based residential areas. This article, based on an original database at the canton level, analyzes the recent developments of the electoral map (2007-2012) and for the 1981-2012 period. It compares these results to socio-economic variables extracted from the population census, and offers spatial analyses (mainly according to the distance from the city).