Contenu du sommaire : Travail et politique

The interest for labour, workers and labour action during the 1950-2000 period in African studies, notably French social sciences, is undisputed. The relation between theoretical insights more or less guided by a marxist inspiration and a third worldist and internationalist activism has produced an important collective ouput of empirical studies enlarged by a very efficient comparatist approach between continental areas. The transformation of this domain into new thematics these last fifteen years, like migration or poverty, have partly disconnected the study of labour from an embedded anthropological perspective and from an activist concern for union and political struggles.

Structural adjustment in Cameroon hit the agro-industrial sector harshly. In the monopolistic cotton industry, it challenged the pattern built during the late colonization period. This article analyses how the Sodecoton tried to manage this crisis, by transferring a large part of its costs on the cotton growers. This process called “professionalization” enabled, under the cover of a pro-peasant rhetoric, the redeployment of the control capacity of the monopolistic firm via new mechanisms which are at the center of the inquiry.

This article looks at a particular feature of the politicization of immigration in Europe: the instrumentalisation of illegal foreign workers by the State. Conventional approaches have thus far only considered the issue in terms of the costs and benefits of a particular work force that needs to be strictly controlled. By contrast, this article argues that policies of repression and integration of this work force constitute a paradox which is at the heart of a wider system of regulation. In this system, illegal immigrant workers (“sans papiers”) represent a central category in a de-regulated labour market. This process of instrumentalisation is part of a wider transformation: the political control of society through security apparatuses such as Europol and other technocratic agencies which form “bureaucratic archipelagos” outside and beyond the traditional democratic sphere. This transformation unsettles former equilibriums in the economy of the work force and it eschews any democratic debate about labour. “Sans-papiers” are both a modern expression of the increasing insecurity of labour and the sociological marker of the end of paid employment (“salariat”).

The article focuses on political relations developed by Egyptian labour migrants to the Gulf, and back home, in the late 2000s. Labour migration and returns are an issue for both the authoritarian Egyptian regime and its opponents. Migration experiences also give birth to critical subjectivization processes on the part of emigrants and returnees. Last, migration feeds evolving political imagination and repertoires. Ethnography helps to articulate various scales and stakes, through inquiries led in Cairo and the Arab United Emirates between 2006 and 2012.

The article analyses the reasons why Marikana mineworkers' strike has been violently repressed, killing 34 people on 16 th August 2012 in South Africa. It looks at the economic and productive context in which the RDO, the less payed mineworkers, demand a rise, outside of the usual bargaining session ; it then focuses on their subjectivity and principles in the strike. Organized outside the main Trade Union, National Union of Mineworkers, the strikers require to talk to the employer directly, as a sign of recognition; in so doing, the strike illustrates a crisis of representation and constitutes an alternative politics. The author's hypothesis is that the ANC governement ordered the police to shoot in order to crush this extra parlementary and popular mobilization because it is uncomfortable with it.

While Rwanda is commemorating the victims of the genocide of the Tutsi twenty years after the events, this article highlights the role of youth movements dedicated to leisure, sports and moral education in the practical and ideological maturation of the massacre. From 1957 to the present day, such activities have fuelled devices of social control and political mobilization for the members and leaders of these movements. The paper deals with a set of cultural policies in the “play-time” manufacture of genocide ideology, now understood as the main struggle of the gatekeepers of the “memory”.

Drawing an analogy between the so-called « Arab Spring » and the sense of rebirth that wafted across Europe in 1848 proves useful from a heuristic perspective. Related exercises are more problematic. Among these are attempts to explain the events in question in terms of « Arabness » or « Islam » and to understand them as short-term developments, unrelated to social and political movements, whether local or further afield. The « Arab Spring » is many things simultaneously : conservative responses on the part of Islamic parties to popular mobilizations ; resurgences of authoritarianism ; conservative modernization ; civil war. Within the broader context of this diversity, the « Arab Spring » must be understood in light of stakes that transcend it. These include the reproduction and/or questioning of associated « authoritarian situations », the political economy thereof, asymetrical formations of the State on the ruins of the Ottoman and colonial empires, overlapping structures of power, ambivalent relationships entertained by ex-regimes with the social order and, notably, with the masses.