Contenu du sommaire : Révolutions et crises politiques

The sociology of revolutions and regime change is still divided between analyses centered on the long term of social and political structures and those focused on the short term of transient constellations of events and the collective mobilizations associated with them. The sociology of the political crises that the Arab worlds have gone through since 2011 does not avoid these divisions and is still overshadowed by geopolitical or culturalist approaches. This article, which also serves as the introduction to this issue, provides a tentative basis for a sociology of such crises that would articulate better the long and the short term, contingence and structure. It tests several hypotheses: the triggering role of ill-adjusted aspirations; the decisive role of the old opposition networks; the importance of geographical variables; the social distance between the actors and the beneficiaries of the revolution; the ambivalent relationship between the revolutionaries and the State. The article also suggests that the notions of revolutionary capital and revolutionary field are potentially useful and asks whether field theory could help the sociology of political crises avoid the pitfalls of finalism and the excessive autonomization of situational logics and individual calculus.

The authors show how, in the context of the civil war in Syria, belonging to groups of protesters against the regime constitutes a variety of social capital that is autonomous both from previous social capital and from other forms of social capital, in particular economic and cultural capital. The article thus shows how an event enables the formation of capital. Social capital does not only have a demultiplying effect on existing economic and cultural capital: it is characterized by its own logic of formation and accumulation. In a subsequent stage, this social capital is converted in positions within the revolutionary institutions, which then appear as an objectified form of social capital. The initial endowments in capital again become decisive if one wants to understand the chances of access to these different positions.

This article is based upon a comparative prosopographic study that seeks to analyze the reshuffling of the social and political characteristics of the parliamentary personnel of the Muslim Brotherhood, before and during the revolution. Under the previous regime, this personnel was characterized by a strong presence in local social and philanthropic structures located at the intersection of state, social and brotherhood networks. Yet, the Islamist organization has partly pushed aside these older actors – and, along with them, this strategy of social implantation – as its agenda reflected new priorities during the period 2011-2013. The parliamentary episode of 2012 thus appears as a crucial sequence, albeit a neglected one, in the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood. The article provides some considerations about the constraining nature of the norms of political activity, including in a revolutionary context.

This article seeks to develop an empirical analysis that connects the expansion of education, unemployment and regional inequalities in an attempt to understand what happened in Tunisian in December 2010 and January 2011. It shows that the figure of the unemployed graduate, mythically embodied by Bouazizi, has developed in a context characterized by a strong development of education and a rise in the unemployment rate of university graduates, in particular in the inner regions of the country. The article describes this situation through medium-term statistical series and the trajectories of unemployed graduates who come back from the coastal cities where they studied in order to live with their parents. They then find themselves in a situation in which it is virtually impossible to find a stable job, for instance in the public sector, and to emancipate themselves. The argument is not that such phenomena constitute the ultimate cause of the Tunisian revolution, but that they represent a legitimate cause for revolt, extremely widespread in the hinterland and relatively recent.

The occupations of the Kasbah square in Tunis, that took place in the aftermath of president Ben Ali's rushed departure on January 14, 2011, have led to the resignation of the provisional government and the elections of a constituent assembly. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the analysis of the discursive and practical repertoire of the mobilization, the article aims at exploring both the emergence and the social conditions of possibility of this revolutionary situation and this revolutionary outcome, largely under-analyzed by the existing literature. It suggests that while this event signals the breakdown of ordinary social routines – both spatial and temporal – in favor of revolutionary innovations and the lasting transformation of these fields, it is also the result of the stability of social relations as much as it is the outcome of their upheaval. This perspective makes it possible to understand better the process of synchronization of time and unification of spaces that characterizes these moments in which the rules of the political game are redefined and the conjuncture becomes fluid.

On January 14, 2011, president Ben Ali fled Tunisia following one month of popular insurrection. The insurrectional movements of December 2010-January 2011 have included protests by lawyers that took place in the continuity of previous sectoral mobilizations, since the authoritarian Ben Ali regime had contributed to politicize collective action by the lawyers when it refused to grant the main professional requests of the Tunisian bar. However, these “revolutionary” mobilizations were different from previous ones, since they took part in a popular insurrection and contributed to de-sectorialize social space, before redeploying themselves in a political arena characterized by a fluid conjuncture, propitious to a redefinition of the norms of professional legitimacy.

This article analyzes the dynamics of the 2011 Algerian protest movements from the point of view of the ordinary logic and structures of contestation that could be observed since the early 2000s. It seeks to understand what makes the 2011 situation unique by explaining the make up of contestation routines and by adopting a bottom-up approach. The January protests were followed by a quick multiplication of insurrectional actions, particularly visible in Algiers, even though public protests were forbidden. The occupation of the streets and square of the capital and the convergence of protests groups asking for the demise of the regime signaled a break with existing collective action routines. However, these mobilizations did not last – either because they appeared to be fragilized by older political cleavages, or because they were not limited to sectoral requests. The article proposes a few hypotheses that can help us understand the resilience of structures that characterize ordinary protest practices in Algeria.