Contenu du sommaire : Enfermement et catégorisations

Distribution and Circulation: Categorizing Detainees in the Choucha Camp (Tunisia) How is the material dimension of the confinement of foreigners linked with the purpose of sites of confinement – that is, managing the movement of migrants via admission or expulsion? The present article examines the distribution of migrants within Tunisia's Choucha transit camp, which, until its closure in June 2013, received Sub-Saharan migrants fleeing fighting in Libya. In order to organize the confinement of a large number of people, the authorities distributed the migrants by reference to categories of national or ethnic group membership. While separating individuals according to nationality allowed the camp's administration to guarantee peace there, it also anticipated the detainees' future administrative status (refugee, rejected asylum seeker, etc.). Used for the purpose of administering the confinement routine, these national categories reveal the manner in which the camp administration anticipated the prospects open to (or imposed upon) individuals. As the case of the “Choucha refugees” shows, some migrants thus attempted to challenge the categories according to which they had been classified.

The Frontiers of Detention: Gender and Ethnicity in the Supervision of Foreigners Awaiting Expulsion Based on immersive research in a French detention center, this article examines the manner in which categories of alterity are used and produced in the confinement of foreigners awaiting expulsion. Gender and ethnic frontiers play a key role in the organization of work, inter-professional relations and the manner in which detained foreigners are treated. Indeed, the general operation of the detention center observes a gendered and ethnicized division of labor that, via appeal to a set of naturalized characteristics, determines the tasks assigned the private agents who supply the Center's staff. Lacking job security, the latter are themselves immigrants and are partly treated in the same manner as the detainees. Moreover, the internal hierarchies of the police, which include a number of women and minority police officers, are predicated on stigmatizing representations of the imprisoned foreigners, representations reinforced by the agents' working conditions. While detention is promoted as an administrative confinement mechanism, its everyday mode of operation produces and reproduces the conflation of detained persons with delinquents.

The “Radical”: A New, Ill-Defined Figure of Prison Danger The moral panic provoked by the attraction that Islamist violence holds for young people has gone hand in hand with the emergence of a new figure of danger: that of young people who become radicalized in prison. To understand the inner workings and processes that have rendered the “radical” – whether avowed or potential – a new category of penal discourse, one must examine the systems of labelling and detection involved in the construction of what is referred to as deviant. Studying the circumstances, context and actors involved in the implementation of a policy for detecting those originally designated as “converts” reveals that the heterogeneous resistances and appropriations of this tool have not prevented the category from establishing itself. The terminological change that has taken place since 2008 via the attempt to substitute the term “radical” or “undergoing radicalization” for that of “convert” is symptomatic of the Europeanization of anti-radicalization policy, which is centered more on objective of prevention. It remains the case that the lack of a shared understanding of what is a radical – a vague and polysemous term – encourages confusion and stigmatizing conflation, exposing all Muslims to suspicion even when it seeks to neutralize this stigma.

Perception and Experience of Religious Plurality in Swiss and Italian Prisons: An Ethnographic Approach For over twenty years, social and cultural globalization have fed the emergence of unprecedented religious plurality in Swiss and Italian prisons. For penal institutions that guarantee freedom of worship and conscience, this “super-diversity” leads to new arrangements and an effort to formally oversee religion (chaplaincies, meals, religious celebrations). The inmates, for their part, draw upon their religious experience in various ways, sometimes as a means for resisting the institution, sometimes in the form of “private” practice or official demands. An ethnographic and epistemological approach sensitive to the situation and enriched by several years of research conducted since 2005 allows one to consider the religious categories used by penal institutions while exploring the manner in which the prisoners' agency is reflected in their appropriation of religion.

Victims Desperately Seeking Status: The Case of the “Stolen Babies” in Spain Since 2005, a group of victims has emerged in Spain in connection with what is generically referred to as the “baby theft”. Independently of the fact that the emergence of this “case” must be set in the context of a broader phenomenon – that of the birth and consolidation of a “new victims' space” in Spain – these victims possess a twofold characteristic: the multiplicity of causes that produce them and the variety of the categories to which they turn in referring to and conceiving of themselves. The relative unity of this victim group does not therefore stem from the fact of their present condition but rather from their effort to find a status – that is, an existence, whether nominal (the fact of being a victim) or legal (the fact of being recognized as such). Faced with this quest for recognition, which implements the tools of citizenship, the frontiers often erected between victims and citizens become porous and even completely disappear.

Resistant “Remains” in the Soninke Milieu: Slavery, Sense of Honor and Mechanisms of Emancipation The social architecture of the Soninke community still allows old forms of domination to be perpetuated, not only via the maintenance of stereotypes but also via the concrete practices of relegation that permeate the Mauritanian social and political field. Today, many of these practices govern the people's consciousness and imaginaries and inform local and national politics. Moreover, conflicts over land ownership – a vestige of times past – have reemerged, pitting “nobles” against “servile” categories. These facts underscore the persistence of slavery, a practice that is less accepted than ever among dominated groups. As a result of evolving mentalities, social transformations and demands for human dignity, the latter increasingly seek to define themselves in autonomous fashion, mobilizing discourses and strategies to free themselves from the tutelage of large segments of the Soninke nobility. In the name of tradition and honor, this nobility seeks to oppose the overthrow of feudalism and the abolition of what are falsely portrayed in their community of origin as mild forms of slavery.

Making War: Public Policy, the State and Armed Conflicts The study of war has been largely untouched by recent rapprochements in the analysis of public policy and international relations. It is thus useful to consider the conditions of possibility for an analysis of war in terms of public policy and its possible contributions. The present article offers an overview of social scientific literature regarding military action in wartime and underscores its failure to attend to the distinction between the preparation and conduct of war. Adopting a public policy approach to account for the manner in which the state makes war allows one to consider the possible specificities of the modes of public action it implements for the purpose of militarily intervening in an armed conflict. Doing so thus sheds light on the manner in which defense policies are adapted to an ongoing war.