Contenu du sommaire : L'Éthiopie après Meles

Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, died on the night of August 20 to 21, 2012, at the age of 57. This article provides an overview of the media coverage of this event (press, TV, online media), both inside and outside Ethiopia, complemented by personal observations in Addis Ababa between June and September 2012. Through the description of the management by the Ethiopian government of the leader's hidden illness, the public announcement of his death and the celebration of funerals, the analysis deals with popular perceptions of this pivotal event, and more broadly the symbolism of death, spiritual and political power within Ethiopia.

This paper contributes to a political economy of rural development based on the case of poor farmers. It focuses on dependency practices developed within rural communities by farmers or organised through the implementation of development public policies. It presents the rise of a new rural order based on the spread of a politicized rhetoric, on the growing dependency of poor farmers via the transformation of peasant ways of sharing resource or by means of a shift in public policies. The article concludes with an analysis of the public management of peasant's debt and the nature of the governance of poor farmers.

Rural healthcare strategies are a meaningful case to reflect on the Ethiopian government biopolitical project mingling political mobilisation and service delivery, top down leadership and grassroots participation. We look at the processes of subjectivation of “Women's development soldiers” acting at the interface between local government and the society, analysing how the developmental state works in practice by getting diluted in the double sense of embodied and accommodated according to a plurality of logics (social, political, religious…) and dynamics.

The ethnography of local administration offers insights into the ethnicization of politics in contemporary Ethiopia. This article takes the conflict that erupted in 2014 in the Majang zone as a case study. Tensions should not be credited solely to the ethnofederal institutional framework, but are informed by contrasted agricultural practices and land use patterns, the state's unbalanced land policies, and a plurality of land rights systems. Today, the formalisation of land rights and broader EPRDF agricultural policies rekindle tensions.

The hegemony of the Ethiopian ruling power is almost uncontested in the political, executive and legislative arenas. Harassed and divided, the legal opposition is still crumbling. The economic growth rate remains high. Nevertheless, the regime is sinking into a crisis aggravated by the passing away in 2012 of the omnipotent Meles Zenawi. The roots of the current crisis lie in the perpetuation of an elitist, centralised, authoritarian and ethnically biased power system. Due to the way in which it is being implemented, federalism is unable to respond to the identity-based claims it has heightened. The new middle class, both urban and rural, remains marginalized. While its capacities are vital for the economic liberalization, which determines a sustained growth, they are still restrained. The party-state comes down to a machinery which moves only by keeping strictly to Meles's legacy. Divided between its four ethnic components and within them, the ruling power is frozen while its vital aggiornamento is at stake.

Recurrent power abuses by the South African police on African immigrants have rarely been situated within the framework of the institutional partnership developed between the police and the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The paper analyses the co-production by the South African Police Services (SAPS) and the DHA of an ultra-repressive immigration policy based on armed raids, deportations and emergency measures. It shows how much this policy impacted on the ordinary practices of the police. It also interrogates power abuses within the South African Police Services daily practices in a broader context of latent xenophobia and zero-tolerance policy against criminality − as African immigrants are still largely, yet mistakenly, associated with crime.

As Abdelaziz Bouteflika's health as evidently deteriorated since April 2013, thus creating a vacuum of power at the level of the Presidency of the Republic, the decisive question of who (really) governs Algeria arises. A hegemonic narrative claims that the advent of Bouteflika IV in 2014 and the subsequent retirement of the infamous General Mohamed Mediene reflect the “loss of leadership of the DRS”, the Algerian political police. At the opposite, this article demonstrates that the hegemonic narrative stems from a storytelling process whose rationality unfolds as follows : projecting the simulacrum of the disintegration of the DRS to avoid endorsing the responsibility of the fourth presidential term ; saving time for shaping the post-Bouteflika. Deploying pseudopolitics, the establishment of the « deep state » succeeds in imposing its narrative order to make invisible the institutional regime that the secret police forged during a quarter shaping the post-Bouteflika era. Deploying pseudopolitics, the state establishment succeeds in imposing its narrative order to make invisible the institutional regime that the secret police forged during a quarter century.