Contenu du sommaire

What lies behind context?
This paper offers a critical review of works who claimed, since few years in France, a return to a contextual approach of electoral behaviors, a framework generally presented as a mean to renew electoral analysis. First, we propose a definition of this approach, mainly developed by Anglo-Saxon researchers, that produced theoretical models that have been little questioned by French electoral science. Second, we put back this “return to context” movement in French electoral analysis within the international framework of contextual approach. We finally underline a paradox: this movement has not been favorable for the importation of these theoretical models in French electoral studies.

On the nature of war
This article intends to demonstrate that Clausewitz's famous Formula – “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means” – can be interpreted as supporting three antagonist conceptions of war, which are found all three in the literature and even in Clausewitz's major book. The Formula leads us to think of war as a political means at the disposal of organized groups, as the overall confrontation of two rival armies, and, eventually, as one of the alternative phases of the commerce between social groups. We support the idea that those three definitions can actually be connected to three distinct concepts : armed violence, the violent confrontation of armies, and war, respectively.

For a sociological approach to civil wars
The structural similarities between contemporary civil wars suggest the possibility for a comparative approach, which would open up promising avenues for general sociology. Indeed violent ruptures – by detrivializing daily routines – make visible, through contrast, the very foundations of social order. However, the dominant neopositivist paradigm fails to offer an adequate theory because of the intrinsic limits of the Rational Choice Theory and an overreliance on quantification. Following a critic of this approach, we lay out our definition of civil wars, namely the coexistence on the same national territory of competing social orders engaged in a violent relationship and the questions that form the outline of a research program : the variation of the value of capitals, the government of populations and the transformation of individual dispositions.

Privatization and fragmentation of violence in Colombia
Scholarship equating pervasive violence and state weakness has been recently and convincingly criticized by a growing body of literature. A finer sociological look at the links between states and non-statutory armed groups rather reveals relations of bargaining and delegation. While taking these conclusions as a point of departure, this contribution studies a “borderline” case, which presents divergent characteristics with most of the existing works. Though the study of paramilitary militias in Colombia, this contribution provides an analysis in which high-intensity violence does not marginalize the state, but on the contrary entails the reinforcement of its central role.