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This special issue aims to account for some of the political and social processes at work in the aftermath of armed conflicts ; by the same token, it explores the production of public policies in sectors frequently neglected by “post-conflict” specialists. As such, it stands in contrast to the exceptional approaches of “post-conflict”, which usually focus on the upheavals brought about by war and on the social and political engineering of peace-building. Our challenge is to empirically identify the links between war, endeavours to bring an end to it, and other spheres of policy action. The introductory article links this approach to recent scholarship emphasizing the “ordinary” during war situations, proposes a brief state of the literature and presents the main objectives of the special issue : to analyse the multiple uses of the “post-conflict” category in the production of public policy and to trace the various ways in which a violent past bears an influence upon policy-making.

This contribution focuses on the inclusion of a policy sector in the field of post-conflict peace-making ; it analyses the mechanisms of this displacement, as well as its effects on the framing of public problems and the relations between various policy actors. In analyzing the case of rural land policy in Colombia, the article demonstrates that the association between land and post-conflict is politically and socially constructed, in interactions that involve both state institutions and official development assistance actors. It describes the transformation of the relationship between the actors, marked in particular by the internationalization of the rural land problem. Finally, the article analyses the way in which competitions arise within and between various Colombian state agencies to become a central actor in the transition from war to peace.

This article aims to study issues of definition and the struggles around the “post-conflict transition” in the production of public action on gender in Burundi (1993-2015). How has the “post-conflict transition” been negotiated, interpreted and debated in the case of Burundi ? What opportunities for action and competition have been opened up by the vagueness of this category for actors involved in the field of gender ? With what effects on the production of public action ? By examining the role of UNIFEM/UN Women and its relations with UN agencies, NGOs, Burundian associations and the state, we show that the uses of the category “post-conflict transition” have certainly empowered external and non-state actors to work in this field since the mid-1990s. But above all, since 2005 they have favoured a division of labour that has benefited the central state, i.e. ever since the CNDD-FDD party came to power, and more assertively so since its victory in the 2010 elections. The article is based on three sets of fieldwork carried out in Burundi between 2012 and 2014, as well as on analysis of data produced by the organizations that participate in public action on gender in Burundi.

Does war transform policy-making, and if so, how ? By scrutinizing an oft-neglected public policy in Bosnia – public employment services – this article highlights the relative continuities of employment policies before, during and after the 1992-1995 war. A multi-level investigation conducted with international financial institutions as well as local, cantonal and municipal actors reveals that the relations between peace-builders and their Bosnian interlocutors feature mutual dependence and the externalisation of bureaucratic labour. Like in socialist Yugoslavia, local ruling parties discreetly weigh on policy-making, and this despite the emergence today of some internationalised governance modalities.

Since colonial times, Gorongosa national park has been the jewel of conservation public policies in Mozambique. It has also been at the centre of multiple armed confrontations, whose logics and configurations have constantly changed : a national liberation struggle from the 1960s to 1975, a civil conflict from the end of the 1970s until 1975, and the resurgence of tensions between Frelimo and Renamo ever since the 2010s. Most of these confrontations are localized around Gorongosa, and this feeds an old collective imaginary regarding the symbolics of a natural space whose control (or at least the prevention from attacks) is synonymous with military victory and of political domination on the national scale.Even if the country is officially in a post-conflict situation, and if the United Nations peace-keeping mission ended in 1995 and Mozambique is considered to be “a donor darling”, if Gorongosa national park is managed within the framework of a public-private partnership largely funded by a philanthropic foundation, it is conflict, or the possibility of a conflict, that underlies everyday life in general, and conservation policymaking in particular. This article thus questions the historicity of the undetermined dimension of the notion of “the end of the war”, by analysing the flexible relationship between conservation public policies and war's permanence.

This article analyses the profiles and the trajectories of actors who integrated into the financial authorities after the Peace Agreements that put an end to the war in Côte d'Ivoire (2002-2011). It explores the vivid debate about continuities and ruptures that characterize the State in the aftermath of war. In this perspective, this article demonstrates that people who integrated into the State apparatus after the war were actually former student unionists who first began their careers during the violent students' struggles in the 1990s before joining the rebellion of the Forces Nouvelles in the 2000s. All these actors gained significant social capital during these periods, which paved the way for their integration into the State administration. Yet, all do not have the same capacity to convert this social capital into symbolic capital in order to durably legitimize their political mobilization at the local and national levels. This process of reconversion indeed depends on the volume of accumulated social capital during the rebellion, which itself depends on their belonging to specific student generations before the conflict. In this context, students' unions' involvement undoubtedly appears to be a new way to access the politico-administrative field during the post-conflict period, but only the best endowed managed to enter politics and experience social mobility. Such a finding illustrates that pre-war social hierarchies, which already existed within student unions then during the rebellion, are reproduced after the conflict. This article thus highlights the importance of analyzing actors' trajectories from a long-term perspective to understand to what extent the integration of former rebels into the administration impacts and transforms State public services, not only in terms of its composition and agent's profiles but also in terms of social hierarchies.

The experience of the Iran-Irak war is one of the principal prismes used to analyse political and social dynamics in contemporary Iran. However, despite the strengths of this approach, it is often over-focused upon the figure of the martyr of “the sacred defence of the Revolution”, or upon the part of the army that lost most lives in defending this cause : the basidjs. Instead, this article analyses the effects of that war upon leisure policies in Teheran neighborhoods from the angle of the sociology of public action. By exploring how the repertoire linked to this war has contributed to framing what constitutes legitimate public action, to guiding the practices and self-representations of public agents, and to both empowering and constraining via a variety of instruments and norms as regards legitimate leisure pursuits, the aim is to shed light upon the modalities of government in contemporary Iran and its daily renegociation.