Contenu du sommaire : Pensées émergentes en géographie politique et géopolitique

This article deals with the mechanism through which individuals or groups become geopolitical actors in distant conflicts, i.e. conflicts that do not take place on the territory where these people live. Cases like this are not much studied in geography, because geopolitics and political geography often equate the space where people live with the space where people fight and the space which they fight for. Some mobilizations nonetheless follow this model, from diaspora politics to environmental movements on global issues. Unlike geographers, sociologists and political scientists have been studying transnational social movements for a long time, but without necessarily pointing out the spatiality of the studied phenomenon. Therefore, this article builds on the rich literature on diaspora politics and political transnationalism, but completes it with a geographical approach. Drawing on French social geography – which studies spatiality rather than space – I answer the following question: how individuals can become stakeholders of conflicts that do not take place in the space of their everyday practices? The case chosen here is the engagement of Ukrainians living in France in the political events of their homeland since 2014 - Maidan Revolution, Russia's annexation of Crimea and the Russian-Ukrainian Donbas war. The article is based on a fieldwork conducted between October 2017 and December 2019 in four French cities, and secondarily in three Ukrainian cities. It combines participant observations among pro-Ukrainian groups, biographic interviews with Ukrainians living in France (n=70), interviews of their acquaintances and partners in Ukraine (n=25), study of association reports, and non-participant observations on social networks. First, I show that long-distance political action is possible only if the distant conflict is constructed as a political issue or, in other words, if a political socialization around this conflict takes place. This happens first when people living in the host-country engage in virtual communications with politically-engaged acquaintances in the homeland. But, besides this network-based mode of socialization, the constitution of political groups is only possible through place-based interaction in particular locations in the host-country. The second part of the article shows that long distance political action is possible when mobilized groups produce a “space of engagement”, constituted by different places in the host-country and in the homeland, where they can either advocate for the cause or unfold military and humanitarian networks. I show that both the weight of social capital in the homeland (offering Ukrainians abroad the possibility to expand networks of financial and material support to people in need in Ukraine) and the socio-economic positions in the host-country (enabling Ukrainian to advocate for the cause and reach strategic actors in France) explain the scope of long-distance mobilization. In conclusion, I emphasize the interest for political geography to import approaches and methods from social geography. It will help the former, first, to adopt an individual-based analysis attentive to socio-spatial practices and representations and second, to pay attention to the impact of socio-economic position on political action.

The article explores the links between electoral sociology and geopolitics in Africa, starting with the issue of the intermittent community vote in the victory of the Democratic People's Movement of Cameroon (CPDM) in the presidential election of 7 October 2018. This intermittent vote (Jardin, 2014) is an irregular community vote depending on the polls and territories. It is situated in a double scientific context linked firstly to a conceptual and problematic renewal of geopolitical approaches (Dussouy, 2010); this scientific context then takes into account the interdisciplinary convergences in the field of electoral studies (Gombin and Rivière, 2010; 2014). It is a matter of borrowing a geopolitical analysis approach to grasp the construction of the irregular character of the community vote in Cameroon. This irregularity depends first of all on differential abstentionism. Corresponding to the 'observation of a difference in mobilization between electors' (Dolez, 2004 : 671), this differential abstentionism has indeed a determining weight on the periodicity of the solidarity vote through the drop in participation in 2018. An analysis of the territorialised strategies of the party in power is also mobilised to complete the explanation of the control of the local vote. It is a question of paying attention to the strategies deployed by actors to conquer and preserve the national territory through votes that are contrary to the electoral sociology of territories (Gombin, 2014; Giblin, 2014) within the regional and local geopolitical systems put in place by elected officials (Subra, 2016; Bailoni, 2018). Community voting in Cameroon can be seen as an intermittent vote, i.e. a community vote that is periodic depending on the polls and the territories. This hypothesis is first inspired by the issue of intermittent voting identified by Antoine Jardin (2014) in the variations in electoral participation in Ile-de-France between 2002 and 2012. This periodic community vote then integrates the weight of the RDPC's territorialised strategies in the control of a local vote acquired by the ADD, the UDC and especially the SDF in the northern and western regions in 2018. The period between the presidential elections of 2011 and 2018 will be mobilised in this study. The intermediate legislative and municipal elections (Parodi, 2004) of 30 September 2013 will serve as a benchmark to highlight a discontinuity in the community vote in favour of the ruling party in the presidential election in October 2018, the main ballot of the Cameroonian political system. Data collected at several levels of analysis (department, region, country, abroad) by Elections Cameroon (ELECAM), the Cameroonian body in charge of organizing elections. These data will also be mobilised and supplemented by a critical analysis of the speeches and representations around the victory of the CPDM. These will be drawn from interviews with political leaders and academics, media monitoring and scientific literature on the issue. Our contribution will first focus on presenting the role of the periodicity of the community vote in the importation of electoral geopolitics in Cameroon, starting with the 2018 presidential election. After having deciphered a sociology of this partisan vote in the face of the Cameroonian crises in 2018 (Eboko and Awondo, 2018; Morelle and Owona Nguini, 2018; Owona Nguini and Menthong, 2018), our reflection will end with a geopolitical analysis of the territorial continuities and discontinuities of the intermittence of a community vote acquired by the ruling party. According to these analyses, the irregularity of the ethnic vote appears as a plural strategic vote (Blais, 2004). Moreover, this intermittent community vote demonstrates that the use of geographical reasoning is not contradictory, but complementary to the socio-anthropological readings of the vote in Africa.

This article aims to present urban agriculture based on its activist expression and, therefore, as a political mechanism for spatial transformation in São Paulo and Paris. For this, we use participatory methodologies, with an emphasis on action research. Based on fieldwork and active participation in urban horticulture networks and initiatives, we also expanded the critical analysis of non-commercial intra-urban agriculture through the mobilization of its ideological essences, the articulations of civil society and the existing public policies and programs. We will return more specifically to the materialities of community gardens, which have the political potential to transform urban space, as they can expand reflections on: the use of public space; the origin and the quality of food; the organic production; the cooperation between citizens; the greening process of the city using edible plants; the forms of interaction between society and public authorities; and the debate on the right to the city. Crossing experiences from São Paulo and Paris, we also clarified the similarities and the differences in the understanding of "urban agriculture as activism" in distinct contexts, both in terms of the gardeners' organization in their respective local scales of activity and in relation to the responses of local governments. The awakening of activism and collective interest in the propagation of community gardens is recent in both cities, dating from this 21st century. But in Paris, the political articulation and the first gardens were created ten years before São Paulo (2000s in Paris and 2010s in São Paulo). Therefore, the number of community gardens is very different between those two cities. Until 2020, 14 initiatives in São Paulo were visited by this research; in Paris, 62 gardens were visited, but data from the local government accounted for 129 community gardens by the end of 2019. In São Paulo, there are no specific municipal policies or programs for community gardens and the initiatives are quite autonomous. However, their existence reinforces an approximation with the public power, since they reveal articulations in favour of the citizen reappropriation of public spaces, notably the squares. In Paris, in its turn, there is a municipal program for community gardens and associations are created to represent them. The local government guarantees a minimum set of support for the success of these actions, in addition to granting authorization for their existence in public spaces, notably squares and parks. In the two cities, São Paulo and Paris, there is an ideological appreciation of organic production in community gardens. Agroecology and / or permaculture appear as a symbol of the activist and collective practice of promoting ancestral knowledge and also to differentiate the organic production for the market. Finally, it is possible to verify that horticultural initiatives in public space reinforce community bonds and introduce new daily socio-spatial dynamics. Thus, it is confirmed that urban agriculture is a plural social practice. Its multiple dimensions allow analysis and studies from different perspectives, including those that focus on urban activism.

Children's geographies do not exist as a field of study in French Academia (Lehman-Frisch et Vivet, 2011) despite being a vivid one in English-speaking research (Holloway et Pimlott-Wilson, 2011). Nevertheless, both scientific traditions have shown little interest so far in children's reprentations of the world and of small-scale spaces in general, despite the calls of influent researchers (Philo, 2000 ; Ansell, 2009). In the French tradition this could be explained by the legacy of cognitive psycholgy and more precisely of Jean Piaget's work. Indeed, the cognitivist approach favours the development of children's spatial representations in stages, for instance, young children would only have representations of their close and familiar space (Piaget, 1926 ; Piaget et Inhelder, 1947). Although for very different reasons the New Social Studies of Childhood (NSSC), which have held a crucial role in English-speaking research since the 1990's, also favour the local scale in their work on children's spatial representations (Ansell, 2009). By highlighting the importance of considering children as social actors, the NSSC prefer to focus on the perspectives of children themselves and thus on the direct experience that children have of their environment and how they can influence it. The underlying idea is that children can only have direct experience and practice of the spaces they frequent in their daily lives. My PhD thesis (in progress) based on a field survey of 248 children aged 6 to 10 years from four Parisian primary schools, argues that children do, however, have representations of the world. This research relies on a multi-methodological protocol composed of four different activities : drawing, a whole-class brainstorming session, a task test (the children were invited to create an illustrated planisphere) and small group interviews (Ott, 2020). This methodology made it possible to vary the types of activities but also the conditions under which they were carried out (e.g. large groups vs small groups). In addition, I did some observation in the classrooms and conducted informal and semi-directive interviews with the teachers to measure the potential influence of the educational insitution on the representations of the children encountered in the field. The various activities highlighted in particular that children's representations reveal strong political views, making it possible to trace the outlines of children's geopolitics. I therefore investigated how the latter is constructed and in which context(s). This paper underlines that children's organisation of the global space reveals a hierarchical world; it is structured by symbolic places that are omnipresent in their geographical imagination, while other places are altogether absent. Moreover, the spaces present in their drawings and speeches are judged differently: some are highly appreciated and others depreciated. The distinctive ways in which they consider spaces and societies, which they are sometimes able to explain and justify themselves, emphasizes the emergence of a political and social awareness from a very young age. Yet, those hierarchical representations must be analysed in the light of the influence of different social bodies (the family, the school, the media). Tracing the genesis of children's representations of the world therefore shows that some global divisions are integrated from an early age, and that primary socialisation is fundamental to understand the power relations that structure the contemporary global space.

For the past 15 years, the mouth region has been altered by an accumulation of hydrological risks against which state policies have shown limits. Today, it is necessary to invest new creative imaginations to re-enchant its adaptive governance trajectory, which has been unsustainable until now. In order to document a possible sustainable transition, I propose a socio-hydrological monograph - a geophysical and human description - of the panorama of the area around the mouth of the Senegal River, before characterizing its trajectory of adaptive governance since the 1970s and finally, I present the agenda of its possible re-enchantment, in a pluralistic, relational and cosmopolitan dimension of knowledge. The analytical timescale of this paper is documented through a collection of "mixed" empirical data - field surveys (53 informants surveyed); academic archives; administrative/institutional documents -. The treatment of this empirical corpus proves that, apart from scholarly knowledge, local/vernacular knowledge co-exists and can give new impetus to public policies in distress, in the face of ecological disasters that have become planetary. This paper will focus on local knowledge in a context of combined ecological crisis. Thanks to a plurality of corpora from the work of the French Ministry of Colonies, qualitative interviews and academic archives. Thus, I define the organization of scientific knowledge carried by the actors of hydrological governance, then prove the coexistence of traditional knowledge still invisible held by indigenous populations through observation and field missions that have allowed to interview 53 individuals between 2016 and 2017 in the town of Gandiol. My results show that apart from the scholarly knowledge that is constantly emerging among elites and technocrats, memories, narratives, techniques, and strategies coexist and function. Thus, in an increasingly vulnerable world (floods, drought, marine submersion, erosive beach crises), where public policies, scientific and technical knowledge have shown their limits in the face of global ecological disasters, a decolonization of environmental imaginations is necessary thanks to a recognition of knowledge, a rebalancing of systems of thought, philosophies and epistemologies. It is in this register that my research is mobilizing real alternatives to re-found the contents of local knowledge (learned and traditional) in the construction of resilience in the service of hybrid intelligence. A contribution to the field of local/vernacular knowledge, in a discipline such as geography.

Autonomous systems (AS) are the basic units of Internet global routing. They are group of routers interconnected by the same administrative control (Internet Service Providers, Content Providers, companies, public services etc.) that interconnect to each other to form the Internet as a whole. By establishing connection agreements between themselves via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), ASes allow data to flow from one point to another around the globe. In this article, we aim to understand how the aspect of the routing of data can be decisive in how we consider both the relationship between Internet and territory, and the impact of the structure of the Internet on territorial conflicts. Much literature has addressed the relationship between space and the Internet, both in geography and geopolitics. The increasing digitization of various aspects of society (Bakis, 2013 ; Cattaruzza, 2019) was first accompanied by comments about a paradigm shift of the concepts of geography (Virilio, 1997) or sovereignty (Camilleri, Falk, 1992). The relationship between space and Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) has also been considered under the angle of infrastructures and their territorial integration (Lasserre, 2000) More recently, Beaude (2012) and Loveluck (2015) have shown how the complex interactions between Internet and society, produced alternative forms of space. Increasingly, the many dimensions of the Internet and of digitization are considered a salient feature of the social construction of territories, and therefore of geopolitical conflicts (Douzet, 2014). We draw from this literature to illustrate how the network of Autonomous Systems is linked to territorial conflicts. The behavior of autonomous systems, and in particular their integration within the rest of the network, responds to geopolitical constraints. The choice of an AS's administrators to connect to some ASes and not others, or the way they design and implement routing policies are subject to commercial, political, geographical and legal decisions. The construction of this topology then alters territories, especially disputed ones, and the power rivalries that apply to it. We show that this network is emblematic of the duality of the Internet between topography and topology. This study aims at understanding the role AS topology can play in the traditional power struggle. By selecting the paths through which data flows, administrators of AS bring out territories and new forms of « power-topology » (Allen, 2011). Our methodology combines elements of geopolitics and technical sciences (Internet measurements, network theory) and is based on quantitative approaches. We use data of interdomain connectivity gathered through BGP monitors that allow us to create graphs showing the interconnections between autonomous systems. We use an empirical approach to read the output graphs on a specific case study: disputed territories in Ukraine. The territories of Donbass and Crimea are ideal case studies in that the dispute over them is rather new, which allow us to observe with detail the changes in the topology of their networks over time. They also represent two different types of disputed territories. While Crimea was annexed by the Russian Federation in March 2014, the Donbass region is home to the two self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and is actively fighting against the central government of Ukraine with the help of Russia. By looking at the stakeholders of connectivity in these territories and their evolution, we show how the Internet is embedded into dynamics of changing sovereignty. In fact, the technical infrastructures of the Internet highlight a new vector of Russian power. The evolution of the routing topology indicates that Crimea is now fully dependent on Russia to connect to the Internet, and Donbass is following the same path.

The Russian Federation has been developing a strategy of informational influence abroad since the beginning of 2010. This strategy, based on a massive presence on social networks, is at the heart of new power struggles between states. In France, Russian state-funded media RT and Sputnik are thus regularly blamed for their editorial policy, which many political and media actors consider as partial or misleading. The Yellow Vests movement, whose members have been accused of being manipulated by Russia and its media, illustrates this observation. While a growing number of publications has focused on the actors of Russian informational influence and the narratives they deploy (Yablokov, 2015; Audinet, 2018, 2020 ; Hutchings, 2020), the question of the reception and the propagation of content produced by these actors on different networks remain unanswered – mainly because of difficulties in accessing to social network data – despite recent efforts (Fisher, 2020). This article therefore proposes to draw up a mapping of the political communities that disseminate the contents of the international Russian media. This cartography is based on data collected on Twitter during the first months of the Yellow Vests movement. The approach we propose here is inspired by the work published by Gaumont et al. which shows that it is possible, through data from Twitter, and especially retweets, to qualify and quantify the activity of political communities, as well as their evolution and reconfiguration over time (Gaumont et al, 2018). Our methodology to map content published by the Russian media is directly in line with the work of Limonier and Pétiniaud (2018), who focused on a part of the "pro-Russian" community of the French-speaking segment of Twitter, as well as on the way this community relayed the MacronLeaks during the between-two rounds of the French presidential election of 2017. Our results first show that content produced by the Russian state-media are relatively popular across a broad spectrum of the French political landscape, from left-leaning to far-right parties. Then, we observe that Yellow Vest communities are distinguished by their weak presence and dispersal within the graph, which confirm the hypothesis that this movement was not formed and structured on Twitter but on Facebook (Sebbah et al, 2018). If the protest movement has indeed been the subject of a very high volume of publications for several months on Twitter, this platform seems to have been only a media and political soundbox, rather than a space for structuring and organizing the different groups of Yellow Vests.