Contenu du sommaire : Entreprises ancrées, États en jeu ?

Two decades after the beginning of the last commodity boom, what is the state of political authority in places dedicated to the extraction of raw materials and often seen as new frontiers of capitalism? By taking mining, oil, metallurgical, and agribusiness sites—and the companies that come along—as fields of investigation, the contributions gathered in this special issue are a testament to the failed endeavor of bounding the state to the mere role of a broker, charged with facilitating the operations of international capital. This introduction outlines a synthetic view of the multiple processes that are responsible for the social and political anchoring of extractive companies, most often despite these latter's intentions. The historical perspective granted by the almost three decades passed since the great wave of privatization and liberalization of the 1990s enables a more accurate view of these extractive spaces; one that is attentive to longer term trends and everyday life. Nurtured by local mobilizations, a variegated panel of forms of representation and authority have sometimes gained a certain autonomy from companies and have even been able to successfully invoke statehood in their quest for legitimacy. In that sense, we argue that these firms can seldom be described through the popular image of extractive “enclaves.” As a matter of fact, these incremental processes tend to strengthen their embeddedness within larger political topographies.

Based on a comparative ethnography of three Cameroonian agribusiness complexes in the 2010s, this article describes the processes through which these spaces, landlocked and granted to powerful enterprises, have been progressively integrated into the political territory. In a context marked by privatization and a rise in the areas dedicated to industrial agriculture, it describes an a priori surprising burgeoning of local authorities and spread of the language of officiality inside and nearby these isolated “enclaves”. To that purpose, it follows the making of local notabilities out of some specific members of each company's staff. It also studies the sociogenesis, rooted in the daily interactions that characterize the industrial plantation areas, of a rising number of local institutions able to gain official recognition from the public authorities (local communities, administrative subdivisions, chiefdoms of different kinds). By describing some of the numerous mobilizations that have affected these companies over the last decade, this article shows that all the complexes (even the only one that remained a parastatal) have been exposed to similar demands and the imposition of comparable social obligations toward their employees and neighboring communities. Through improvisation and incremental accommodations, each of these diverse spaces has therefore in its own way followed a trajectory of integration into the political and institutional framing of the territory as it has been reinvented over the last two decades in Cameroon. In that sense, this article also bears witness to the vitality of local authorities in that country, in the framework given by a politically locked decentralization.

This article investigates factory regimes in Kryvyi Rih, a mining and metalworking city in eastern Ukraine. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it studies the reproduction of industrial hegemony in the context of major post-Soviet transformations (privatization and austerity measures). The comparison of three cases representing different hegemonic configurations (mines privatized by Ukrainian businessmen, a metalworking factory bought by a foreign company, and quarries acquired by a Ukrainian vertically integrated holding) sheds light on the variations of this process. This variability is due to the degree of the new owner's indigeneity and his repressive capacity; to the kind of informal relations regulating the labor process and the union scene; and to the social embeddedness of the owner on the scale of the factory and at the city level. The article shows how the construction and preservation of a hegemonic bloc between the dominant and the subaltern groups at the enterprise level rely on a vernacular moral economy in which the factory's economic activities are embedded. Post-Soviet industrial paternalism is the product of lay expectations that are, in their turn, dynamic and prone to change under the influence of the policies of legitimate owners.

The encounter of indigenous peoples with mining or oil companies is often seen through the prism of confrontation. While the frequency of disputes is undeniable, particularly in Latin America, the interactions arising from the establishment of extractive industries in rural areas cannot be reduced to head-on opposition: because they are necessarily grounded in territories where they have to deal with their social environment, these industries often give rise to more mundane and peaceful interactions that bring about profound changes. This is the subject of this article, which is based on an ethnographic survey carried out in Peru, in indigenous villages in the Amazon facing the development of an emblematic oil site in the region. It questions how this locally grounded extractive industry contributes to the normalization of a border society. Taking into account the relational nature of the interactions that take place around extractive sites, it conceptualizes this political topography as an “oil space” where profound but ambivalent transformations take place, whether it be the importation of wage discipline into productive practices, the hierarchical restructuring of the village collective, or the inclusion in the national territorial order that is conducive to a certain commodification of Amazonian land.

Agribusiness investment has an overarching and growing influence in a wide range of rural areas. In Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, but also the post-communist world, agribusiness territories are described as “enclaves,” encountering the opposition of “local communities” who fight in resistance against “land grabbing”. While reckoning with the intractable issues related to agribusiness activities, this contribution intends to complexify this narrative, emphasizing the multiple ways in which the establishment of a firm can reconfigure power relations and the dynamics of collective mobilization at the local level. It then highlights the existence of a continuum between intermediation activities, the most visible forms of protest, and the more prosaic modalities of adaptation, which become apparent as we look more closely at the relationships between local mobilizations and transnational activism. These various forms of action ultimately contribute to developing the social and political grounding of the corporation. This proposition is put into practice in the study of a territory marked by agribusiness palm oil production—the Ivorian region of Sud-Comoé—and documented by several repeated field trips between 2016 and 2019.

Who decides who is a “political prisoner” and who is not? This article aims to study the evolution of expertise on political prisoners from the late Soviet period to the present day, by examining the way in which identifying institutions—from Soviet dissidents to professionalized human rights organizations—grant this status to certain prisoners and refuse it to others. Based on documentary research (archives, memoirs, press articles) and fieldwork among contemporary human rights actors, this article shows that two major trends—that of internationalization and juridicization within the post-Soviet human rights space—mark the evolution of expertise on political cases. This expertise is forged at the crossroads of the tradition of the legalist approach taken by dissidents and standardized international practices, which shows that “human rights” are not simply a pure product of a symbolic import but are defined through the continuous tension between local challenges and processes of internationalization.

This article shows how, in the face of river continuity policies that aim to restore aquatic biodiversity, the defense of hydroelectric and agricultural activities involves politicizing their role in adaptation to climate change. Thus, actors in these industries seek less to depoliticize water issues than to reaffirm their political dimension by providing other problematizations and other frameworks for interpreting the ecological emergency. This article is based on an analysis of the multi-scalar political work of actors in these industries using some fifty interviews and gray literature. The results show that the politicization of climate issues enables them to transform the frameworks for legitimizing water policy and to reproduce their industrial uses of watercourses. Finally, the results invite us to observe the ecological transition less as a homogeneous object opposed to other principles of action than through the competing political uses made of it.

This article aims to provide a thematic review of academic works on the gilets jaunes movement since its inception in November 2018. Its purpose is to synthesize the main results emerging from the authors' reading of the various studies published in the past two years, mainly in sociology and political science, with some forays into history, geography, anthropology, and political theory. In doing so, it outlines the most salient characteristics of the movement as described by the social sciences, as well as the main lines of inquiry and debates the gilets jaunes have sparked.