Contenu du sommaire

How does the municipal administration govern in the midst of violence in Badiraguato, Sinaloa, a municipality considered to be Mexico's national “cradle of drug trafficking”? One strategy, used by the current administration in Badiraguato, Sinaloa, is to make tourism the main economic objective while inhabitants' daily movements put them at risk; to make road safety a priority while homicides are a recurring occurrence in daily life; to encourage “social bonding” through development programmes while inhabitants' main source of income locks them into an economy that is repressed by a different level of the state. This approach of addressing solvable problems is a subtle game, taking the context into account in order to better avoid it and never name it. By relying on programme-based development engineering – and on its depoliticising and decontextualising potential – elected officials and civil servants of Badiraguato are managing to produce an agenda and routine that are impervious to the outbursts of violence that affect the municipality. These practices constitute a mode of government which, by dodging the most prevalent social dynamics, ensures a stable administration in a context of violence and uncertainty.

What are the social bases of the making of public authority in contexts marked by violence and uncertainty? Based on fieldwork conducted with trade association leaders in Karachi's bazaar, I explain how adherence to a particular style of life constitutes an effective mode of domination. While some argue that public authority is generally shaped and maintained through violence, this article shows that actors in conflict situations value modes of action, such as non-violent confrontation, that allow them to defend interests without fueling tensions. In order to build their authority, these leaders also privilege vernacular registers of legitimacy, notably apoliticism†the supposed absence of compromise with the criminal underworld†and piety, which goes hand in hand with honesty and respect for Islamic morality in the conduct of business. Hence these leaders' authority is embedded both in the norms of Karachi's market society and the urban environment in which they work.

How is a legitimist militia constructed in contemporary Mali, particularly in the context of the fight against jihadist groups ? The investigation presented in this article sheds light on the way the Dogon hunter-militiamen have become defenders of their community, but also intermittent partners of the state in the “war on terror”. While the state†often described as failed†appears as a central actor in the production of violence, political actors who specialise in intermediation emerge and take the role of brokers in a context of internationalising conflict. These militia elites put forward their “autochthony” and their involvement in the “war on terror” in order to negotiate their position and secure rising social trajectories. These processes highlight the use of a local lexicon in national and transnational configurations, which reinforces identity assignments and the prolongment of conflict.

Using data collected during fieldwork conducted in Jordan during the 2020 legislative elections, I examine campaign modalities and candidates' electoral mobilisation strategies. I am particularly interested in their territorial practices, namely in the spatial organisation of their campaigns in their electoral districts. By following three candidates in their respective constituencies, I first show that their choice of electorate and mobilisation space depends on their representations of the electoral configuration, their trajectories, as well as the resources and means they have at their disposal. I then analyse how this choice affects the way the candidates invest their energies throughout the territory, both in terms of repertoires of action (door-to-door campaigning in a limited territory, mobilisation of an “a-spatialised” categorical electorate on specific themes, delegation to a party organisation) and in terms of the location of these practices across the constituency.

In this article, I compare the collective identifications mobilised by university graduates of sub-Saharan origin in Paris and London to politicise their experiences of discrimination. I reveal how these identifications echo French and British public policies and debates. While a black identification is clearly claimed in the “race-conscious” British context, it is scarcely politicised in the “colour-blind” French framework. Blackness is mobilised only by French respondents who are highly aware of race issues; others promote migrant or neighbourhood identities to denounce injustice. In effect, the spatialisation of social problems in France means that the politicisation of discrimination emerges more easily through a neighbourhood identification, albeit one into which a racial dimension is interwoven. Conversely, this kind of territorial belonging is not politicised in the United Kingdom, where racial segregation is less of a public issue.

Between 2012 and 2014, the establishment of the National Women's Forum was the subject of considerable controversy in Burundi, pitting women's associations against the country's ruling party. UN Women, which was one of the main donors of the Forum, was taken to task. This case study addresses the issue of the participation of international organisations in the (de)politicisation of women's representation in a country that has experienced armed conflict. Against the hypothesis of a single depoliticisation, I show, by mobilising the notion of a third party with varying roles, that the actions of the UN agency are more equivocal. Indeed, UN Women first stood as a structuring third party in the conflict relating to this issue, reactivating a long-standing dispute between political institutions and women's associations ; then it served as a neutral third party, seeking to neutralise antagonisms by mobilising universal norms ; finally, it acted as an excluded third party, when – unrecognised as a mediator – it reopened a space for debates on the rights and duties of the state, civil society, and the international community in representing women and defending their claims.

In 2012, for the first time in its long history, the international labour standards' supervisory system of the International Labour Organization (ILO) was paralysed by an internal conflict started by the employers' group at the International Labour Conference. During the conference, the employers' delegates challenged the recognition of the right to strike by Convention no. 87 and the legitimacy of the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations to interpret the Convention. I analyse this unprecedented conflict as a transnational mobilisation of the employers' group, and explain the genesis of this movement. First, I underline the reasons for this conflict, which resulted from the evolution of the ILO since the end of the Cold War and from the increased visibility of international labour standards in the legal landscape. Second, I focus on the sociology of the entrepreneurs of the mobilisation. I show the role of lawyers from large Anglo-Saxon law firms who specialise in anti-union counsel. These lawyers are characterised by an antagonistic legal style (adversarial legalism) at odds with the ILO's logic of tripartite consensus.