Contenu du sommaire : Construction de soi et révolte dans le monde musulman, la politisation jugulée

This study attempts to describe the different way young people live their sentimental relations and sexual experiences in Algeria. It examines the way people try to conform and sometimes secretly transgress the norms. Social and religious norms forbid having sex before marrying and most of the youth conform to the social order. However, the average age to marry in Algeria is rising (around 30 for boys and girls) even if young people want to marry before. This is the result of unemployment, housing problems and large access to university. This article focuses on a minority of transgressive youth in the city of Oran. It describes the different logics people mobilise, highlighting the tension between individual and social demands. This study identifies the complexity and tensions of hybridisation and the way people try to shape their identity. It is argued that even if they transgress the norms, they still adhere to conformism and don't mobilise their revendications in a politic way.

This article addresses the politicization of the ‘metalheads' of Latakia, Syria. More particularly, it highlights the role of a set of individual and collective practices associated with the metal musical genre — whether listening to the music or actually playing an instrument, possibly leading to the constitution of a music band — in politicization mechanisms, from 2008 to the present day. Metal music, which boomed in Syria from the 2000s, mainly in well-to-do environments, is often reduced to its dimension of protest. Based on a reflexive approach and a series of interviews, this article makes the point that in Latakia, this contestation was a rather muffled one, and associated with the elaboration of an individual narrative, through which metalheads constitute an outlet and give meaning to their place as individuals in their environment. In this process, music is both a discursive and material tool in a quest for individual achievement, and a social marker through which individuals differentiate themselves and try to escape social control. From 2008, metal practices provoke conflicting interactions, particularly with the security and intelligence services of the state. Such tensions reveal the ambiguity of the political commitment of metalheads and specify the nature of the control of the authoritarian power over the bourgeoisie that is close to it.

In the last twenty years, suicide attacks has become the favoured repertoire of political violence by Jihadist militants. Whenever such attacks occur, media and academics alike tend to focus and speculate on the individual motivations of the perpetrators. Their reading usually oscillates between an understanding of Jihadist violence as a result of, on the one hand, a hyper-individualization and highly intimate motives or, on the other hand, of a blind submission to authority. This paper departs from such motivations-focused analyses and turns the question upside down in order to interrogate instead the very logic of attributing motivations to others. Ascribing motives to militants is in itself a political process: it is fully embedded in power relations, in the broader imperatives of counter-terrorist policies, and in context-specific “moral panics”. I am particularly interested in both identifying the discursive entrepreneurs — the state security apparatus of course but not only — and elucidating the specific frame used to describe Jihadists' motivations: the tension individualization/de-individualization mentioned above. My demonstration is based on a case study, that of a young woman who was arrested after a foiled suicide attack orchestrated by the Islamic State in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2017. The empirical material gathered (her confessional video and TV interview) enables me to analyse how militants adapt to, but at times also manage to resist and challenge, the denial of agency imposed upon them.

For more than twenty years, the French State has relied on intermunicipal authorities to rebalance the presence of social housing in urban areas and to fight against socio-spatial segregation. The Établissements publics de coopération intercommunale (EPCI) have been given instruments that allow them to influence first the production of new social housing units and, more recently, their allocation to tenants. In this article, we attempt to measure the effective rise in power of the EPCIs in these areas based on a comparative study of six French cities (Bordeaux, Dunkirk, Grenoble, Meaux, Mulhouse and SaintÉtienne). It emerges that the progress made by the intermunicipal authorities is clearer in the regulation of the production of new social housing than in the regulation of attributions. We note fairly strong variations between cases that result from two series of variables: socio-spatial configurations that cover the degree of tension on the housing markets as well as the socio-economic and demographic balances between the central cities and the peripheral municipalities; political-administrative configurations and, in particular, the capacity of ‘reform coalitions' mobilized at the intercommunal level to impose themselves in the face of the ‘municipal machines'.