Critique internationale - Content
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[Governing the Frontiers of Development: The Return of the Land Question and the “Management” of the Investments in Senegal]
The end of the Washington Consensus coincided with the start of a new development phase driven by the African rising narrative. In Senegal, this resulted in a relaunch of the agrarian development policies, marked by a rise in large-scale land deals. This paper examines the governance of an agro-industrial investment in the Senegal River Delta region foreseeing the cession of 20 000 hectares of grazing land, and the ensuing conflict with the local population. It focuses on land governance procedures that underpin the investment and on the formal and informal, public and private forms of regulation that accompany its establishment and the management of the relations with the populations affected by the project. It highlights the strategic articulation between state action and neo-liberal governance in the reorganisation of the relations between territories, rights and inhabitants, continuing the process of agricultural colonisation of the delta. These dynamics, it is argued, reflect the neo-liberal transformation of the 'development state' while undermining the possibility for local populations of participating in development processes concerning their territories.
[Industry and Development in Cameroon: State Dynamics in a Context of “Emergence”] Industrialization occupies a central place in the new engineering of emergence in Cameroon. This article examines the authorities’ return to development planning policy by focusing on projects relating to the construction of material infrastructure, institutional reform and business development financing. The discrepancy between stated objectives (or the image that a regime eager to construct new legitimacy presents of itself) and actual achievements (or the state’s practices) tells us much about the power dynamics at play in the political, economic and social project of “emergence”. Our fieldwork shows that this configuration contributes to rebooting the forces that have historically structured government in Cameroon. Yet, even though the state’s dynamics have converged in a way that tends to preserve the status quo, the project of “emergence” is accompanied by significant transformations that attest to the malleability of a regime capable of permanently reinventing the forms of this status quo in the aim of guaranteeing its stability.
[Redeploying the State through the market: the politics of social housing in Côte d’Ivoire]
The rhetoric of emergence is a recurrent phenomenon in Africa and Côte d’Ivoire likes to see itself as a laboratory for its experimentation. Confronted with criticism of what is said to be an insufficiently inclusive growth policy, the Alassane Ouattara’s government responded by seeking to signal the advent of a distributive policy based in its social programs, an essential link of which consists of its social housing policy (PLS). This article examines the construction of this policy understood as a vantage point for observing the ambiguities of the state and of issues relating to the discourse of emergence. Data collected between February 2016 and April 2019 among actors involved in interactions relating to the Presidential Social Housing Program provide the basis for a sociology of the state’s PLS regulation. We find that power asymmetries among these actors jeopardized the realization of the program’s objectives. We further find that what might at first seem a failure of regulation in reality barely conceals the opportunity that the PLS represented for expanding the sphere of political patronage to the private sector and that the market-driven production of social policy proves no more than a pipe dream. Finally, we argue that, behind the pie-in-the-sky discourse of emergence, the Ivorian state is developing a system for exploiting neoliberal reforms in the interests of its own redeployment.
[Chinese Participation in Kenyan Transport Infrastructure: Reshaping Power-Geometries?] Infrastructure has historically been both a tool and a reflection of state power, and current development agendas across the African continent are contributing to reposition the state as driver of development. Simultaneously, diverging agendas amongst state and parastate actors, as well as the involvement of private or foreign actors produce a complex and layered political reality. Increasing involvement of Chinese actors in infrastructure projects calls for further investigation of the impact Chinese participation has on relations amongst state and non-state actors in African nations. Using the case study of Lamu port project in Northern Kenya, financed by the Kenyan government but constructed by a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise, this article focuses on the controversies involving the national government and Lamu county government. This paper highlights how the presence of Chinese actors has both reproduced pre-existing geographies of power, but also contributed to the emergence of new power-geometries.
[Sovereignists vs. Liberals within the Eurocratic Field: The Case of the Adoption of the “Defense Packageˮ]
Who defended the creation of an internal defense market within the Eurocratic field following the adoption of the “defense package” in 2009? This analysis sheds light on the armament actors who worked on behalf of this change in public action and those who opposed them. Drawing upon fieldwork, I show that this rivalry at the summit of the European Union can neither be reduced to the national interests of opposing member states nor to predictable institutional division between the European Commission and EU member states. The armament actors that defended adoption of the defense package consist of member states and EU institutions, public actors and private industrial actors. On the basis of a “programmatic” approach located at the intersection of the sociology of European public action and the sociology of elites, I shed light on two “associations” of competing actors, the “sovereignists” and the “liberals”, who respectively position themselves as adversaries and supporters of the defense packet’s adoption. This approach contributes to the study of the structuring of the Eurocratic field in the twenty-first century.
[Ecological Populism as International Strategy: Equator and Bolivia Faced with Environmental Multilateralism]
The notion of populism is generally used to describe national political scenes and the plurality of its uses may give an impression of vagueness. In this paper, I put forward the concept of ecological populism, which I describe as a strategy consisting of elements that may be articulated at both the national and international levels. Studying the international policies of Bolivia and Ecuador under the governments of Rafael Correa and Evo Morales supports the thesis that this political strategy is characterized by a revival of the anti-imperialism of the 1970s and the use of a curiously empty signifier: the Pachamama, or Mother Earth. In addition to allowing anti-globalization circles to unite around the diplomacies in question, this strategy also reinforces the internal cohesion of the blocs that support the Correa and Morales governments. Yet even though it has given unprecedented visibility to these countries within environmental multilateralism, its lack of power and failure to win acceptance for its proposals has prevented ecological populism from transforming the contested multilateral framework.
Gabriela Polit Dueñas, Unwanted Witnesses. Journalists and Conflict in Contemporary Latin America, Pittsburg, University of Pittsburg Press, 2019, XIII-161 pages.
Romain Lecler, Une contre-mondialisation audiovisuelle, ou comment la France exporte la diversité culturelle, Paris, Sorbonne Université Presses, 2019, 308 pages.
Federico Tarragoni, L’esprit démocratique du populisme : une nouvelle analyse sociologique, Paris, La Découverte, 2019, 371 pages.
Arturo Escobar, Sentir-penser avec la Terre. L’écologie au-delà de l’Occident, Paris, Le Seuil, 2018, 225 pages.
Kristen Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex. Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War, Durham, Duke University Press, 2019, XVIII-306 pages.
