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Les Études du CERI, n°271-272, janvier 2024.

Amérique latine. L’Année politique 2023 est une publication de l’Observatoire politique de l’Amérique latine et des Caraïbes (Opalc) du CERI-Sciences Po. Il prolonge la démarche du site www.sciencespo.fr/opalc en offrant des clés de compréhension d’un continent en proie à des transformations profondes. Des informations complémentaires sont disponibles sur le site.

Canberra, ANU Press, 2024, 454 p.

This volume brings together an international team of prominent scholars from a range of disciplines, with the aim of investigating the many facets of the Chinese Communist Party’s 100-year trajectory. It combines a level of historical depth mostly found in single-authored monographs with the thematic and disciplinary breadth of an edited volume. This work stands out for its long-term and multiscale approach, offering complex and nuanced insights, eschewing any Party grand narrative, and unravelling underlying trends and logics, composed of adaption but also contradictions, resistance and sometimes setbacks, that may be overlooked when focusing on the short term. Rather than putting forward an overall argument about the nature of the Party, the many perspectives presented in this volume highlight the complex internal dynamics of the Party, the diversity of its roles in relation to the state, as well as in its interaction with society beyond the state. Our historical approach stresses impermanence beyond the apparent permanence of the Party’s organisation and ideology while also bringing to light the recycling of past practices and strategies. Looking at the Party’s evolution over time shows how its founding structures and objectives have had a long-lasting impact as well as how they have been tweaked and rearranged to adapt to the new economic and social environment the Party contributed to creating.

Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023, 354 p.

This book offers a novel account of the significant debt crisis which hit many developing countries during the 1980s. It starts with the flawed cycle of bank lending during the 1970s, and then moves from the opening act, in Mexico in 1982, until a solution was found with the 1989 Brady Initiative. The Debt Crisis of the 1980s also articulates closely the economic and financial dimensions alongside the political and multilateral ones. The key relation between debtor countries and the IMF is explored in detail, but the book also documents the tense and often coercive interactions with commercial banks as well as on the continuing resistance to the IMF-led strategy among G7 governments. How debt contracts were restructured during all those years helps understanding how the Brady Initiative worked in practice, and how it prepared the ground for the turn to global markets after 1990. This debt crisis was indeed one of the main incubators of globalisation. This underlines further its unique character in the long-run history of sovereign debts, before and after the 1980s. Remarkably, this book rests on in-depth interviews with the key players. Transcripts are included for the six most important players, including the former heads of the US Federal Reserve and the IMF. Archives from the IMF, the New York Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and commercial banks have also been systematically exploited, often for the first time ever.

Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2024, 350 p.

Vladimir Poutine livre en Ukraine une cinquième guerre depuis 1999, après la Tchétchénie, la Géorgie, le Donbass et la Syrie. Jamais la Russie n’a réellement été menacée par ceux qu’elle attaquait, il lui a fallu trouver des prétextes : protéger des « russophones en danger », lutter contre le terrorisme, « dénazifier l’Ukraine ». Ce que craint Poutine plus que tout, c’est la démocratisation des anciennes républiques soviétiques et leur émancipation de la tutelle d’un État russe prédateur. Pour assurer la survie de son pouvoir, il mène une guerre de destruction et sacrifie les soldats russes en grand nombre. Mais il n’avait anticipé ni la résistance des Ukrainiens ni le soutien des pays occidentaux. La guerre permanente n’a fait qu’accentuer la répression à l’intérieur et fragiliser la Russie à l’extérieur. En livrant à l’Ukraine une guerre ingagnable, Poutine enferme les Russes dans une confrontation majeure avec l’Europe, l’Amérique du Nord et le Japon, et entraîne son pays vers l’abîme.