Violence, deuil, politique (violence, mourning, politics) (trad. de l'anglais E.U.)

Cet article soutient l'idée que le travail du deuil peut être riche de possibilités pour repenser la communauté et les relations internationales, et que la " guerre préventive " ainsi que la déréalisation de la perte concourent à miner les liens humains fondamentaux. L'expérience du deuil est à même de révéler les modes sur lesquels le self est fait de relations intériorisées, si bien que lorsque nous perdons des êtres, nous perdons et altérons une part de nous-mêmes. Faire le deuil pourrait déboucher sur une option : la non-violence. A soutenir l'insoutenable quand nous perdons quelqu'un, nous pouvons devenir capables d'une plus grande sollicitude envers les pertes subies par les autres, et en particulier, les pertes causées par notre propre recours à la violence. La distinction entre des vies " qui valent la peine d'être pleurées " et d'autres " qui ne valent pas une larme " est révélatrice de la distribution géopolitique différentielle de la mélancolie, ainsi que des cadres raciaux et ethniques qui font et défont l'humain en sa possibilité d'être pleuré. Voici qui laisse entrevoir une manière de faire le lien entre un concept psychanalytique de la formation du sujet, concept pétri de politique, et une politique soucieuse de tout ce qu'il y a d'inacceptable à mourir sous les frappes militaires. La théorie féministe est centrale à cette conception, dans la mesure où elle met tout particulièrement l'accent sur un sujet incarné, vulnérable à la violence, qui ne peut émerger que dans le contexte d'une dépendance physique fondamentale.

Hybrids and Regulation in the Global Political Economy

While regulation theory literature has made important contributions to the much-debated domain of globalisation by focusing on various aspects of post-Fordism, it has not yet fully engaged with the implications that can be drawn from critical approaches in international political economy. Recent studies have explored the transnational bases of new patterns and agents of change beyond states, firms and institutions traditionally involved in regulatory practices. Hybrid is often used as a default attribute reflecting lack of clear understanding of the breadth of this new type of influence and the opacity of the means involved. Drawing on the insights of philology and mythology, the paper argues that the notion of hybrid is relevant in elucidating the ontological ambiguity between imaginary and real aspects of globalisation. Furthermore, it specifies the categories involved in the analysis of emerging forms of hybrid regulation. Recent scholarship on globalisation tends to focus on the private-public nexus of the subjects involved in new forms of institutional arrangements and authority. Here, subjects, objects and space are analysed as joint issues. By focusing particularly on transformations affecting the role of the state, forms of competition, and their rescaling on a transnational basis, the concept of global hybrid is seen as complementary to the emancipation of regulation approaches from early emphasis on national levels of compromises.

Do Fiscal and Political Decentralization Raise Students’ Performance? A Cross-Country Analysis

The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22 countries, we test whether there exists an impact of fiscal and political decentralization on student performance in the areas of mathematics, reading skills and science. We observe that fiscal decentralization exerts an unequivocal positive effect on students’ outcomes in all areas, while the effect of political decentralization is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the capacity of the subnational governments to rule on its region has a positive effect on students’ performance in mathematics. On the other hand, the capacity to influence the country as a whole has a negative impact on mathematics achievement. As a general result, we observe that students’ performance in Mathematics is more sensible to these exogenous variations than in Sciences and reading skills. Keywords: School outcomes, PISA, fiscal decentralization, political decentralization JEL codes: H11, H77, I21

The Impact of the Electoral System on Political Campaigning : Are Candidates for the Council of States More Moderate than their Fellow Candidates for the National Council ?

It is commonly believed that majority voting enhances parties to cluster around the centre of the political space, whereas proportional systems (PR) foster great ideological divergence. The theoretical arguments for these expectations go back to the work of Downs (1957) and Duverger (1954). More recent studies, however, produced quite contradictory empirical findings. In this paper I will test whether similar arguments hold true for the positioning of candidates campaigning in different electoral systems. The elections for the two chambers of the Swiss Parliament and the data from the Swiss Electoral Studies (SELECTS) and the Swiss Voting Advice Application (VAA) smartvote offer an excellent - almost laboratory like - opportunity to do so empirically. The analyses show clearly, the theoretical claims that majority voting necessarily fosters more moderate positions find no support. The candidates for the Council of States, elected in a majority system, are not more moderate than their fellow party candidates for the National Council which are elected in a PR system.

Uncertainty, electoral Incentives and political myopia

In this paper, we study the determinants of political myopia in a rational model of electoral accountability where the key elements are informational frictions and uncertainty. We build a framework where political ability is ex-ante unknown and policy choices are not perfectly observable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep well-performing incumbents. On the other, politicians invest too little in costly policies with future returns in an attempt to signal high ability and increase their reelection probability. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, uncertainty reduces political myopia and may, under some conditions, increase social welfare. We use the model to study how political rewards can be set so as to maximise social welfare and the desirability of imposing a one-term limit to governments. The predictions of our theory are consistent with a number of stylised facts and with a new empirical observation documented in this paper: aggregate uncertainty, measured by economic volatility, is associated to better ...scal discipline in a panel of 20 OECD countries.

The Relationship between Media and Political Agendas : Variations across Decision-Making Phases

Previous studies have demonstrated that the extent to which media coverage influences the issue priorities of policy makers is contingent on the type of issue, media, and political agenda. This article contends that the relationship between media and political agendas varies across the phases of the decision-making process. Based on a comprehensive dataset on issue attention in media coverage and various policy-making channels covering the years 1996-2003, the article analyses the level of media coverage and, more importantly, the distribution and correspondence of issue attention between media and political agendas across the four successive phases of the decision-making process (initiation, preparatory, parliamentary, and referendum phases) in Switzerland. Despite inversely distributed levels of attention for successive decision-making phases, both media and political agendas are concentrated on fewer issues in the initiation and referendum phases, and they are more strongly correlated in the most decisive stages of the process, that is, the preparatory and referendum phases.

Autonomía comunitaria y caciquismo: identidad étnica, control social y violencia en una comunidad mixe de Oaxaca

La etnografía de la comunidad mixe de Salto de la Tuxpana y del grave conflicto que se produjo entre 2005 y 2007 es el punto de partida del presente artículo. La investigación realizada arrojó como resultado más destacado el descubrimiento de un violento cacicazgo, legitimado ideológicamente en la autonomía comunitaria, la identidad étnica y el reclamo de una jurisdicción propia, y asentado firmemente sobre tres mecanismos de control social: protección a través de la Policía Comunitaria Armada, acceso a la tierra y acceso a los programas de «desarrollo». El caciquismo se define como el régimen político personalista, basado en estructuras clientelares, que monopoliza y controla recursos y votos. También se propone la hipótesis de que la mayor parte de la violencia desplegada por los caciques es el resultado del proceso de reproducción social del mismo sistema político, cuando se genera una faccionalización simétrica de la comunidad, después de un periodo de estabilidad complementaria.

Social media and political change: The case of the 2011 revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt

Throughout the past decade, social media have come on the scene of various popular revolts. Their role as tools of information and coordination of social movements, from the Iranian Green Movement in 2009 to the Arab uprisings in 2011, has been widely debated. In most cases, online activism through blogs, Facebook, Twitter or other forms of social media has allowed citizens to be part of a social networking exercise and to engage in a public sphere that would have otherwise been unreachable to them due to severe repression. In Tunisia and Egypt, social media helped protests start and expand thanks to their ability to coordinate and disseminate information quickly. The new information and communication tools were an influential factor in accelerating the revolutionary processes across the Arab world, albeit they cannot be seen as neither the spur nor the drivers of any revolution.

Political Humor as a confrontational tool against the Syrian regime: A study case: Syria, 15th March 2011 – 15th May 2012

The aim of this working paper is to analyze the inclusion of political humor into the set of actions used by opponents to the Syrian regime during the first year of a state-wide uprising in 2011. The research argues that although political humor has traditionally been seen mainly as a concealed voice against dominant elites, it can nevertheless take a confrontational stance and challenge a regime. In this paper we assess the role of political humor in challenging the legitimacy of the Syrian State through the battle for the signification of events. We will work with a theoretical framework that draws its assumptions from social movements’ studies and cultural studies. Through the assessment of the importance of discourse and the role of ideological domination to a regime we will see how the first year of the Syrian uprising included widespread acts of political humor as part of the strategy against the regime.