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1. Regards sur l’Eurasie - L’année politique 2016

Author:
Anne De Tinguy, Bayram Balci, François Dauceé, Laure Delcour, Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean, Aude Merlin, Xavier Richet, Kathy Rousselet, and Julien Vercueil
Publication Date:
02-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Looking into Eurasia : the year in politics provides some keys to understand the events and phenomena that have left their imprint on a region that has undergone major mutation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991: the post-soviet space. With a cross-cutting approach that is no way claims to be exhaustive, this study seeks to identify the key drivers, the regional dynamics and the underlying issues at stake
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Corruption, Crime, Democratization, Economics, International Trade and Finance, Politics, Sovereignty, War, International Security, Regional Integration, and State
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Belarus, and European Union

2. Palestine : de l’Etat introuvable à la nation en déroute. A quoi servent les dirigeants palestiniens ? (Palestine: From an untraceable State to an impossible nation. What purpose do Palestinian leaders serve?)

Author:
Laetitia Bucaille
Publication Date:
10-2016
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Today, the creation of a Palestinian state appears to be a distant possibility: the international community rejected to manage the issue, and the leadership in these territories weakened because of its divisions, revealing their inability to advance. Both the political and the territorial partition between the Gaza strip, governed by the Hamas and the West Bank, under Palestinian authority in line with Fatah, reveal a profound crisis that questions the very contours of Palestinian politics. It also shows that Hamas’ integration in the political game made it impossible to pursue the security subcontacting system. Maintaining the system avoids reconstructing the Palestinian political community, and makes it difficult to develop a strategy that moves towards sovereignty. Since October 2015, the popular and pacific resistance project has been shelved by the return of the violence against Israeli civilians. The Palestinian leadership counts on internationalization of the cause, which has shown mediocre results. Will the replacement of Mahmoud Abbas by his competitors permit to leave the rut?
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Democratization, Politics, Sovereignty, War, Territorial Disputes, Governance, Peacekeeping, Conflict, and State
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and West Bank

3. Maintien de l’ordre public et community policing à Beyrouth: Le cas du commissariat de Ras Beirut (Public Order and Community Policing in Beirut: Ras Beirut Police Station as a Case Study)

Author:
Leila Seurat
Publication Date:
07-2016
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
There is ample literature devoted to the sociology of the police in the western world, yet little research focuses on Arab countries. This study tries to fill this gap by offering an ethnographic study of Ras Beirut police station, the first and the only police station in Lebanon that has been reformed according to the community policing model. The academic works focusing on the importation of this model in developing countries point out how difficult it is to implement and emphasize its negative outcomes due to the local characteristics of each country. Fragmented on a sectarian and a political ground, Lebanon remains a perfect field to explore this hypothesis. Indeed the divisions of the Lebanese state weaken the interactions between the public and the private security forces. Nevertheless, many others factors, beyond the religious and the political divisions, explain Ras Beirut’s failure. The internal dynamics at work inside the police station and the influence of the patronage networks reduce considerably the chances of its success.
Topic:
Security, Civil Society, Corruption, Crime, Sociology, Governance, Transnational Actors, and State
Political Geography:
Middle East, Lebanon, and Beirut

4. Guerre, reconstruction de l’Etat et invention de la tradition en Afghanistan (War, Reconstruction of the State and Invention of Tradition in Afghanistan)

Author:
Fariba Adelkhah
Publication Date:
03-2016
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
War since 1979 and the reconstruction of the state under Western tutelage since 2001 have led to a simplification of the identity of Afghan society, through an invention of ethnicity and tradition – a process behind which the control or the ownership of the political and economic resources of the country are at stake. Hazarajat is a remarkable observation site of this process. Its forced integration into the nascent Afghan state during the late nineteenth century has left a mark on its history. The people of Hazara, mainly Shi’ite, has been relegated to a subordinate position from which it got out of progressively, only by means of jihad against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and the US intervention in 2001, at the ost of an ethnicization of its social and political consciousness. Ethnicity, however, is based on a less communitarian than unequal moral and political economy. Post-war aid to state-building has polarized social relations, while strengthening their ethnicization: donors and NGOs remain prisoners of a cultural, if not orientalist approach to the country that they thereby contribute to “traditionalize”, while development aid destabilizes the “traditional” society by accelerating its monetization and commodification.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Civil Society, Religion, War, History, Sociology, Peacekeeping, Identities, State, and Anthropology
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Central Asia, Asia, and United States of America

5. Regards sur l’Eurasie - L’année politique 2015

Author:
Anne De Tinguy, Bayram Balci, Isabelle Facon, Adrien Fauve, Thorniké Gordadze, Sergei Guriev, Raphaël Lefèvre, Gilles Lepesant, and Céline Marangé
Publication Date:
02-2016
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
"Looking into Eurasia" provides some keys to understand the events and phenomena that have left their imprint on a region that has undergone major mutation since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991: the post-soviet space. With a cross-cutting approach that is no way claims to be exhaustive, this study seeks to identify the key drivers, the regional dynamics and the underlying issues at stake.
Topic:
Demographics, Economics, Energy Policy, Migration, Nationalism, Political Economy, Sovereignty, Terrorism, Natural Resources, Europeanization, Political Science, Regional Integration, and State
Political Geography:
Russia, Central Asia, Caucasus, Middle East, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Western Europe, and European Union

6. Exposition industrielle, production de réseaux et construction d’imaginaires : la Foire internationale du Müsiad et les représentations de l’Etat turc (Industrial Exhibition, Network Production and Construction of Imaginaries : the International Müsiad Fair and Representations of the Turkish State )

Author:
Dilek Yankaya
Publication Date:
11-2015
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Müsiad International Fair held in Istanbul in 2014 aroused great public interest due to the strong presence of political elites as well as to the mobilization of a large network of institutions, firms and media partners. International exhibitions are relevant fields to explore the formation of trade circuits and the creation of sociabilities, as well as to question the political and international issues central to the construction of trade networks and markets. This event appears as the representation of the Turkish state as it is formed under the AKP power. We witness a double trend of reconfiguration and of internationalization of the state constituting processes through the phenomena of increased interactions between private enterprise and public action on one side and the shrinkage of patronage networks on the other. Participating to this event therefore becomes a question of legitimization and delegitimization for private actors regarding these networks of power, the production of which is based on the presentation of economic and industrial productions and goes together with the creation of Imaginaries. The ethnographic study of the fair shows how industrial, cultural and symbolic representations bring about the production of two types of Imaginary, one related to the reinvention of the idea of the ummah across merchant networks and the other referring to the supremacy of Turkey as the carrier of this project.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Sociology, Political Science, Networks, State, and Ethnography
Political Geography:
Europe, Turkey, Asia, and Istanbul

7. Relations informelles entre Pékin et Taipei : l’essor de la diplomatie académique dans le détroit de Taiwan (Informal Relations Between Beijing and Taipei: The Expansion of Academic Diplomacy in the Taiwan Strait)

Author:
Alice Ekman
Publication Date:
09-2015
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
Since the Kuomintang returned to power in 2008, Beijing has adjusted its communication strategy towards Taiwan, while maintaining the same long-term goal of reunification. This strategy of rapprochement by seduction rather than by threat promotes the rapid growth of exchanges between the Chinese and Taiwanese populations at all levels: students, tourists, farmers, businessmen, academics, retired diplomats and military, politicians, etc. Especially, the multiplication of meetings between academics of both countries is creating new channels of communication over the Strait, allowing on the one hand to compensate for the lack of formal diplomacy between Beijing and Taipei, and on the other hand to compete with informal diplomatic links existing between Taiwan and several of its partners (US and Japan, mainly). These communication channels could ultimately reinforce Beijing’s strategy – and China keeps investing heavily in their development – but could also be used as a conduit to prevent and to manage crisis would tensions reappear in the Strait.
Topic:
Nationalism, Sovereignty, Borders, Identities, and State
Political Geography:
China, Taiwan, and Asia

8. Entre européanisation et fragmentation, quel modèle de développement pour le territoire ukrainien? (Between Europeanization and fragmentation, what model of development for the Ukrainian territory?)

Author:
Gilles Lepesant
Publication Date:
06-2015
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
One week before the third Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius on November 28-29, 2013, Ukraine suspended the preparation of an association agreement with the European Union, which had been under negotiation since 2007. When the agreement was finally signed in June 2014, President Yanukovych had fled the country under people’s pressure, and the integrity of Ukraine was challenged in the East by separatists and their Russian allies. These events came paradoxically at a time when the country's cohesion seemed stronger than in the 1990s. Far from being divided into two parts, Ukraine consists of the pieces of broken empires that all have good reasons to join in the state, as recent as this one may be. Indeed, its geography, electoral or economic, does not show a split between two blocks, but various lines of division that do not necessarily herald the breaking up of the state. Since the independence, this diversity had never been translated into new institutions: for several reasons, the reshaping of the centralized regime inherited from the Soviet era was deemed untimely by the country’s political forces. Presented as a priority by the members of the Parliament elected in 2014, the reform of territorial government is being implemented while Ukraine’s driving regions are either paralyzed or threatened by war.
Topic:
Nationalism, Sovereignty, War, Territorial Disputes, Europeanization, Memory, Borders, and State
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and European Union

9. Le Congrès des Etats-Unis : une assemblée incontrôlable ? (Is Congress out of Control ?)

Author:
François Vergniolle De Chantal
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
The US Congres is the most powerful legislative in the world. Its independence and its powers make it impossible for the presidency to be truly imperial. The Senate is especially influential since it allows its members to use a series of minority procedures, such as the filibuster, that exert a constant a priori pressure on the Executive. This institutional configuration is made extremely costly by the current partisan polarization. It is also, however, a functional equivalent to the theoretical parliamentary right of life and death on Executive powers.
Topic:
Governance, Law, Political Science, and State
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

10. Toward a Reorganization of the Political Landscape in Burma (Myanmar)? (Vers une recomposition de l’espace politique en Birmanie ?)

Author:
Renaud Egreteau
Publication Date:
09-2013
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales
Abstract:
In March 2011, the transfer of power from the junta of general Than Shwe to the quasi-civil regime of Thein Sein was a time of astonishing political liberalization in Burma. This was evidenced specifically in the re-emergence of parliamentary politics, the return to prominence of Aung San Suu Kyi elected deputy in 2012 and by the shaping of new political opportunities for the population and civil society. Yet, the trajectory of the transition has been chiefly framed by the Burmese military’s internal dynamics. The army has indeed directed the process from the start and is now seeking to redefine its policy influence. While bestowing upon civilians a larger role in public and state affairs, the army has secured a wide range of constitutional prerogatives. The ethnic issue, however, remains unresolved despite the signature of several ceasefires and the creation of local parliaments. Besides, the flurry of foreign investments and international aid brought in by the political opening and the end of international sanctions appears increasingly problematic given the traditional role played in Burma by political patronage, the personification of power and the oligarchization of the economy.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, Democratization, Human Rights, Politics, Peacekeeping, and State
Political Geography:
Asia, Burma, and Myanmar