In the 1970s, French immigration policy was reoriented with the tightening of entry and residency conditions. During that same decade, parallel to actions led by activists of the Movement of Arab Workers (Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes), Algerian authorities regularly politicized assaults against their citizens on French territory. At a time when the number of Algerian migrants authorized to enter French territory was a subject of sustained debate, finger-pointing racism was used to exert pressure on the French government. This article highlights the discursive practices and operations through which French officials of the Ministry of the Interior tried to demonstrate that such acts of violence were not due to racism. Contrarily, French officials argued that attacks were the result of cohabitation difficulties provoked by the moral traditions and lifestyles of the supposed “North African” culture.
Topic:
Crime, Migration, Race, History, Border Control, and Violence
The military program for building “strategic villages”, which emerged at the beginning of the Cold War, sought to develop ex nihilo urban spaces to displace rural populations living in zones influenced by guerrilla groups. This article analyses the Rural Relocation Plan implemented in the Argentinian province of Tucumán between 1976 and 1978 that led to the construction of four strategic villages. In doing so, it seeks to establish whether or not space has the power to transform a community’s political and social life in the long term. This article equally addresses the following three questions: What is everyday life like in spaces where military and civil worlds cohabit and hybridize? What are the characteristics of urban spaces designed to dissuade populations from rising up in support of the guerrillas? The analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with the inhabitants of strategic villages in Tucumán allows for an examination of the social and political effects of forced urbanization as a counter-insurgency technique.
Topic:
Counterinsurgency, Displacement, Space, and Violence
With over ten thousand victims, the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez was one of the most violent theatres of the war against drug trafficking, which was initiated by the former Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, during his 2006-2012 mandate. This article draws parallels between, on the one hand, the manner through which the government problematized the rise in homicides and, on the other hand, the experiences of some of the victims of violence inflicted by law enforcement agencies. Drawing from ethnographic material collected between 2008 and 2011, the practices of state violence implemented during the last military operation are approached here through the experiences and narratives of victims.
Topic:
War on Drugs, State Violence, Ethnography, and Violence
By applying an international political sociology to NATO’s military intervention over Libya, this paper proposes an analysis of securitization processes developed into particular military technologies and representations of the use of violence in the context of international military interventions. Our aim is to study securitization logics contained in the use of highly sophisticated military technologies allowing to create a particular sense of (in)security fixed on the referential of the use of violence. We try to demonstrate the different ways through which the use of violence is represented as more or less securing by an analysis of a practical and discursive construction of an opposition between NATO’s instrumental-rational use of violence and Gaddafi’s one, portrayed as irrational and indiscriminate.
Topic:
Security, NATO, Military Intervention, Conflict, and Violence
Political Geography:
Europe, Libya, North Africa, and United States of America