Political Sociology

"There is a lot of controversy surrounding the issue of e­-democracy and con­cerning whether and to what extent, ICTs can be used to reinvigorate public discourse, to strengthen participation in democratic processes and to enable bet­ter policy­making. Taking into account many different points of view about the topic, this paper argues that we still need to better understand contemporary changes in media landscape as a «phase transition» in our relational patterns.
Assuming that a phase transition consists in an abrupt change in the probability of interaction between the elements of a system, phase transition with respect to the new media landscape consists in the unprecedented degree of fast and convenient interactivity offered by ICTs to all citizens who can connect to the Inter­net. The importance of such transition cannot be underestimated, but it doesn’t provide us with definitive answers to the dilemma posed by the alternative views
of pessimists who fear an escalation of existing inequalities, and cyber­utopians who hold that new ICTs can achieve enhanced citizen engagement in policy­ making processes and consequently widen opportunities for more democratic participation. The dilemma itself is not well posed: an examination of the literature and case studies shows that despite the growing opportunities to share ideas and information on the Internet, there continue to be several educational,
cultural, organizational and constitutional barriers to meaningful citizens’ en­gagement in policy­making. Changes that are currently reshaping our media environment may lead to very different outcomes: the proposal of reshaping politics through the Web is compatible with the development of more and more meaningful interactivity between representatives and citizens, but also with new
forms of autocracies and populist projects. Although there are many examples of the instrumental use of social media to spur political change (campaigning, petitioning online, organizing protest and mobilization initiatives, promoting participation, fostering revolutions), the application of ICTs for political change doesn’t automatically transform citizens neither into “Habermasian” individuals aiming and able to reach agreements through argumentation­based negotiation,
nor into better­educated and vigilant multi­taskers, with an additional immu­nity to traditional and recent propaganda techniques. In conclusion, the article suggests that access to ICTs and the Internet alone are not sufficient to fulfill the unfulfilled promises of democracy (Bobbio). The political promises of the Internet are ambiguous, so that we need much more educational and political imagination now than in the past, in order not so much to fulfil, as to keep in contact with the promises of democracy."

Governing Citizens is about the striking changes in the government of migration, crime and citizenship in the Netherlands over the past thirty years. The dissertation is based on a reconstruction of Foucault’s governmentality lectures. Citizenship is studied from a governmentality perspective as a technique that functions in relation to other techniques of sovereignty, discipline and government. Hence, it is related to mushrooming detention facilities, parenting courses, assimilation, selective incapacitation, responsibilization and other techniques invented to govern contemporary predicaments of control. The book presents new concepts to understand the present government of citizens such as neoliberal communitarianism, the migration control predicament, and the distinction between facilitative resonsibilization and repressive responsibilization. It raises one question in the end: do we want to govern (non-)citizens the way we do?

The geostrategic importance of Africa’s Gulf of Guinea region is growing. Oil and gas exports are rising, new oil-exporting countries such as Ghana are emerging, and China and other Asian economies are joining Europe and the USA as energy-hungry customers. We are witnessing a new scramble for Africa’s oil and gas in the ‘new’ Gulf of Guinea. On the other hand, many of the region’s countries remain fragile, badly governed and poor. While the region’s oil is ‘fuelling the world’ it is completely failing the large majority of its citizens. Going beyond narrow conceptions of the ‘resource curse’, this book analyses the challenges the countries along the West and Central African coast face in translating resource wealth into stability, peace, economic growth, social justice and democratic governance. It assesses existing initiatives for making oil and gas work for the benefit of the people and suggests new, innovative solutions to the ‘resource curse’.

"It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak. The public sector, in particular, is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical and frequently overlooked phenomenon: effective public organizations or “Pockets of Effectiveness” in developing countries.
Why do these pockets exist? How do they emerge and survive in hostile environments? And do they have the potential to trigger more comprehensive reforms and state-building? This book provides surprising answers to these questions, based on detailed case studies of exceptional public organizations and state-owned enterprises in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. The case studies are guided by a common analytical framework that is process-oriented and sensitive to the role of politics. The concluding comparative analysis develops a novel explanation for why some public organizations in the developing world beat the odds and turn into pockets of public sector performance and service delivery while most do not.
This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, development, organizations, public administration, public policy and management."

In this article I will review the film Dogville by Lars Von Trier through the perspective given by Hamid Naficy in his book An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. The main purpose is to understand how identity is described and performed through the allegory of Grace and the image of the refugee, and the role homelessness and displacement play both for the filmmakers and the content of diasporic films. I will demonstrate how the relationship between minority (Grace-the refugee) and the majority (the population of Dogville) is a topic of transnational cinema, and which conclusions can we make by taking into account the role of identity and sense of belonging for transnational productions.

""Based on the analyses of select elections coverage by five television channels – India TV, NDTV, Aaj Tak, ANI, and IBN– I argue that: 1) The way journalists pose questions to their favorite politicians are often already answers; 2) In pursuing a storyline, journalists  ubordinate, even sacrifice, actual responses or events/facts to bolster their pre-determined narrative; and 3) Electoral polity like India is heading towards a designer democracy marked by permanent campaigning-cum-advertising. In short, I caution against the use of widespread phrase: ‘media and politics’. It is more fitting to say: ‘media as politics’ or ‘politics as media’.
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The Month of Welcoming: Re-appropriations of Electoral Mechanisms and Readjustments of Power Relations among the Negev Bedouins

This research focuses on the conditions of emergence of ideological and individualistic patterns of electoral participation among the Negev Bedouins at the end of the 1990’s. It evaluates the significance of these new patterns of electoral participation for the readjustments of power relations--both among the Bedouin and between them and the dominant Israeli society. The analysis is based on ethnographic data collected during the municipal and the Israeli parliamentary campaigns that took place in the Bedouin town of Rahat in 1998 and 1999. The object of study and methodology were chosen for two reasons. First, despite their sentiment of political, economic and social marginality, and despite the enduring forms of domination and solidarity, the Bedouin of the Negev invest more and more the electoral process without using it solely as a means of social and economic mobility for individuals or limited groups. Second, electoral campaigns constitute a place and a time of intense competition between different modes of representation and practice of power coming from the dominant Israeli society on the one hand and the local Bedouin society on the other hand.

The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part is a historic reconstitution of the relationships between the Bedouin, and successive States in the region in order to provide a better understanding of the context in which Bedouin approach the electoral process at the end of the 1990’s. The first chapter is dedicated to the social, economic and political upheavals in which the Bedouin were involved from the end of the 19th century. It focuses on the changing modes of social, economic and political integration of what is commonly referred to as the “tribal organization,” but which, I show, is in fact prompted by the successive frames imposed by the States who dominated the region. The second chapter deals more specifically with the pattern of juridical and political integration of the Bedouin in the State of Israel during the last fifty years  as compared with the other Israeli Palestinians. I focus here on ways by which the Israeli authorities introduced the electoral technique among the Bedouin as a means of control and how progressively Bedouin elites re-appropriated this mechanism to promote their own interests. This preliminary analysis stresses that the “tribal organization” cannot be merely apprehended as a socio-historical construction deeply influenced by its broad administrative, economic and social environment, but as a set of power configurations pervaded by modes of practices and representation of power coming from the dominant society. Furthermore, it shows that the responses developed by the Bedouin to face the changing economical, social and political context in which they are living are frequently grounded on reconstructed “traditions” in the frame imposed by the dominant surrounding society.

The second part is dedicated to the municipal electoral campaign of 1998. Chapter three presents an analysis of the sociopolitical mobilization for the constitution of the competing factions for the control of the municipality, tracing them to networks based on kinship, patronage, friendship and ideological relations. The fourth chapter investigates the patterns of organized and spontaneous mise en scene of power and confrontations through electoral meetings and agonistics exchanges. Finally, the fifth chapter deals with the local re-codifications of the civic ritual that aim at strengthening its symbolic efficiency. It also addresses the physical conflict generated by the announcement of the results and the struggles between different groups of elites to keep a prime role in its resolution. Thus, this analysis shows the emergence of new elites on the local scene; more significantly, it highlights the way these new actors work to enforce new definitions and news ways to think the “politic” as an autonomous field of activity in order to legitimize their exclusive power. The investigation of these negotiations provides a unique perspective on the processes by which representations and practices of power are reconstituted and hybridized.

In the third part, the analysis of the 1999 parliamentary campaign offers a way to track how Bedouin further integrate the Israeli state system, why local power centers are multiplied, and why political activities have become specialized. Here, as the stakes for the real or classificatory kin groups are less important, individual voters are less solicited by corporate solidarities. Thus, even if enduring forms of domination and solidarities are still playing a significant role, political mobilization shows itself to be more influenced by ideological factors. The question of the relation between those two modes of affiliation is here more acute than during the municipal campaign.

The observation of private visits where candidates and activists intend to draw the support of local voters shows that the chains of patronage and kinship mediation are the main channels for the dissemination of a strongly ideological and individualistic political culture. In order to evaluate the impact of the transmission of this political culture in these specific conditions, I first examine the trajectories of young activists and then those of voters. Specific attention is given to the way by which individuals articulate different models of authority and solidarity to rethink their relations with the political sphere. In this perspective I study different innovative rituals of symbolic contestation aiming at reversing the equation dominant/dominated. These rituals involve both the Bedouin and the dominant society and the Bedouin and their local elites. They play a major role in compensating the lack of influence the Bedouin have on the national leaders. But these rituals are not merely significant as means of expressing but rather as means of producing alternative forms of collective consciousness. This lead to reconsider the local re-appropriations of the civic ritual and more especially the electoral fraud that is less significant as a way for modifying the results than as a means to put on stage the power of the local activists and voters. For, as it sanctions the enfranchisement of the local community from the tutelage of the authorities, the electoral fraud can give rise to alternative forms of public-spiritedness. Finally, by deciphering the sense of local political practices, this analysis allows a better perspective on the degree of participation of the local electorate as well as on the sense the Bedouin voters attribute to the content and the form of their vote.

The study of the confrontation and the articulation of different modes of representation and practices of power, which produces highly hybrid political practices and cultures, highlights several processes at work in the Bedouin society beyond the electoral sphere. It allows another perspective on the relations of cultural domination between the Israeli surrounding society and the Negev Bedouin. It also provide with a better understanding on the political positioning of this population in a bi-national environment. Furthermore, by showing that politicization processes work mainly through channels (such as patronage networks, or rituals of contestation) that are often considered as obstacles to the emergence of “political modernity”, this analysis challenges both the taken-for-granted antinomy between on the one hand kinship and patronage allegiances and ideological/individualistic modes of political mobilization. Finally, it questions the theories asserting the limits of Arab societies to foster more “democratic” political arrangements.



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