Search results for ""Author Beatrice Hibou""

The events that took place in Tunisia in January 2011 were the spark igniting the uprisings that swept across North Africa and the Middle East, toppling dictators and leading to violent conflict and tense stand-offs. What was it about this small country in North Africa that enabled it to play this exceptional role? This book is a deeply informed account of the exercise of power in Tunisia in the run-up to the revolt that forced its authoritarian ruler, Ben Ali, into exile. It analyses the practices of domination and repression that were pervasive features of everyday life in Tunisia, showing how the debt economy and the systems of social solidarity and welfare created forms of subjection and mutual dependence between rulers and ruled, enabling the reader to understand how a powerful protest movement could develop despite tight control by police and party. For those wishing to understand the extraordinary events unfolding across the Arab world, this rich, subtle and insightful book is the indispensable starting point.

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The events that took place in Tunisia in January 2011 were the spark igniting the uprisings that swept across North Africa and the Middle East, toppling dictators and leading to violent conflict and tense stand-offs. What was it about this small country in North Africa that enabled it to play this exceptional role? This book is a deeply informed account of the exercise of power in Tunisia in the run-up to the revolt that forced its authoritarian ruler, Ben Ali, into exile. It analyses the practices of domination and repression that were pervasive features of everyday life in Tunisia, showing how the debt economy and the systems of social solidarity and welfare created forms of subjection and mutual dependence between rulers and ruled, enabling the reader to understand how a powerful protest movement could develop despite tight control by police and party. For those wishing to understand the extraordinary events unfolding across the Arab world, this rich, subtle and insightful book is the indispensable starting point.

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Privatisation is supposed to bring about the retreat of the state. But what happens when the state privatises itself and even its core functions - tax collection, internal security, customs - are auctioned to the highest bidder? Does this imply a weakening of the state? Or, rather, does it lead to a scrutiny and control? The contributors to this work examine these phenomena in the former "Second" and "Third World" (Central and Eastern Europe, China and other parts of Asia and Africa) highlighting the very different ways in which continuing state interference and privatisation are implemented. What we are witnessing, according to this study, is not the eclipse of the state under the impact of globalisation but the end of the relatively short era of the "development state" and its commanding role. privatisation does not necessarily lead to a weakening of state control; it leads to new, and often more informal, forms of interference and influence, and it is these that are the book's central theme.

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Composed of articles first published in the journal Politique africaine, this book proposes an original interpretation of neoliberalism in Africa. Instead of seeing neoliberal reforms as intrinsically destructive of the post-colonial state, the authors, who include some of Africa's best-known social scientists, focus on the resilience and adaptability of African state structures, economic systems, and social survival mechanisms. They examine the diversity of responses to neoliberalism in what the editors call the "everyday politics of the state." In essays that range from diverse theoretical or historical discussions to close studies of the dynamics of specific reforms in particular places, they argue against univocal interpretations of the effects of neoliberalism. They show that the African state, far from disappearing, is adapting and reconfiguring itself in fascinating new social realities "co-constructed" by state action, as well as by the improvisations of communities and other private actors. These fascinating studies reveal processes far more complex and ambivalent than what entrenched ideas of the distinction between "public" and "private" actors or between the "state," the "market," and "society" allow for. Whether discussing neoliberal theories of sovereignty and property in the context of centuries of African political development or revealing the intricacies of people's adjustments to the restructuring of an urban transport system, these essays show that conventional readings of governance in Africa underestimate the dynamics of reappropriation and adaptation, and the conflicts between differing conceptions of power that are profoundly reshaping the state in contemporary Africa. [Subject: Politics, African Studies]

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