The European Union in Africa: the linkage between security, governance and development from an institutional perspective

The international community currently favours an approach to development that stresses a triangular linkage between security, good governance and economic development. This approach clearly informs the European Union’s agenda in Africa, which has progressively integrated governance and security elements. This paper will show that this agenda is at least as much determined by the bureaucratic and national affiliations of the concerned EU actors as it is by African realities and international trends. African security indeed triggers a competition between the different European institutions, eager to be the driving force for a policy that can offer some additional resources and autonomy. The consistency and the credibility of the EU security policy in Africa will therefore depend on the responses provided to these institutional rivalries. Keywords: European Union, Africa, security, institutions, member-states

Prison escape and its political imaginary in times of political crisis : Tunisia, 2011–2016

International audienceIn 2011, during and after the revolutionary events in Tunisia, over a third of the total prison population escaped. These widespread jailbreaks could have been a symbol of emancipation from an abusive state power; but in Tunisia they instead came to represent the threat of criminal destabilization, and rumors of conspiracies against the democratic movement. Beyond the anecdotal dimension of these unusual events, this chapter analyzes the changing meanings of mass prison escapes in times of political transition, as they can be interpreted as part of liberatory moves, or reframed in a security-oriented political imaginary fueling more punitive policies