Why Congo Persists: Sovereignty, Globalization and the Violent Reproduction of a Weak State

Wherever one looks, many elements conspire to suggest that the Democratic Republic of Congo should have collapsed some time ago under the multiple assaults of its own inadequacies as a state, the extreme heterogeneity and polarization of its populations, and the dislocations of globalization and foreign occupation. Yet, Congo has gone on defying such expectations and has continued to display a stunning propensity for resilience. This paper tries to explain why Congo persists amid these overwhelming structural obstacles. It focuses particularly on the more recent period when state weakness, foreign invasions, the exploitation of its natural resources by transnational and informal networks, and the multiplicity of domestic rebellions linked to foreign interests have not managed to dent, however slightly, the generalized support that exists for the reproduction of the Congolese state among its elites and regular citizens, foreign political and economic interests, and the international community at large. Observing that, in many parts of Congo, local grievances against the state and the greed of political elites have been magnified by the circumstances of post -Cold War Africa, it takes as paradoxical the continued broadly unchallenged existence of Congo

Les concepts de territorialisation et de ritournelle pour appréhender la perte de corps commun dans la psychose

peer reviewe

Conclusion : Anormalité ou anomalie ?

peer reviewe

A new understanding of psychopathy: The contribution of phenomenological psychopathology

peer reviewedThe objective of this study is to present a theoretical paper about a clinical issue. Our aim is to propose some clinical and semiological considerations for a psychopathological conception of psychopathy. We will discuss several major theoretical works dedicated to this nosographic entity (mainly those of Schneider, Cleckley and Hare). We will also examine a significant issue raised by Cooke et al., namely whether psychopathic functioning is consistently related to antisocial behavior. This theoretical essay is informed by clinical situations (involving psychopaths who were interviewed in prison or in forensic centers). The method applied a phenomenological psychopathology analysis to the clinical material. We first compare Binswanger’s conception of mania with psychopathic functioning. Patients’ behavior is similar but there is a difference related to the dialectic between the ego and the alter ego. A patient with mania has a fundamental crisis of the ego, which a psychopath does not have. A second finding of our investigations concerns emotions and the adaptive dimension of the psychopathic disorder. An epistemological discussion of the concept of emotions reveals that psychopaths are competent in the management of emotional stimuli, which confers a psychological advantage upon them

Trends in social indicators and social sector financing

Over the past three decades, per capita GDP has increased worldwide. The authors examine whether this has resulted in better quality of life in developing countries. This paper documents the evolution of social indicators (health, education, nutrition), private consumption, and government expenditure on the social sectors. They conclude that developing countries made uneven progress in the quality of life in the period under study. Key findings include: (a) health indicators showed stable improvements in all regions, but Africa's rates were the slowest; (b) of all social indicators, education made the greatest gains, however, net enrollment ratios actually decreased in Africa in the 1980s; (c) while developing nations as a group enjoyed improved indices of undernutrition in 1965-85, the degree of undernutrition worsened in more than one-third of sub-Saharan African countries; (d) Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean also saw declines in average per capita private consumption during the 1980s; and (e) the share of total government expenditure on health remained stable in all regions, but that of education declined in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors also note that any effort to assess trends is severely hampered by lack of information. The quality of existing data is not systematically trustworthy, and there are many gaps.Health Economics&Finance,Early Childhood Development,Demographics,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Early Child and Children's Health

Conically singular Cayley submanifolds III: Fibrations

This is the third and last in a series of papers working towards the construction of non-trivial Cayley fibrations using gluing methods. In this paper we will show two stability results for Cayley fibrations with certains types of conical singularities (in particular Morse type singularities present in holomorphic fibrations of Calabi--Yau fourfolds). The first is a stability result for weak fibrations, which has minimal assumptions. Then we show stability of Cayley fibrations in the usual sense. This requires stronger geometric assumptions on the Cayley cone and the initial fibration. As an application we construct examples of Cayley fibrations on twisted connected sum $G_2$ manifolds times a circle. In particular we also obtain examples of coassociative fibrations of twisted connected sum $G_2$ manifolds, completing the longstanding programme by Kovalev.Comment: 42 pages, 2 figure