State-Society Relations and Intangible Dimensions of State Resilience and State Building: A Bottom-Up Perspective

Crucial social and cultural elements underpin state institutions and ensure that they function. This is true in any context, but it is even more important to understand and truly acknowledge in fragile ones. Conventional perspectives need to be broadened and need to look at the multiplicity and diversity of political institutions (formal and in-formal), cultures and logics through which state resilience and state-building processes may be supported. Such an approach would help re-integrate the intangible dimensions that constitute the substantive content of institutions, their ethos, beyond their mere forms. Based upon concrete experiences in different African countries, this paper explains what these intangible dimensions are in three of the sectors usually concerned with reforms (politics, justice and security), and why they are important and should be better integrated in analyses, intervention strategies and aid programmes. An equally important dimension of such integration is that it would also allow better consideration of local capacities and resources to be taken, in particular in terms of resilience, and would allow it to go beyond the impression of vacuum or chaos too often given to situations of fragility. Finally, the paper presents some concrete recommendations to integrate these dimensions better into the priorities and modalities of European aid, as well as suggest a few avenues for further research on the subject.state building; institutions

Pérouse de Montclos, Marc-Antoine. — L’aide humanitaire, aide à la guerre ?

Récemment, « l’humanitaire » faisait la une des journaux en France. Le rapport d’une mission d’évaluation conjointe du Haut Commissariat des Nations Unies pour les réfugiés (hcr) et de l’ong Save the Children Fund, révélait que des travailleurs humanitaires appartenant à quarante organisations avaient utilisé leur position de pouvoir pour obtenir les faveurs sexuelles de réfugiés mineurs en Sierra Leone, au Liberia et en Guinée. Dans la foulée, Sylvie Brunel, présidente démissionnaire de l’or..

Pérouse de Montclos, Marc-Antoine. — L’aide humanitaire, aide à la guerre ?

Récemment, « l’humanitaire » faisait la une des journaux en France. Le rapport d’une mission d’évaluation conjointe du Haut Commissariat des Nations Unies pour les réfugiés (hcr) et de l’ong Save the Children Fund, révélait que des travailleurs humanitaires appartenant à quarante organisations avaient utilisé leur position de pouvoir pour obtenir les faveurs sexuelles de réfugiés mineurs en Sierra Leone, au Liberia et en Guinée. Dans la foulée, Sylvie Brunel, présidente démissionnaire de l’or..

Wetting and Contact Lines of Micrometer-Sized Ellipsoids

We experimentally and theoretically investigate the shapes of contact lines on the surfaces of micrometer-sized polystyrene ellipsoids at the water-air interface. By combining interferometry and optical trapping, we directly observe quadrupolar symmetry of the interface deformations around such particles. We then develop numerical solutions of the partial wetting problem for ellipsoids, and use these solutions to deduce the shapes of the corresponding contact lines and the values of the contact angles, Θc(k), as a function of the ellipsoid aspect ratio k. Surprisingly, Θc is found to decrease for increasing k suggesting that ellipsoid microscopic surface properties depend on ellipsoid aspect ratio

L’intervention de l’ONU dans l’histoire politique récente d’Haïti

L’action politique de l’onu en Haïti s’est particulièrement exercée à deux moments-clés de l’histoire récente de ce pays : les premières élections démocratiques de décembre 1990, le règlement de la crise ouverte par le coup d’Etat de septembre 1991. Révélatrices du rôle croissant de l’onu sur des questions considérées auparavant comme relevant de la stricte compétence interne, ces interventions ne sont pas exemptes d’ambiguïtés et d’incohérences de la part de la “ communauté internationale ”. Or, sur le terrain, l’onu entre en interaction avec des acteurs politiques et sociaux qui déploient des stratégies paradoxales. Interprétables au regard des mutations en cours dans la société haïtienne, ces comportements contribuent, dans leur ambivalence même, à limiter d’autant la portée de telles interventions mais ils pourraient participer également de processus de recomposition partielle de l’espace socio-politique interne.The un action in Haiti, at the political level, has notably occured at two key moments of the recent history of the country: in December 1990 with the first democratic elections; then, in the crisis following the coup d’Etat of September 1991. These interventions have to be considered in the context of an evolutionary process in which, since the end of the bipolarity, the UN is interfering increasingly into matters which were traditionally viewed as domestic affairs. But they are not free from ambiguities and incoherences. In the field, the un is interacting with political and social actors who take paradoxical strategies which may be interpretated according to the current evolutions in the Haitian society. Because of their ambivalence, these beheviors are partly responsible for the limitation of the impact of such interventions but they are also part of partial processes of internal reconstruction

Motion of a massive particle attached to a spherical interface: statistical properties of the particle path

We have studied the motion of a Brownian particle on a spherical interface under gravity, with the aim of setting up a protocol to measure the friction (f) felt by such a particle in experimental conditions. Our analysis is based on the Schmoluchowski equation for particle motion. Essentially we derive a practical criterion to find f from the average particle path. Our statements are illustrated by a few experimental and numerical examples. Numerical paths are obtained by computer simulation and experimental paths are those of micrometre-sized latex or glass particles attached to spherical giant lipid (SOPC) vesicles. From experimental values of f, we estimate the surface shear viscosity of SOPC bilayers to be in the range 3-8×10^(-6) Poise

Motion of a massive microsphere bound to a spherical vesicle

We study the motion of a small solid particle (a few micrometers in size) attached to the membrane of a spherical giant lipid vesicle. By means of optical manipulation, the particle is first brought near the top of the vesicle, and released. We determine the friction experienced by the particle moving along the vesicle surface under the action of gravity. From experiments with latex and glass beads, we check that SOPC membranes are fluid at room temperature (static shear modulus u = 0) and estimate the shear viscosity of SOPC bilayers: nm = 3 * 10^(-6) surface poise

« L’humanitaire à l’aune du politiquement incorrect » et « À propos du sionisme »

L'humanitaire est de ces sujets qui « font recette » et ont suscité, ces dernières années, une littérature abondante mais souvent décevante. Par-delà les inégalités entre les contributions qu'il réunit, le dossier que Philippe Ryfman a coordonné pour les CEMOTI a le mérite d'échapper à cette règle pour deux raisons majeures. Alors que l'essentiel des travaux de ces dernières années a porté sur l'Afrique sub-saharienne et les Balkans, la région couverte ici a été relativement délaissée...

Azimuthal instability of the radial thermocapillary flow around a hot bead trapped at the water-air interface

We investigate the radial thermocapillary flow driven by a laser-heated microbead in partial wetting at the water-air interface. Particular attention is paid to the evolution of the convective flow patterns surrounding the hot sphere as the latter is increasingly heated. The flow morphology is nearly axisymmetric at low laser power P. Increasing P leads to symmetry breaking with the onset of counter-rotating vortex pairs. The boundary condition at the interface, close to no-slip in the low-P regime, turns about stress-free between the vortex pairs in the high-P regime. These observations strongly support the view that surface-active impurities are inevitably adsorbed on the water surface where they form an elastic layer. The onset of vortex pairs is the signature of a hydrodynamic instability in the layer response to the centrifugal forced flow. Interestingly, our study paves the way for the design of active colloids able to achieve high-speed self-propulsion via vortex pair generation at a liquid interface