Ethnicity, ideology and geopolitics in Crimea

This paper considers the ethnic, ideological, and geopolitical crises that have engulfed the Crimean peninsula since 1991 and provides a preliminary explanation for the region's success in averting violent conflict to date. Focusing on the role of political entrepreneurs in mobilizing key social constituencies, it argues that the failure of competing elites to correctly identify and skillfully manipulate existing ethnic, ideological, and geopolitical cleavages in society significantly limited the effectiveness of their mobilizational appeals. The existence of cross-cutting cleavages and the failure of political entrepreneurs to bring these cleavages into alignment have played a central role in deterring violent conflict in the region.     

Bondjo Ethnicity and Colonial Imagination

Cet article, qui porte sur le film Heremakono du Malien-Mauritanien Abderrahmane Sissako, examine les intertextualités cinématographiques, poétiques et picturales. Il démontre comment l'ouvrage se réfère au désert et aux divers modes qu'il engendre: importance de la trace, question du déplacement et de l'exil, tradition poétique mystique. Il analyse également l'importance de l'art abstrait et montre comment le cinéaste construit ses images selon une peinture, traçant en même temps un parallèle à l'art moderne (Kandinski, Mondrian) et à la calligraphie en Islam, où l'usage du figuratif n'est guère sollicité afin de ne pas limiter la représentation de l'Absent à une interprétation.     

Economic reasons for the break-up of Yugoslavia

The history of Yugoslavia continues to attract academic attention more than twenty years after the violent break-up of this federative state. Analyzing why it happened can be instructive in dealing with many unsolved problems in the region. The article will argue that deteriorating economics triggered all other factors leading to eventual disintegration of Yugoslavia. Specifically, during the 1980s external and internal economic imbalances, coupled with substantial regional disparities, resulted in a situation which was no longer acceptable to some constituent republics, especially the wealthier ones. Unfortunately, their secession was followed by a violent conflict which still resonates throughout South-Eastern Europe.