Du fatalisme en matière de prolifération nucléaire: Retour sur une représentation opiniâtre

Les discours des décideurs politiques mais aussi de la majorité des spécialistes du nucléaire militaire véhiculent l'idée selon laquelle l'augmentation, pas nécessairement linéaire, du nombre d'acteurs dotés de l'arme nucléaire est une tendance lourde, voire une loi de l'histoire. Cet article entend mettre au jour le rôle de la métaphore biologique de la prolifération, transposée aux armes nucléaires, dans la construction de cette vision de l'histoire nucléaire et explorer la sélection qu'elle opère dans la mise en récit qui en découle. Il conclut par la saisie des conséquences politiques de cette vision et une mise en garde contre une alternative fallacieuse au fatalisme proliférant que serait la pédagogie de la catastrophe, avant de proposer plusieurs pistes de recherche sur les autres sources du « fatalisme » que nous avons identifié ainsi que la possibilité d'un changement de paradigme.     

Governmental behavior in representative democracy: a synthesis of the theoretical literature

What is the impact of bureaucratic behaviors on tax rates? What is preferable: a bureaucrat or a partisan politician? Does a flypaper effect occur when lobby groups influence public policies? This article tries to answer these questions by analyzing and comparing six different models of public choice: (1) the median voter model, (2) the Leviathan model, (3) the slack-maximizing model, (4) a general model of bureaucracy, (5) the partisan politicians model and (6) a general model of lobbying. Among several results, it is shown that the median voter’s income and tax share almost always play a significant role in the design of the public good/tax package, even if the government does not explicitly try to maximize the median voter’s utility. The article also provides a synthesis of the positive analysis of the flypaper effect.     

“Elusive natives”: escaping colonial control in the Leverville oil palm concession,Belgian Congo, 1923–1941

Throughout the inter-war period, in the Belgian Congo's largest oil palm concession, thousands of colonised workers and their families managed to escape administrative surveillance and authority through schemes of dissimulation and elusiveness. The shared nature of sovereignty imposed on this territory, distributed between private and public agents, along with a sparse territorial occupation, left extended areas unsupervised by Western actors and indirect rulers. In these remote places, palm-fruit cutters, with the blessing of their employers, could settle without having to answer to authority. After exposing the specific policies enforced in the concession, this paper highlights how natives were able to maximise their autonomy regarding both the production imperatives imposed upon them and their obligations to the public authorities. The last part details the administration's consecutive failures in its endeavours to tackle workers’ elusiveness. The conclusion challenges the notion of “resistance” as an appropriate concept to recover the fruit cutters’ adaptation to the imperatives of colonial rule and large-scale manual labour within the rainforest.     

French nuclear idiosyncrasy: how it affects French nuclear policies towards the United Arab Emirates and Iran

This article elaborates the notion of ‘nuclear idiosyncrasy’ as a specific understanding of what nuclear weapons and energy are, what they stand for and what they can do. It then assesses the persistence of nuclear idiosyncrasy over time and its effects on French nuclear policies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran. Based on interviews in France, Geneva and the UAE, this article contributes to three debates within foreign policy analysis and nuclear history. Is a regional approach necessary to understand the framing of foreign policies in the twenty-first century? Does a change in leadership fundamentally affect the orientations of nuclear policies? Are the risks of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and the measures to prevent it similarly understood by all the players in the international community? First, it shows that French nuclear policies in the Middle East are not shaped by dynamics specific to the region as the often invoked notion of an ‘Arab policy of France’ would suggest. Secondly, in-depth analysis leads one to reject the idea of a major change between the nuclear policies of Presidents Chirac and Sarkozy. Thirdly, persistent French nuclear idiosyncrasy leads also to rejection of the idea of convergence towards a shared understanding of the proliferation threat in the Middle East.     

Competition and Collaboration in the Contracting of Family Relationship Centres1

In 2005–06 the Australian government announced the establishment of 65 Family Relationship Centres (FRCs) – a ‘gateway’ service assisting separating couples to reach agreement about child custodial arrangements without recourse to courts. The use of a multi‐round competitive contracting regime for the purpose of selecting service providers gave rise to a number of tensions amongst not‐for‐profit organisations (NFPOs) which, to a degree, compromised the full realisation of stated public policy aims. Reporting on fieldwork conducted with a sample of FRC operators, industry representatives and key government officials this article evaluates the extent to which the case of FRCs conforms to critiques commonly aired in the social policy literature that attribute various forms of policy failure and/or social capital depletion to the competitive contracting of human services within quasi‐markets. Although the competitive selection process imposed significant costs on the NFPOs involved, the program also exhibited substantial collaborative and collegial behaviours between government and NFPOs, thus diverging from the critique usually portrayed in the literature.     

Bioinformatics and human identification in mass fatality incidents: the world trade center disaster

Victim identification initiatives undertaken in the wake of Mass Fatality Incidents (MFIs) where high-body fragmentation has been sustained are often dependent on DNA typing technologies to complete their mandate. The success of these endeavors is linked to the choice of DNA typing methods and the bioinformatic tools required to make the necessary associations. Several bioinformatic tools were developed to assist with the identification of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, one of the most complex incidents to date. This report describes one of these tools, the Mass Disaster Kinship Analysis Program (MDKAP), a pair-wise comparison software designed to handle large numbers of complete or partial Short Tandem Repeats (STR) genotypes, and infer identity of, or biological relationships between tested samples. The software performs all functions required to take full advantage of the information content of processed genotypic data sets from large-scale MFIs, including the collapse of victims data sets, remains re-association, virtual genotype generation through gap-filling, parentage trio searching, and a consistency check of reported/inferred biological relationships within families. Although very few WTC victims were genetically related, the software can detect parentage trios from within a victim's genotype data set through a nontriangulated approach that screens all possible parentage trios. All software-inferred relationships from WTC data were confirmed by independent statistical analysis. With a 13 STR loci complement, a fortuitous parentage trio (FPT) involving nonrelated individuals was detected. Additional STR loci would be required to reduce the risk of an FPT going undetected in large-scale MFIs involving related individuals among the victims. Kinship analysis has proven successful in this incident but its continued success in larger scale MFIs is contingent on the use of a sufficient number of STR loci to reduce the risk of undetected FPTs, the use of mtDNA and Y-STRs to confirm parentage and of bioinformatics that can support large-scale comparative genotyping schemes capable of detecting parentage trios from within a group of related victims.