The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy

Populism is on the rise, and so are academic studies on populism. The study of populism has long focused on the way its spokespersons have behaved as an oppositional force, in Western countries in particular. While discourses and practices of populists exercising a protest function still merit attention, this volume trains the focus on populists in government. The real novelty of the past decade is that many populists are now (or have been) in power, in Europe as well as in other parts of the world, and this book intends to play a pioneering role from a geographical and analytical standpoint. Besides Europe and Latin America, where populism is well established, populists are today—or have been recently—in office in the Middle East (Turkey, Israel), Asia (India, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), and the United States. In most of the cases, their rule has resulted in forms of authoritarianism, giving birth to a new kind of regime that combines elections—which populists need to nurture their legitimacy—and attacks against institutions in charge of checks and balances, including the judiciary. While most of the populist rulers have consolidated their power, democratic resilience has prevailed in some rare cases.

This book deals with the contemporary history of the imprisonment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons since 1967, and, since the 2000s, in Palestinian facilities. The prison experience is widely shared in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It endurably marks personal and collective stories. Since the Occupation of the Palestinian Territories in 1967, mass incarceration has spun a prison web, a kind of suspended detention. Approximately, 40 percent of the male population has been to prison. It shows how the judicial and prison practices applied to Palestinian residents of the OPT are major fractal devices of control contributing to the management of Israeli borders, and shape a specific bordering system based on a mobility regime: such borders are mobile, networked, and endless. This history of confinement is that of the prison web, and of the in-between political, social, and personal spaces people weave between Inside and Outside prison. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, oral and written sources, archives, and extensive institutional documentation, this political anthropology book deals with carceral citizenships and subjectivities. Over time, imprisonment has had profound effects on personal experiences: on masculinities, femininities, gender relations, parentality, and intimacy. Woven like a web, this story is built around places, moments, people, and their testimonies.

This book provides an in-depth account of military operations against drug gangs and organizations in two of the biggest countries in Latin America: Brazil and Mexico. Recent studies on drug wars have detailed case studies on the war on drugs but do not focus on the role of the army in such policies. Publications that do drive attention to the military in such situations are usually from human rights organizations or the press and are therefore not scholarly works. There are therefore no recent academic books dealing with the role of the military in the fight against drugs in Latin America. This book aims to fill this gap. It also offers an empirical and theoretical examination of the issue of the role of the military (rather than the police) on national soil—the army being generally devoted to interventions abroad, and the police, to law enforcement on the national ground. The book is also the first work to look at high-level negotiations between military and civilian elites that define the conditions for the use of force during military operations. It provides a theoretically informed understanding of contemporary security politics in Brazil and Mexico.

This book explores the complexity of the Syrian question and its effects on the foreign policies of Russia, Iran, and Turkey. The Syrian crisis has had a major effect on the regional order in the Middle East. Syria has become a territory where the rivalry between Russia and Western powers is being played out, and with the West’s gradual withdrawal, the conflict will without a doubt have lasting effects locally and on the international order. This collection focuses on the effects of the Syrian crisis on the new governance of the Middle East region by three political regimes: Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Many articles and a number of books have been written on this conflict, which has lasted over ten years, but no publication has examined simultaneously and comparatively how these three states are participating in the shared management of the Syrian conflict.

This book addresses the issue of one of the most visible and debated currents in contemporary radical Islam. It sheds light on the history, the fundamental principles, and the political and religious translations of Salafism and explains current events involving Salafist actors in an objective and dispassionate manner. The author explains with precision the different contemporary Salafist mobilizations by illustrating them with specific cases while shedding light on the main debates related to this mode of understanding of the Muslim religion, such as its potential role in triggering certain forms of violence, the way to compare it to other fundamentalist versions in other religions, or the way to describe, in terms of social sciences, the main concepts and discourses that can be observed in this current of Islam today.

The Republic of Turkey celebrates the centenary of its proclamation in 2023. Founded on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, one of the world’s greatest empires both in terms of its geographical extent and its longevity, Republican Turkey has gone through a century of profound and constant changes and transformations from politics to society, economy to religion, or culture to history. These changes have been produced by inner and foreign policies carried out and implemented by the country’s leaders – from Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current Turkish President in 2023 - but also under the influence of the regional and international context. This collective work aims to take stock of the great achievements of the Turkish republican project. It attempts to draw a general presentation of the evolution of contemporary Turkey in six main areas which constitute six major issues for the country: the general political evolution of Turkey focusing on the issue of citizenship; the transformations in the Turkish economy through a political economy analysis; the evolution of the relationship between religion, state and society; Turkey’s nation-building and the Kurdish question, which still seeks a solution; the changes in Turkish foreign policy focusing on the relationship between Turkey and the West; the relationship between Turkey and Europe, caught between the model of civilization for the republican regime and the prospects of accession to the European Union. Several “focus points” also concentrate on specific subjects such as the Alevi issue, the Cyprus issue or the Turkish soft power with an accent on Africa.

This book explores the challenges that multilateralism faces today and questions the idea of a ‘crisis’ of multilateral cooperation and international organizations. It accounts for the pressures on and power shifts in multilateralism in recent years - such as the war in Syria, the Covid-19 pandemic, challenges for NATO, the erosion of multilateral norms, the transition from Trump to Biden, the rise of China, the post-Brexit European Union, and the mobilization of countries from the South. The authors illustrate the resilience of multilateralism and lessons learned from the WTO, UN Women, International Organizations’ Secretariats and global environmental governance. Written in part by members of the Research Group on Multilateral Action (GRAM), this volume argues that ‘crisis’ should not be considered a pathology but the ‘matrix’ of multilateralism, which is more resilient than commonly thought. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations, global governance, and international organizations.