International

For more than ten years, a mobile studio has been touring the United States and offering to record the conversation of all those who might be interested. By collecting the words of anonymous people, StoryCorps aims to strengthen ties and to document contemporary America. Could it be that it primarily encourages self-staging?

Qi—“breath” or “energy”—lies at the heart of many traditional Asian practices, be they martial or artistic, that rest upon a broader understanding of mind and body. This concept has now become pervasive in Western ideas of health and spirituality. Could this trend be a positive effect of globalization?

The president of the Brazilian Political Science Association, an expert of democratic innovations, discusses how Brazilian political scientists are taking stock of the Workers Party president’s curtailed electoral mandate in favor of Michel Temer and how it impacts their research orientation.

Multinationals are not the only actors in the globalised world. Globalisation is also apparent in less visible forms of exchange that take place in spaces usually held as marginal. Armelle Choplin and Olivier Pliez focus our attention on this trade in minor mode.

How can we explain the Chinese Communist Party’s lasting legitimacy? Part of the answer may be found in the ritual official inspections of the grassroots. Even if limited and orchestrated, they tend to boost transparency, communication, efficiency.

Can an algorithm predict crime? For several years, United States police forces have used software that is said to detect the locations of future crimes and offences. Of the many companies working in this field, Predpol is the name that is mentioned the most. But the success of this Californian start-up is more the result of marketing than any actual predictive effectiveness. The stance of this paper is twofold: first, a closer look from the seismologist who developed the algorithm reveals that this solution is far from having the predictive capacity boasted by its promoters. Second, the ethical problem with Predpol’s algorithm appears not to be police discrimination, as many feared, but rather the exclusion of a section of the population from the public security offering.

For the past five years, the population of Syria has been undergoing severe repression at the hands of a regime implementing a policy of mass destruction, forcing over half of all Syrians to leave their homes, and seriously threatening the future of a country that has had the strength drained out of it.

The question of rising inequalities in the United States is widely discussed, but what reality do they entail? Taking the example of San Francisco, this article casts a new light on the way to measure urban inequalities and to understand them.

Published eleven years ago, the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, also known as the Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, was translated into English in 2014. Barbara Cassin discusses the aim of this project, and how the book is being given a new lease of life thanks to translations in various languages.

By comparing the Muslim pilgrimage in its contemporary form with its past manifestations, Sylvia Chiffoleau shows how the control procedures established long ago have been strengthened and expanded by the Saudi dynasty in order to deal with a sharp rise in the number of pilgrims but also to increase its own legitimacy.

The question of the origin of AIDS has given rise to a wealth of studies. Moving away from conspiracy theories or culturalist readings, Guillaume Lachenal shows that the key issue is retracing the colonial, epidemiological, and sexual context that fostered the propagation of the virus rather than identifying a specific cause.

Britain is now facing the very real possibility of national disintegration and an exit from the European Union. Amidst this political crisis, and in the wake of a manifesto celebrating British exceptionalism, historians have mobilised themselves to (re)write the history of the UK, whether for or against Europe.

The management of the Ebola epidemic by the international community has revealed the deficiencies of health development aid, as well as long overlooked structural problems. Yet it may also be an opportunity to establish long-term mechanisms of international solidarity and improve the basic health capacities of affected countries.

Is the Islamic State a state, as it claims to be? Or does it designate a new form of imperial sovereignty? Matthieu Rey traces the history of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, starting with European colonial rule and the two Gulf wars.

Two books take stock of the impasse at which European construction has arrived. Who is the culprit? The market, as Robert Salais believes, or, as Philippe Herzog contends, the state? Both declare the postwar model bankrupt and call for a new framework, one that would more effectively involve Europe’s citizens.

Michael Brown’s death and the Ferguson unrest signal a change in the condition of Black people in American society since 2000. This new condition is marked by the culmination of the penal state’s power over Black people’s lives, and an increase in socio-economic inequalities between races.

Thanks to new scientific instruments and the globalisation of research, astronomy is currently an expanding science. F. Combes explains the directions she is taking with her research into our Universe, about which we still have so much left to discover.

Whether it is a matter of prosecuting ordinary crimes or genocide, meting out justice is a process that involves the law, legal institutions and individual human interactions. International justice is still in its infancy, and the International Criminal Tribunal set up in Arusha, Tanzania to prosecute those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide is hampered by a number of difficulties. Liora Israël, a sociologist of law, went to Arusha for a first-hand look at some of the complications and paradoxes underlying international justice.

Is the total eradication of poliomyelitis a reasonable goal? Claire Magone relates the negative effects of a campaign against this disease, which has no real justification and could even be a prejudice to other world health issues.

Although today’s world is more interdependent than ever, it is still a jigsaw puzzle of sovereign states. One consequence of globalization is that we have to update our own mental maps, and to understand other people’s. In this interview, the diplomat and geographer Michel Foucher explains the world’s new geography.

Until now, the Warsaw Ghetto archives were known to only a few specialists. The American historian Samuel Kassow presents them in a new light—as the work of a team whose mission was to describe the daily life of a community as it was being exterminated.

Paul Jobin, who has been monitoring workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant, provides an analysis of the Japanese government’s denial of the health implications for these workers and, more broadly, the long-term effects of the disaster. This censorship is, however, being challenged by the social mobilization that has followed, particularly on the Internet.