rebellion

Jacquerie, revolt of the peripheries, or revenge of the working class? The initial analysis of the “yellow vest” (gilets jaunes) movement has unleashed sociological prejudices. Yet this movement reflects not so much a France split in two as a multiplicity of territorial interdependencies.

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.

Has Russia, amidst rising social discontent and pervasive economic crisis, rediscovered collective mobilization? In this essay, Carine Clément emphasizes the potential for self-organization evident in mobilization “from below,” which is rapidly expanding in daily life.

Youth has all the trappings of the universal, eternal value—one that is especially mobilized when there is a need for change. Looking at its history is delving into the construction of a category, and the ubiquituous use and abuse of the people it covers. Historian Ludivine Bantigny sheds light for us on this very political notion.

Negotiations between protesters and the governement have failed: the political crisis ignited in Quebec several weeks ago is far from being over. For Professor Christian Nadeau, of Montreal University, much more is at stake here than student tuition fees. As the emergency law passed by Quebec’s provincial government shows, the true object of the conflict is social democracy and the society that goes with it.

The revolts rocking the Maghreb were set off by a surge of suicides that greatly perplexed Islamic authorities. Were they a symptom of secularization, or even of a radical transgression of a Koranic prohibition?

Fifty years after his pioneering books on rebellion and social banditry, Eric Hobsbawm explains why he always paid close attention to “uncommon people” and popular forms of revolt, and analyses how globalization has triggered off new political mobilizations.