With taxpayer suffrage abolished and universal suffrage achieved, political participation in our democratic societies should no longer be conditioned on property ownership. However, as Timothy Kuhner shows, politics remain subservient to capital.
From October 2019 to May 2020, 150 French citizens have been involved in a participatory democracy experiment, defining measures to fight against climate change. But how, and through which legal process, can the citizens’ proposals be implemented?
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.
The climate has become a major stake in international cooperation. The sociologist Jean Foyer, who observed the COP21 at Le Bourget (France) in December 2015, considers the major trends and defining moments of the latest round of climate negotiations.
Is man responsible for climate change? Two historians, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, argue that this question is anything but new. Modern thinkers did not wait for the turn of this century to begin reflecting on the impact of human activities on the environment.
Environmental concern now seems to be a matter of broad consensus. It is sometimes forgotten that NGOs, long considered marginal, were the first to sound the alarm and lead the movement to protect the planet. We will now look back on thirty years of mobilisation that have changed our perception of these organisations.
