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During the latest armed conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) from 2013 to the present, narratives emerged regarding who was an autochthon and who was not, pitting “true Central Africans” against “foreigners”, Christians against Muslims. This new cycle of violence is embedded in a long history of political violence in the CAR. Still, the claim of one group being more autochthon than another has not been a prominent feature of previous conflicts, neither has fighting in the past formed so clearly along religious identities. Being a Son of the Soil, an autochthon, evokes an image that denies CAR’s history of migration of social groups and reify fixity, and such conflicts have also been present in other parts of Africa, as well as in Europe and Asia. To date, most literature seeking to understand autochthony-related armed conflict has been dominated by elite-centric analysis that highlight the mobilization of autochthony as a strategy to retain power in cases of political liberalization or democratization (Cameroon, Kenya or Côte d’Ivoire). When not elite-centric, analyses of autochthony-related conflict have emphasized land, access to land issues or crudely predatory logics of vigilante groups on the local level (Côte d’Ivoire or the DRC). In CAR, neither political liberalization, nor land issues alone were prominent, but autochthony was a strategy as witnessed in other African cases of autochthony-related armed conflicts. In that sense, this research asks how and why is autochthony being mobilized in the CAR politics before and after the 2013 coup? The dissertation argues that elites and ordinary citizens discursively mobilize autochthony as an identity capital across various scales. They do it to access non-land related resources, claim hierarchy, and discriminate against the other. The mobilization of autochthony is tied to longer legitimacy-seeking strategies of the elite, and autochthony is a symbolic myth that can be mobilized at various levels. The dissertation’s main theoretical contribution is to challenge the tendency to consider elites and supporters as belonging and subscribing to different discursive realm. This study has considered that autochthony links leaders and their followers in a type of pre-given conception that no longer needs explanation. This contributes to considering elites and their supporters as tied by the same discursive realm, but the concrete meaning of the discourse is different across multiple levels. To make the argument, the dissertation uses a qualitative multi-method approach predominantly centered on discourse analysis, fieldwork, interviews, and newspapers archival research. My research shows that understanding autochthony violence requires a simultaneous analysis of how autochthony is given meaning at different levels by various actors in everyday practices from the macro to the micro. Instrumentalizing autochthony lies at the interplay of all these levels. In this work, autochthony is vague enough to connect leaders to followers and, at the same time, precise enough for listeners to make sense of the term by connecting it to their daily experience of it. The long-term existence of the autochthony discourse allows it to change and morph at times of heightened crisis. It does not emerge overnight, but it has a longer genealogy that must be understood in context. That is, it is not simply because Bozizé targeted Muslim-foreigners in his speeches that people mobilized against them. Top-down manipulation might have resonated with followers but understanding of autochthony also operated independently of the top-down manipulation. That the conflict manifested around sectarian lines fits within an autochthony framework because autochthony is an empty identity marker whose content can be filled in many ways – most frequently with reference to ethnicity, religion, language, myths of origin, or some combination of such markers.

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No / Presents an analysis of Pakistan that features five players: the people, the army, the Islamists, the politicians and the Americans. This book explains how a series of alliances borne of political and strategic expediency between the US and the military have continually undermined the state to the extent that its very existence is in jeopardy.

Yes / This article examines the key features of state failure that have adversely affected the goal of state-building and peace-building in South Sudan. Drawing on interviews with sections of local and international stakeholders in South Sudan, the article analyses the major areas of state reconstruction and peacebuilding that the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM) government has failed to address proactively, areas and issues that seem directly or indirectly linked to the political crisis that started in December 2013 and the relapse into armed conflict. The paper also analyses the recent political developments and ongoing peace process in South Sudan and proffers some complementary policy intervention measures that could be implemented to strengthen the peace process. / This article was made possible through support from the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network (APN) research grant, with funds provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Yes / Stark illustrations of the dangers from chemical weapons can be seen in attacks using toxic industrial chemicals and sarin against civilians and combatants in Syria and toxic industrial chemicals in Iraq, as well as more targeted assassination operations in Malaysia and the United Kingdom, employing VX and novichok nerve agents, respectively. Concerns about such malign applications of chemical technology are exacerbated by the unstable international security environment and the changing nature of armed conflict, “where borderlines between war, civil war, large-scale violations of human rights, revolutions and uprisings, insurgencies and terrorism as well as organized crime are blurred” (1). It is thus essential that the global community regularly review the nature and implications of developments in chemistry, and its convergence with the life and associated sciences, and establish appropriate measures to prevent their misuse. With the parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) convening a Review Conference to address such issues beginning 21 November 2018, we highlight important scientific aspects (2)

Les crimes de guerre constituent des violations graves du droit international pénal. Cependant, chaque nouveau conflit, qu'il ait un caractère international ou non, donne lieu à la perpétration de tels crimes. Pourquoi ? Y aurait-il des éléments prédisposant aux comportements de violence ? Le XXe siècle est le siècle de la justice internationale pénale caractérisée par la mise en place de tribunaux militaires internationaux après la découverte des atrocités de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, puis de tribunaux internationaux « ad hoc » pour se terminer par l'instauration d’une Cour internationale permanente en matière pénale. Les tribunaux ad hoc instaurés pour l’ex-Yougoslavie et pour le Rwanda ont permis que soient appliquées aux conflits armés non internationaux, les conventions internationales définissant les règles régissant les conflits armés internationaux. Quel a été l’impact de la jurisprudence de ces tribunaux sur la notion de crime de guerre ? Enfin, même si la mise en place de la Cour pénale internationale constitue un espoir dans la lutte contre l’impunité, son Statut souligne le difficile équilibre qu’elle opère entre la souveraineté des États et la volonté d’une justice universelle. Aux côtés de la justice institutionnelle est apparue la « justice transitionnelle », dont l’un des objectifs est de permettre la transition entre le temps de guerre et le temps de paix, dans les meilleures conditions possible, et ce, malgré les dilemmes auxquels elle doit faire face. Après tout, un retour rapide à une paix durable n’est-il pas préférable ? La justice transitionnelle nous emmène à nous poser la question suivante : faut-il juger ou pardonner les crimes de guerre ? / War crimes are serious violations of international criminal law. However, each new conflict, international or non-international, gives rise to the commission of war crimes. Why ? Does-it have factors that predispose to violent behaviours ? The 20th century is the century of international criminal law which is first characterized by the establishment of international military tribunals after the discovery of the atrocities of World War II, then international tribunals « ad hoc », eventually it ends by the introduction of an international criminal court. International Criminal Tribunals established for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have permitted the application of International Conventions, defining armed conflict’s rules, to non-international armed conflicts. What was the impact of these tribunals’ case laws on war crime concept ? Eventually, even if the establishment of International Criminal Court gave hope to combat impunity, its status highlights the delicate balance between states’ sovereignty and the willingness of universal justice. Transitional justice was introduced to complete or to replace institutional justice in some cases. One of transitional justice’s objectives is to make a transition a transition between wartime and peacetime as smooth as possible even if many challenges remain. In fact, the fast restoration of lasting peace would it not be better ? The transitional justice leads us to wonder if we have to judge or forgive war crimes ?