La démarche générale de cette thèse est d’aller étudier le politique ailleurs que dans les oppositions, en explorant les ressorts de l’engagement et les logiques d’action au sein d’un parti hégémonique au pouvoir. A partir d’une enquête de terrain menée au Yémen entre 2008 et 2011 dans différentes sections locales du Congrès populaire général (CPG – al-mu’tamar al-sha‘bî al-‘âmm), j’interroge les pratiques militantes ordinaires et les investissements dont le parti fait l’objet. Le CPG constitue un observatoire privilégié pour interroger l’exercice de la domination – ses modes d’imposition et de contournement – dans un contexte où le régime autoritaire se trouve contesté. Au pouvoir depuis sa création en 1982 et fondé sur l’accommodation historique d’acteurs politiques divers, le parti forme un cadre dans lequel opèrent et se déploient les réseaux de patronage du président Ali Abdallah Saleh (1978-2012). La structure de l’échange politique qui en résulte favorise le développement de dépendances matérielles qui n’excluent pas, si ce n’est entretiennent, des formes multiples d’attachement affectif et idéologique au parti au pouvoir. Je souligne dans cette thèse les ambivalences du soutien au régime autoritaire, l’évolution du régime d’obligations et de contraintes qui en découle, ainsi que l’ambivalence et la réversibilité de l’obéissance et du consentement. Ce travail invite ainsi à interroger les ressorts du fonctionnement et de la résilience d’un régime autoritaire et à dépasser les lectures fonctionnalistes réduisant le parti hégémonique soit à un instrument de reproduction du régime autoritaire, soit à celui de son irrésistible réforme / Contrary to political scientists’ tendency to focus on opposition actors and politics of contention in the Arab world, I study “the political” elsewhere. Built on extensive fieldwork carried out in Yemen from 2008 to 2011, my dissertation explores the motives of commitment, logics of action and everyday forms of activism in a hegemonic ruling party, the General people’s congress (GPC – al-mu’tamar al-sha‘bî al-‘âmm) and in a context where the regime’s authority is contested. The GPC is a great observatory to interrogate the exercise of domination. Founded in 1982, the party has operated as a key apparatus of Ali Abdallah Salih’s authoritarian regime (1978-2012) and a relay for its patronage networks. Far from constituting a homogenous amalgam of president supporters within which discipline is obvious, deep divisions and contradictory logics of action strain the GPC. If its loose structure, the extreme heterogeneity of its members and the elasticity of its political line require the imposition of schemes of domination, they favour in return the expression of indiscipline. In this regard, I study diffuse modes of domination as well as ways to bypass, or even exploit, them. By exploring the dynamics of clientelist politics and politicisation promoted by the party, my dissertation underlines the ambivalences of “participation” and sheds light on the blurry frontier between compliance and resistance, consent and dissent

Pa., Univ., Diss.--Pittsburgh.

Ever since the military takeover of 1952, the post-monarchic political system of Egypt has been dependent upon a variety of mechanisms and structures to establish and further consolidate its powerbase. Among those, an intertwined web of what could be described as ‘patronage politics’ emerged as one of the main foundations of these tools and was utilized by the regime to establish the fundamentals of its rule. Throughout the post-1952 era, political patrons and respective clients were existent in Egyptian politics, shaping, to a great extent, the policies implemented by Egypt's rulers at the apex of the political system, as well as the tactics orchestrated by the populace within the middle and lower echelons of the polity. This study aims at analyzing the factors that ensured the durability of patronage networks within the Egyptian polity, primarily focusing on the sort of social structural reconfiguration that has been taking place in the popular communities of Egypt in the beginning of the 21st Century. Dissecting the area of Misr Al Qadima as an exemplar case study of Cairo’s popular quarters, the research mainly focuses on examining the role of the lesser notables, those middle patrons and clients that exist on the lower levels of the Egyptian polity within the ranks of the National Democratic Party and the Muslim Brotherhood. Henceforth, the sociopolitical agency of these lesser notabilities shall constitute the prime concern of the writing and, in doing so; this research also attempts to draw some linkage between the micro-level features of the popular polities of Cairo and the macro-level realities of the Egyptian polity at large, in the contemporary period.

The aim of this thesis is to explore how livelihoods are recovering in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka through the lens of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and the social networks approach—methods of inquiry that have gained considerable impetus in livelihoods research. The study is conducted with reference to two tsunami-affected fisher villages in the Hambantota District, Southern Province. It employs a qualitative ethnographic methodology that examines narratives emerging from households, local officials of government and non-government organizations, office bearers of community-based organizations, local politicians, village leaders, and key informants. Focus is on evaluating how particular roles, activities, and behaviour are given importance by these groups in specific post-tsunami contexts and how these aspects relate to broader conceptualizations of social networks, informal politics, social inequality, and ethnographic research in South Asia. The findings support four major contributions to the literature. First, social networks are significant as an object of study and a method of inquiry in understanding livelihoods post-disaster. Second, paying heed to varied forms of informal politics is critical in post-disaster analyses. Third, the concept of intersectionality can extend and improve upon prevailing approaches to social inequality in disaster recovery. Fourth, ethnographic research is valuable for understanding everyday networks, informal politics, and change in South Asia. Collectively, these findings present a human geography of post-tsunami livelihoods in Sri Lanka, where networks, politics, and inequalities, which form an essential part of everyday livelihoods, have been reproduced in disaster recovery. The thesis constitutes a means of offering expertise in the sphere of development practice, highlighting internal differentiation in access to aid as a key issue that needs to be identified and systematically addressed by policymakers and practitioners.