Béatrice Hibou

The Bureaucratization of the World in the Neoliberal Era

1. What is Neoliberal Bureaucracy? 2. A Bureaucratized Society 3. Market and Enterprise Bureaucracy at the Heart of the Neoliberal Art of Governing 4. Neoliberal Bureaucratic Domination: Diffuse Control and the Production of Indifference 5. Struggles and Breaches: Bureaucratization as the Site of Enunciation of the Politica

Fiscal Trajectories in Morocco and Tunisia

Understanding fiscal relations demands an exhaustive knowledge of politics. Without a doubt, the tax system is one of the clearest reflections of power relations within a given society. Yet to go beyond such general remarks and to understand concretely the current situation in Morocco and Tunisia we must take a detailed look at recent changes in fiscal relations and the events associated with them. This means integrating them into a historical perspective. For example, the way in which tax (or legitimate extraction) has been modeled historically depends on the particularities of a specific context and on specific sociopolitical configurations. Tax cannot be taken merely as an economic concept; it is simultaneously a historically constructed political concept. In order to understand contemporary transformations in fiscal relations in the North African contexts of Morocco and Tunisia, we must first clarify the historical processes through which some forms of extraction became legitimate while others did not and some forms of taxation became accepted while others did not.1

Work discipline, discipline in Tunisia: complex and ambiguous relations†

By looking at tourism, textiles, and call centres in Tunisia, this article analyses the complex relationships between capitalism and political discipline. Starting from the tradition of Weber and Foucault, it shows that the multiplicity of the meanings of capitalist work and the plurality of the ways in which people live with their work stem from a deep heterogeneity in the perceptions of reality: at the same time discipline and freedom, submission and access to some sorts of freedom, rigidity and new latitude for action. In this way, capitalist labour relations can at the same time serve for domination and erode its effects. The analysis that is offered, based on extended fieldwork in Tunisia, suggests the multiplicity and the plasticity of relationships between the technologies of power, the development of the productive forces, and the methods of economic and political regulation.

Development as a Battlefield

Conflict and development are commonly understood as two contradictory phenomena. Some apparently self-evident ideas, such as gaps in development being a source of conflict and social and political conflict being a major obstacle to development, have been revitalised by the debate about the Arab Spring and used to orient development projects in the MENA region. This chapter aims to explore a radically different perspective: we conceive development as a complex social relationship, involving a vast constellation of actors, interests, logics, spaces, causalities and temporalities, and we consider conflict in a multidimensional sense, as an expression of struggle, competition, tension, resistance, opposition and critique. Conceived in these terms, conflict and development appear to be strictly interlinked rather than opposites. Three particular configurations characterise development as a ‘battlefield’: conflicts that create consensus around development; consensus as an expression of conflict; and the definition of legitimate conflicts. There is special focus on the interconnection between different temporal layers characterising the formation of the state and the transformation of capitalism, and the consequences of development for society, the assertion of sovereignty, the definition of social order and how people conduct their lives. This examination of the links between development and conflict thus sheds fresh light on injustice, inequality, modes of government and on how people interpret and live in political society far beyond the MENA region.

On Bureaucratic Formalization: The Reality-Like Fiction of Neoliberal Abstractions

This chapter aims to shift the glance from a very peculiar feature—both fundamental and under-studied—of neoliberalism: its bureaucratic dimension. I have been able to pursue this way by crossing Michel Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism with the work of Max Weber on bureaucracy, while drawing on Weber’s methodological approach. This approach enables me to shed a new light on a particular dimension of neoliberalism, which Michel Foucault seems to have slightly neglected in his work: the specific process of abstraction every act of formalization implies. This chapter offers an interpretation and a problematization of our contemporary situation in which the neoliberal narrative—and its abstractions—transforms the relation to reality, to the world, and to us, and installs its own fiction(s) that play(s) a fundamental role in perpetuating its own criteria and formal procedures as a mode of government.

Effets d'aubaine

Les Etats-Unis se sont portes garants de la reconstruction de l’Irak, mais sont confrontes a une societe eclatee et petrie de contradictions ethniques, religieuses, politiques, historiques. Dans cette societe blessee, les sentiments a l’egard des nouveaux bâtisseurs sont ambigus.

The Criminalization of the State in Africa

This book examines the growth of fraud and smuggling in African states, the plundering of natural resources, the privatization of state institutions, the development of an economy of plunder and the growth of private armies. It suggests that the state itself is becoming a vehicle for organized criminal activity. The authors propose criteria for gauging the criminalization of African states and present a novel prognosis: they distinguish between the corruption of previous decades and the criminalization of some African states now taking place. Major operators are now able to connect with global criminal networks. Also, the notion of social capital has led to current attitudes towards the use of public office for personal enrichment, or even systematic illegality. Looking at South Africa, the authors examine the decades-long tradition of association between crime and politics in this area. South Africa is now the centre of important international patterns of crime, notably in the drug trade. It has Africas largest formal economy and the continents largest criminal economy. Considering the economic origins of official implication in crime, the authors conclude that new forms of corruption have been unintentionally helped by liberal economic reforms.