08 février 2006
Pause en 2006
Je ne serai plus en mesure de mettre à jour le blog (ou très peu) ces dix prochains mois.
Les milliers de visites mensuelles, en très grande majorité d'internautes se connectant à partir du Maroc, prouvent que ce blog n'est pas inutile.
Je reprendrai donc les mises à jour dès que cela sera possible.
T.
PS: à noter que le délai de modération des commentaires sera plus long mais ces derniers continueront à être postés sur le blog.
12 avril 2005
[Out of Sahara] Définition du crime de génocide
Naïri Arzoumanian, Isabelle Moulier & Thomas de Saint Maurice, Définition du crime de génocide
Cet article rédigé fin 2002 fait partie d'un vaste projet de dictionnaire de droit pénal international, dans le cadre d'une "Chronique des Juridictions Pénales Internationales" initiée par Roland Adjovi. En attendant le véritable lancement de ce projet et la publication des nombreux articles y afférant, cette définition est disponible sur ce site.
Voici les premières lignes de l'introduction :
Le terme de génocide
est apparu au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale bien que des
actes qualifiables de génocide aient été perpétrés bien antérieurement.
Le génocide arménien perpétré sous l'Empire Ottoman en 1915, notamment,
a précédé l'invention même, par Raphaël Lemkin, du terme "génocide"
formé à partir du Grec, genos (la race, la tribu) et du Latin caedere
(tuer). De plus, il apparaissait déjà dans l'acte d'accusation des
criminels de guerre jugés à Nuremberg, ainsi que dans la Résolution 46
de l'Assemblée générale des Nations Unies (11 décembre 1946). L'étendue
et la nature des exactions commises par le régime Nazi durant la
Seconde Guerre mondiale ont incité la communauté internationale à
poursuivre l'effort normatif pour en arriver à l'adoption du premier
texte juridique international incriminant spécifiquement les actes de
génocide, qualifiés par Benjamin Whitaker de "crime ultime, [de]
violation la plus grave des droits de l'homme qu'il soit possible de
commettre". La Convention pour la prévention et la répression du crime
de génocide, adoptée le 9 décembre 1948...
Lire le texte au format PDF.
08 mars 2005
Tout en PDF
Tous les documents qui étaient disponibles auparavant au format DOC ou HTML et stockés sur mon site sont proposés au format PDF.
Si vous ne parvenez pas à lire ce format de fichier, il suffit de télécharger Adobe Reader.
Bonne lecture !
03 mars 2005
Du site au blog : pas qu'un effet de mode
L'ancien site http://membres.lycos.fr/tomdsm est voué à disparaître :
lenteurs, publicités envahissantes et autres problèmes techniques ont
eu raison de ce site qui avait atteint l'âge de raison (un septennat
déjà!).
Toutes les informations qu'il contenait,
principalement dédiées au Sahara occidental, se retrouveront sur ce
blog. Les documents également (toujours stockés chez Lycos).
Des améliorations seront bientôt apportées, notamment la disponibilité de tous les documents et analyses au format PDF.
Il vous est possible de réagir à ce site en postant des commentaires
(principe du blog). Vous pouvez aussi m'envoyer vos textes pour
publication dans la catégorie "Analyses".
Autres
particularité du blog : vous pouvez le "syndiquer" pour être informé à
chaque mise à jour en l'intégrant à votre lecteur de fils RSS.
03 août 2000
[Out of Sahara] Governance and conflict prevention in Africa: the Sierra Leone case
Thomas de Saint Maurice, Governance and conflict prevention in Africa: the Sierra Leone case
The
prevention of conflicts has become a discipline, within the
International Relations, that gathers an increasing number of scholars.
Indeed, with the growing violence of the conflicts targeting mostly the
civilians, the desire to stop a conflict, before it sinks into
violence, as gained everyone's mind. To study a specific case and then
drawing from this analysis a generalized conclusion is a dangerous
exercise. Especially in the discipline of conflict analysis, we know
that each conflict is a very particular case that has to be taken
without any a priori. I will try, notwithstanding, to analyse
the Sierra Leone conflict as a symptom, which will show us the illness
of the current way of dealing with such new kinds of internal
conflicts. In that sense, it is also difficult to study a conflict that
has not yet come to an end. But a decade of atrocities has been enough
to allow the enhancement of the main features of such a conflict. This
paper will show that the Sierra Leone conflict is one of the new kind
of conflicts that have emerged especially within collapsing states, and
which have appeared to be intractable by the old 'classical' mechanisms
existing in the international sphere. So, to adapt the current
structures is the best violent conflict prevention. I told about 'new
kind of conflict'; we can call it 'globalisation rebellion' or 'private
conflicts' and this paper will show why. I told about adapting the
existing structures as a means of prevention. I meant that we have to
re-think the concept of governance, and that at each level
simultaneously: state, region, and world. The way by which the
international community has 'helped' the state-building process in
Africa, with the concept of 'good governance', has to be changed. A
regional prevention structure should be set up in Africa, linked to the
United Nations, the only place of global governance in terms of
security, which role has to be enhanced. In short, my point is that we
have to reaffirm the power of the public sphere in order to counter the
occurrence of private conflicts. That would prevent the world, and
especially Africa, from atrocities such those we have seen in Sierra
Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo or Angola. To demonstrate that, I
will first draw a picture of the ten years-long conflict in Sierra
Leone and expose the new features that render it 'private'. In a second
part, I will argue that new public governances at the state-, region-,
and world-level are the best way of preventing future conflict of this
kinds. (...)
Lire le texte au format PDF et un tableau sur les liens entre les compagnies privées de sécurité (mercenaires) et les compagnies minières en annexe.
03 mai 2000
[Out of Sahara] Utility and futility of the theorization in the international relations
Thomas de Saint Maurice, Utility and futility of the theorization in the international relations
The International Relations discipline is full of theories which are either in the continuity with the past or a kind of revolution in the history of thought. Different theories can explain the same events or phenomena with totally divergent means and lead to very opposite conclusions... What theory is the right one, why the other is wrong or false? The first question that we have to ask is "what is the purpose of a theory in International Relations?". A theory can be a series of causal links, like chemical formulas. For instance, the probability that two democratic countries wage war on each other is not high. We know that the International Relations discipline is not a science because human beings are not things; they are both observers and subjects of the discipline. So the application of scientific method to elaborate a theory in International Relations could be seen as dubious. Anyway, to answer to the question of the purpose of such a theory, I would argue that there exist two kinds of theories: descriptive theories and constructive theories1. The former is quite close to a historical work. The latter has rather a utopian purpose. The descriptive theories are useful in a historical prospect, in order to understand why such wars occurred within a given context, for instance. The normative theories make suggestions about what we should do; how the decision-makers have to behave in order to promote peace, reduce inequities and so on. The same theory can be at the beginning constructive and become progressively descriptive. For instance in the 19th century, the realist paradigm and its concept of "balance of powers" was born in order to maintain stability in Europe. Now this paradigm is still advocated by some authors but it is no more related to the actual facts; it has become an historical theory of International Relations. Both kinds of theories have a part of utility and a part of futility. The futility of the realist paradigm today is that it is too far from the actuality and can only be useful to build the future just as the history does. The futility of new theories that set up kinds of utopia is that it could be completely useless, looking too far in the future without taking into account the actual reality and therefore this theory would never been followed. The utility of such a theory is important if it looks both to the future and to the present: how to build a better world, given the current situation. (...)
Lire le texte au format PDF
[Out of Sahara] Is the bombing of a TV-building a violation of the international humanitarian law?
Thomas de Saint Maurice, Is the bombing of a TV-building a violation of the international humanitarian law?
This
question refers to the bombing of the Serbian TV-building which
occurred during the Kosovo crisis in April 1999. Since the
international law is to be considered as relative and subject to
interpretations, we cannot deal with this question without replace it
in a concrete context. Each situation has to be analysed case-by-case,
in its context. So we will answer at the question, in the case of the
U.S. bombing of the Serbian TV-building one year ago. (...)
Lire le texte au format PDF
03 janvier 2000
[Out of Sahara] The European security and the relationship between the OSCE and NATO
Thomas de Saint Maurice, The European security and the relationship between the OSCE and NATO
Ten
years after the collapse of the soviet block, how the notion of
European security has been evolved? One could think that with the
vanishing of the Warsaw Pact, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization), its western counterpart, would do so. But the USA would
never allow losing its control on the European defence. One should
think that the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe), the only organization gathering every European states
including those from the former USSR, would become the privileged forum
in term of European security. But NATO survived and even has begun a
second life; while the OSCE tried to develop its competence field. What
is the point today and what are the perspectives for the beginning of
the XXIst century? The year 1999 was full of events interesting the
European defence. Among them was the Kosovo crisis and the Istanbul
Summit. The former was the theatre of the new NATO’s strategy. The
latter let the OSCE make an important step in strengthen its place in
the field of European defence. I will argue that the traditional
separation between the military NATO and the civil OSCE is
progressively making space within both organizations can work together.
Lire le texte au format PDF