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AbstractBelonging to the democratic peace theory program research, this article tries to test the relevance of democratic peace theory in the post-cold war world. In particular, the authors subject Huntington's thesis of a coming clash of civilization to a scientific test, and show that knowing that a pair of states is split across civilizational boundaries does not improve our ability to predict whether their relations will be marked by violence beyond what we know from realism and Kantian theory : as a matter of fact, civilizations do not define the fault lines along which international conflicts occur. Concerning the respective relevance of Kantian and realist theories of peace and war, an international system characterized by preponderance of power is associated with more peace than a balance of power system, but less than a democratic zone of peace made of state sharing democratic regimes, trading relations and membership of international organizations.

Bateson's "Eurêka" has been his application of Russell and Whitehead's theory of types to the social sciences. They had postulated a discontinuity between the levels of the members of a class and a class of classes and so on. Hence a class may not be a member of itself. The cat scratches and the word "cat" does not bite. Confusion between levels, or the signifier and the signified, or the map and the territory, or the menu and the meal, is a sign of disorder. Having been introduced to Bateson's ecology, Anthony Wilden has formulated a theory of contexts, already present in "System and Structure". In order to avoid simplicity through the flattening of social and organic levels into inorganic levels of matter-energy, the theory of contexts suggest the organisation of constraints, complexites, or levels of reality into levels of logical types, using the rule of extinction. It goes on to suggest the use of the rule of commutation to eliminate spurious similarities and inappropriate symmetries which lead to oppositions and Imaginary "contradictions". It is suggested to use Korzybski and Hayakawa's rule of communication in order to get over conflicts due to misperception. To illustrate all of this, we propose to dismanthe the processes which have led to the misunderstanding behind the first Indochinese war of 1946-1954. From one misunderstanding to another, the VPA (Vietnam People's Army), in the 1980's, mobilised at the Kmer-Siamese border, at the door of Thailand who since 1939 has claimed to be the land of the Thais and heir to the Champa empire which was established in 192 and, soon after 1471, was dissolved by the "gnawing" of the Vietnamese peasants in their "long march" towards the South. The most revolting of working, conjugal and international disputes is that which emerge from misperceptions where each party is convinced of its own good will and of the foul bad will of the other. A mutual consent regarding the context, that of metacommunication, may lead to a common signification (consensus) of beings, events and objects.

AbstractIn recent years, several academic and media articles predicted an increased tension in the Arctic fueled by a reported race to maritime spaces and natural resources. In this race, China would try to set itself as a major player. Several analysts place the emphasis on ambitious Chinese projects in the region, and on their destabilizing potential effect. In fact, if indeed the Chinese government seems to be articulating an Arctic policy, nothing warrants the idea that China is on the verge of contesting Arctic countries' claims or is about to try and seize Arctic resources.

Keywords: Chine, Arctique, stratégie, ressources naturelles, changements climatiques, China, Arctic, strategy, natural resources, climate change, China, Ártico, estrategia, recursos naturales, cambio climático

Although much remains the same in world politics despite claims that a new global order has emerged out of the rubble of the Cold War, there is a level at which the emergence of a new order can be discerned. If one probes beneath the outcomes of international affairs and focuses on their underpinnings, it is possible to trace the utlines of new foundations of global politics. This new world order is depicted in terms of three basic parameters that bind the global System, each of which is posited as undergoing profound and enduring transformation. At the micro level the analytic skills of individuals everywhere are conceived to have undergone extensive expansion. At the macro level of systemic structure the transformation involves the bifurcation of world politics into a state-centric world and a multi-centric world, neither of which is predominant and both of which are responsive to the other. At the macro-micro level, which links individuals to their macro collectivities, transformation is seen to have occurred in authority relations, with the dynamics of change having moved authority structures from being in place to being in crisis. While these fundamental transformations are seen as fostering endless tensions between the centralizing and decentralizing forces at work in the world, the resulting turbulence is not viewed as amounting to disorder. Rather, the emergent global order is viewed as encouraging the institutionalization of the tensions, the outcome of which is readily discernible in present day relations among the states analyzed in this symposium.

This special issue showcases some contributions presented during the symposium “Arctic policies in perspective” which was held at Sciences Po, in Paris, on December 18 and 19, 2019. These two days of discussions aimed at shedding light on the Arctic in a context of the international development of the region, where the signs of cooperation are always vibrant, as indicated by the signing of the moratorium to ban fishing in the central Arctic Ocean. At the same time, weak signals would indicate an increase in security tensions with the jamming of the gps disrupting civil aviation in the Barents region or the return of the United States Navy to Iceland. Far from an image of a unified, frozen and exotic space, the Arctic is now being recognized as a space at the heart of international relations. This special issue is therefore dedicated to discussing and reflecting on the diversity of these Arctic worlds, based on innovative and transdisciplinary research. The links between different prisms of analysis - geographic, strategic, historical, political science - make it possible to see in the Arctic Ocean and the circumpolar territories a space particularly sensitive to the recomposition of the international political scene as to the climatic upheavals which modify singularly this vulnerable region.

Keywords: Arctique, politique, gouvernance, acteurs non arctiques, Arctic, politics, governance, non-Arctic actors

This article is devoted to the Eurasian dimension of Russian foreign policy. Eurasian integration, which was popular among Russian elites in the 1990s, gradually imposed itself in the 2000s due to the failure of union projects including Ukraine and of attempts to rapprochement with Western Europe. Moscow now relies on the Eurasian Economic Union (eaeu) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (csto) to try to reaffirm its leadership in post-Soviet Eurasia and establish international partnerships on a continental scale in order to structure the Great Eurasia project. If this policy has known certain successes, in particular in the cooperation with China for the establishment of the New Land Silk Roads, it continues to come up against the incomprehension of the Western powers which refuse any form of partnership between the Euro-Atlantic structures and Eurasian organizations.

Keywords: Puissance russe, Eurasie, intégration eurasiatique, Union économique eurasiatique, otsc, cei, Nouvelles routes de la soie, Organisation de coopération de Shanghai (ocs), Russian Power, Eurasia, Eurasian Integration, Eurasian Economic Union, csto, ciso, New Silk Roads, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (sco)

How should we conceptualize the weaknesses in global governance associated with the recent global financial crisis ? We argue that global financial governance has been characterized by a complex overlapping system of communication and coordination. While there have been important successes in this system, its failings can be conceptualized both in terms of a lack of institutional capabilities on the one hand, and failures associated with accountability and representation on the other. These problems are however not unique to the domain of finance, and actually pervade other areas such as the security system and global environmental governance. As such, the failures in global financial governance can be seen as part of broader global governance challenges, with deeper roots and causes than most scholarship is prone to think.

Keywords: gouvernance mondiale, crise financière, capacité institutionnelle, représentation et reddition de compte, échec de la gouvernance, global governance, financial crisis, institutional capacity, representation and acountablity, governance failure, gobernabilidad global, crisis financiera, capacidad institucional, representación y rendición de cuentas, fracaso de la gobernabilidad

On May 10th, 2018, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution opening negotiations for a Global Compact for the Environment that could fill the gaps in current governance. To this end, a special working group has been set up to discuss ways of addressing the shortcomings of international environmental law as set out by the Secretary General of the United Nations in a technical report of December 13th, 2018 and, consequently, the opportunity of adopting a general international treaty for the protection of the environment which would decline in the form of legally binding commitments all the founding principles of international environmental law. As part of this contribution, the author questions the legal and practical relevance of this future global pact initiated by a group of legal international experts aimed at improving the global governance of the environment by promoting greater effectiveness of international environmental law, particularly through more inclusive governance mechanisms.

This paper aims to examine the subscription of entrepreneurs in the informal sector to the public social protection system in Cameroon. The analysis covers a sample of 4598 promoters of informal production units (UPI), obtained from the 2nd phase of the second survey on employment and the informal sector in Cameroon (INS, 2010). Based on the review of the economic literature, the econometric results obtained using a Probit estimation with selection bias reveal that entrepreneurs in the informal sector will be less inclined to adhere to a system of public social protection offering the following social benefits: old age insurance, invalidity insurance, family allowance and occupational sickness allowance.

Keywords: Protection sociale, Social protection, Secteur informel, informal sector, demande, demand