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The 1992 Rio Earth Summit provided an opportunity for the international community to lay the foundations for the requirements of sustainable development. Former non-sustainable ways of exploiting natural and genetic resources now had to be revisited using the precautionary principle. Precaution was expressed in terms of environmental constraints, but this key component in sustainable development policies has since, unfortunately, been eroded despite a small number of victories gained through multilateralism under the world biodiversity program. Within the biodiversity program, the bio-safety sector was expected to lead to constraints in the environmental field. However, the Advance Informed Agreement (AIA), the main procedure used to combat bio-technological risks following the implementation of the Cartagena Protocol, has not been successful in introducing constraints in the international trade of GMOs. The law applicable to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has prevented any international attempt to consolidate precautionary constraints. For instance, EU achievements in implementing the precautionary principle in bio-safety have only had a regional effect, and mostly because public opinion backs strong constraints. The WTO Disputes Settlement Body (DSB) has defeated the EU's strongest arguments for constraints, in the form of a moratorium and prohibition on imports, in particular in the so-called “hormone” and “GMO” cases. However, even though, at the international level, the precautionary principle tends to be interpreted in a way that supports free trade, the EU still has the potential to initiate a move towards stronger environmental constraints as a component in the requirements of sustainable development. Judicial and regulatory actions within the EU appear to support this observation, and the EU could have a strong influence over the expected harmonization of mechanisms to assess, manage and monitor biotechnology risks worldwide. In the meantime, we will also observe the international emergence of a commercially-based precautionary principle, a long way from a moratorium but continually seeking constraints in its interactions with free trade.

This article accounts for an ethnographic research about the legal programs of two French elitist institutions : Sciences Po Paris and the HEC business school. Beginning from an institutional picture of legal education in those schools, this paper applies sociological observation to the analysis of legal teaching, in the purpose of highlighting major topics, whether theoretical, practical or pedagogic found in those programs. By demonstrating how this academic socialization integrates a normative acculturation to the capitalistic ideology through business law, it contributes to a better understanding of the teaching of law “in action”.

Starting with a review about school dropout risk factors illustrating the multidimensional aspect of the phenomenon, the authors set out to highlight the importance of school factors, and more specifically, the importance of labeling and school climate. If a school can exclude, it can also act as a protection factor in a variety of ways, for example, relationships based on individual support and empathy, facilitating school affiliation. In this context, the authors describe organizational systems to prevent school dropouts that provide students in difficulty the chance to get out of their regular school environment where the problems originate in order to recover cognitively and emotionally. In parallel with this type of intervention, another method, known as the “community approach” has been developing for the last 15 years. It requires the involvement of actors from all sectors that can contribute to better school affiliation and the social inclusion of the young people. This article presents the example of French- speaking Belgium, which is attempting to set up a multi-partnership collaboration to prevent school dropouts. Finally, in the last part of this article, the authors suggest a few ideas for a quality approach to the implementation, analysis and piloting of new educational partnerships, including schools and communities.

SummaryThe author discusses the philosophical and scientific value of Paul Ricoeur's contribution to the writing of history. In particular, he focuses on the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity and the role of intentionality in historicity and destiny. To do so, the analysis is organized around the Temps et récit in three volumes (1983-1985), in which Ricoeur opposes his proposition concerning the dialogue between philosophy and history to the self-satisfied triumphalism of the Annales School. The author reviews a variety of reactions to Ricoeur (among others: de Certeau, Chartier, Rancière, Duby) and compares his position to those of Anglophone historians and philosophers (among others: Dray, von Wright, Danto, White, Taylor). These discussions permit a systematic exploration of the thought of the philosopher-historian. This leads to the realization that, for Ricoeur, the historian's practice is in constant tension between an always incomplete objectivity and the subjectivity of the methodological gaze which must always depend on a part of itself. This tension, argues Ricoeur, regulates the "truth contract" which guides historical investigation and grounds its method in which the subjectivity of thought is engaged in the very construction of frameworks of intelligibility. It is therefore not surprising that Temps et récit is devoted to thinking through the articulation of time which must appear with the notion of time conceived as a condition of historical phenomena. It is precisely this which is the basis for Ricoeur's hermeneutic project, i.e., reopening the past, revisiting its potentialities in light of the intentionality of the analyst. This project could only lead Ricoeur to reflect upon events and their meanings. In this regard, the author emphasizes the importance of philosophy's contribution at a time when the globalization of information has led to a conjuncture in which the social totality is experiencing a dilation of history. This has produced a presentification leading to a new experience of historicity, in which historical facticity is redefined as an approach involving a multiplicity of possibilities and the historian's reading of events, no longer reducible to the event in question, is viewed rather as a trace situated in a chain of events and therefore within a process. On this basis it is possible to understand the importance of Ricoeur's contribution to the history of the present, as well as the impact of his work on the history-memory relationship, which is itself presented as an historical object. This reversal has an historical value because it allows for a better understanding of the indeterminate character of the possibilities open to actors, an indeterminacy in which the subjective intentionality of actors assumes an importance in the determination of the regime of historicity, inasmuch as the latter is traversed by the tension between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. As such, the regime of historicity is always open towards the future and cannot be a mere projection of a social project closed upon itself, the logic of action always keeps open the field of possibility.

Keywords: Ricoeur, objectivité, subjectivité, intentionnalité, historicité, devenir, philosophe-historien, événement, présentification, attentes, Ricoeur, objectivity, subjectivity, intentionality, destiny, philosopher-historian, event, presentification, expectations, Ricoeur, objetividad, subjetividad, intencionalidad, historicidad, devenir, filósofo-historiador, evento, presentización, expectativas

The theme of innocence threatened or corrupted by seduction recurs in the novels of Prévost. The story appears both in his Mémoires d'unhonnête homme (1745) and in le Monde moral(1760), recounted respectively by the victim of seduction and the seducer. These two, apparently complementary, versions correspond to two ways in which Prévost grasps the phenomenon of the libertine at different moments of its emergence. A comparison of the texts reveals the characteristics of Prévost's oblique discourse on libertinism, with its unuttered motives, slippages and resistances, particularly by the virtuous narrators who set themselves up as moral arbiters of the action. Prévost uses terms of seduction and censure to put forward a critical vision of libertinage touched, as it were, by moralism. The two episodes are notable also for their underlying fantasies: the figure of the libertine father, the incestuous seducer, in Mémoires d'un honnête homme, and the bankruptcy of all-devouring libertinism in le Monde moral, where Prévost evokes some of the psychic aspects of phallic exhibition. Our interpretation should shed new light on the immature libertinage of des Grieux, as well as on its wavering pursuit by the ambassador in l'Histoire d'une Grecque moderne. After 1740, seduction appears in Prévost's novels in the guise of more or less inhibited obsessions and desires for sexual violence.

AbstractCentral Asia has been divided among five States since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These complex borders suddenly went from the status of interior limits to that of international boundaries. Some authors have little hesitation using the term “artificial boundary”. This concept however is debatable and overly minimizing, to the same extent as the concept of “natural boundaries”: both reflect very ideological representations of the borders they are used to describe.Moreover, the history of boundary making underlines the approaches used by Soviet officials when they carved up the region: it reveals criteria that certainly do not make Central Asian boundaries ontologically different from borders elsewhere in the world. There is little doubt that newly independent States inherited complex limits, but the issue of their peaceful management has more to do with political goals and the objectives of local governments than to the reportedly artificial nature of State boundaries.

Keywords: frontière, territoire, artificiel, géopolitique, Asie centrale, horogenèse, border, territory, artificial, geopolitics, Central Asia, boundary-making