Laurent Gayer

Gilles Favarel-Garrigues

Excédés par le présumé laxisme des tribunaux, les justiciers autoproclamés s'évertuent à punir par eux-mêmes les fauteurs de trouble. Violant la loi pour maintenir l'ordre, ils s'improvisent détectives, juges et bourreaux. Adeptes du lynchage et autres châtiments spectaculaires, ils trouvent un nouveau public sur les réseaux sociaux. Des groupes d'autodéfense du Far West aux chasseurs de pédophiles en Russie contemporaine, les justiciers hors-la-loi sont typiquement des hommes blancs, réactionnaires et xénophobes.
Toutefois, mouvements révolutionnaires et défenseurs des dominés ne s'interdisent pas de manier, à leur tour, le fouet et le feu. L'auto-justice compte en outre de fervents zélateurs dans les services répressifs. Et quand policiers et paramilitaires s'affranchissent du cadre légal pour nettoyer la société, ils précipitent l'avènement de l'Etat justicier. Cet essai comparatif s'aventure dans les eaux troubles de la justice sommaire.
Au terme d'un périple dans le monde perturbant des redresseurs de torts, une question s'impose : la France est-elle immunisée contre cette fièvre punitive ? 

Le monde des justiciers hors-la-loi

Fiers de punir

Christophe Jaffrelot

Trajectories of Marginalisation

Muslims in Indian Cities

With an official population approaching fifteen million, Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta-"protection" money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a "Pakistan in miniature," has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially. Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer's book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in the city's permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi's polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence "manageable" for its populations. Whether such "ordered disorder" is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite-and sometimes through-violence.

Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

Karachi

With more than 150 million people, Muslims are the largest Indian minority but are facing a significant decline in socio-economic as well as political terms - not to say anything about the communal waves of violence that have affected them over the last 25 years. In India's cities, these developments find contrasted expressions. While Muslims are everywhere lagging behind, local syncretic cultures have proved to be resilient in the South and in the East (Bangalore, Calicut, Cuttack). In the Hindi belt and in the North, Muslims have met a different fate, especially in riot-prone areas (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Aligarh) and in the former capitals of Muslim states (Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lucknow). These developments have resulted in the formation of Muslim ghettos and Muslim slums in places like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. But (self-)segregation also played a role in the making of Muslim enclaves, like in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and the new Muslim middle class searched for physical as well as cultural protection through their regrouping. This book supplements an ethnographic approach of Muslims in 11 Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first hand account of an untold story.

Laurent Gayer

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