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Bibliothèque de Sciences Po Aix

Karthala Publishing House

The Karthala publishing house was founded in May 1980 in Paris with the aim of publishing and distributing texts on international issues relating to the countries of the South. Twenty years after independence in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a need for new political approaches to what was then called the “Third World”, and in particular to Africa.

During the 1990s, Éditions Karthala diversified and increased its production. Thematic collections were created (Médecines du Monde, Questions d’enfances, Recherches internationales, three collections on contemporary Christianity, etc.) and the catalogue was also opened to publications on Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Today Karthala publishes about 120 new titles per year.

Our “Transnational Issues” collection

Directed by Professor Philippe Aldrin

Transformations in the ways in which politics and policies are made have been taking place in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Arab world for nearly three decades. Paradoxically, although they are taking place in distinct institutional contexts and political regimes, these transformations refer a priori to rhetoric and universes of meaning shared by most of the actors involved. The apparent worldwide success of models of public action (such as ‘governance’), of techniques of government (such as ‘participation’) or of registers of mobilisation (such as ‘alterglobalism’) invites the social sciences of politics to empirically question the reality and the reasons for the similarities and interdependencies between socio-political processes identified here and there.

In the multidisciplinary and comparative tradition of Sciences Po Aix and its laboratory, Mesopolhis, this collection intends to nourish this questioning by publishing works that favour field research and propose to grasp in concrete terms – i.e. as close as possible to situations and conflicts, to actors and their representations – the transnational dimensions of contemporary politics.

Already published

  • Trade union mobilizations and violence in the South – Protesting in the factories of international subcontracting in Guatemala by Q. DELPECH, 2014
  • Les lieux de la colère – Occupying space to protest, from Madrid to Sana’a by H.COMBES, D. GARIBAY, C. GOIRAND, 2016
  • Campaigning, here and elsewhere – Electoral mobilisations and ordinary political practices by L. BAAMARA, C. FLODERER, M.POIRIER (CHERPA doctoral students), 2016
  • Marseille, city of the world – The internationalisation of a fragmented metropolis by Nicolas MAISETTI, 2017
  • The Factory of Identities – The Political Framing of Caribbean Minorities in Paris and New York by Audrey CELESTINE, 2018
  • The Workers’ Party in Brazil. From Social Struggles to Power Trials by Camille GOIRAND, 2019
  • The politics of drums. Popular cultures and postcolonial contestations in Martinique by Lionel ARNAUD, 2021-Making, unmaking democracy. From Moscow, Bogota and Teheran to the Council of Europe by Pascal Bonnard, Dorota Dakowska and Boris Gobille, 2021

To be published:

  • “Politiques de la nature et nature de l’État”, by Mariama Diallo, forthcoming 2022.
  • “Un arrière pays, La fabrique frontalière des attachments politiques. Ethnographie historique de la vallée de la Roya (Italie-France, XIXème-XIXème siècles), by Lucie Bargel, to be published in 2023

Submit a manuscript

To send your manuscripts, please contact the editors of the collection by clicking directly on the following link or by copying it into your mailbox: questionstransnationales@sciencespo-aix.fr