School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Misunderstanding of autochthony vis-à-vis the question of indigenous peoples

Abstract: Your latest book (Geschiere 2009) gives the reader a key to understanding autochthony, which opposes the membership of some to the exclusion of others. From a study of the political uses of the term ‘autochthonous’ in Africa, and its antonym ‘allochthonous’ in the Netherlands, your analytical framework applies to different situations. However, it does not apply to contexts that are being defined by the dialogue of the last four decades between states and indigenous peoples’ organisations on the international stage. We agree that ‘indigenous/autochthonous issues’ reflect a tension in the world of citizenship, but I note that the legal and political dynamics of indigenous peoples – united in an international movement of networks of organisations – are deployed by the advocacy of inclusion, not by the rejection of others. This construction of the ‘Other’ is also a critical element of post-colonial anthropology (Tuhiwai Smith 1999). The Hellenic origin of the term ‘autochthon’, which feeds a common understanding to which you refer, acknowledges exclusive rights to persons, while the UN use aims at recognising a polity of peoples, who have been deprived of their rights in the territory and history of the nation state. The fact is that a dual tension illuminates the scope of the term, whether it is used nationally or internationally and spoken in English or French, the latter language using the expression ‘peuple autochtone’ rather than ‘indigène’ because of the pejorative uses of former colonial administration. But in the political category ‘indigenous peoples’, the quality of ‘people’ that confers a legal personality overrides the attribute ‘indigenous’, variously translated into the UN working languages (English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian). Considering the semantic field of indigeneity, the scope of the terms – Autochtone/indigenous/indigenas/aboriginal or tribal – has to be interpreted with regard to three dimensions: the UN terminology in normative texts (e.g. the ILO Convention 169 or the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – UNDRIP); the state framework of legal registration (nations, nationalities, peoples, minorities, pueblo originario, scheduled tribes, etc.); and the statements made by actors in local mobilisations. However, indigenous peoples’

From one-way streets to percolation on random mixed graphs

Abstract: In most studies, street networks are considered as undirected graphs while one-way streets and their effect on shortest paths are usually ignored. Here, we first study the empirical effect of one-way streets in about 140 cities in the world. Their presence induces a detour that persists over a wide range of distances and is characterized by a nonuniversal exponent. The effect of one-ways on the pattern of shortest paths is then twofold: they mitigate local traffic in certain areas but create bottlenecks elsewhere. This empirical study leads naturally to considering a mixed graph model of 2d regular lattices with both undirected links and a diluted variable fraction $p$ of randomly directed links which mimics the presence of one-ways in a street network. We study the size of the strongly connected component (SCC) versus $p$ and demonstrate the existence of a threshold ${p}_{c}$ above which the SCC size is zero. We show numerically that this transition is nontrivial for lattices with degree less than 4 and provide some analytical argument. We compute numerically the critical exponents for this transition and confirm previous results showing that they define a new universality class different from both the directed and standard percolation. Finally, we show that the transition on real-world graphs can be understood with random perturbations of regular lattices. The impact of one-ways on the graph properties was already the subject of a few mathematical studies, and our results show that this problem has also interesting connections with percolation, a classical model in statistical physics.

Price versus Quantities versus Indexed Quantities

Abstract: We develop a stochastic model to rank dierent policies (tax, fixed cap and relative cap) according to their expected total social costs. Three types of uncertainties are taken into account: uncertainty about abatement costs, businessas-usual (BAU) emissions and future economic output (the two latter being correlated). Two parameters: the ratio of slopes of marginal benefits and marginal costs, and the above-mentioned correlation, are crucial to determine which instrument is preferred. When marginal benefits are relatively flatter than marginal costs, prices are preferred over fixed caps (Weitzman’s result). When the former correlation is higher than a parameter- dependent threshold, relative caps are preferred to fixed caps. An intermediate condition is found to compare the tax instrument and the relative cap. The model is then empirically tested for seven dierent regions (China, the United States, Europe, India, Russia, Brazil and Japan). We find that tax is preferred to caps (absolute or relative) in all cases, and that relative caps are preferred to fixed caps in the US and emerging countries (except Brazil where it is ambiguous), whereas fixed cap are preferred to relative cap in Europe and Japan.