Dramas of ethnic elites accommodation [Ressource électronique] : the authoritarian restoration in Mauritania / by Cédric Jourde

Ph. D. : Political science : Madison, University of Wisconsin : 2002

Bibliogr. p. 380-396

This dissertation posits that the relationship between processes of regime change and cultural pluralism are mutually informing. It explains why it is possible that, despite the recurrence of ethnic tensions in a multicultural state like the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, a country that bridges the Arab and African worlds, an enduring accommodation amongst authoritarian elites from the country's different ethnic groups has developed. This dissertation contributes to the nascent body of literature on the failed democratic transitions of developing countries, or process of 'authoritarian restoration.' It explores two under-theorized aspects of the interaction between the regime change and cultural pluralism literatures. First, I analyze political tensions within ethnic groups and accommodative relations among ruling elites of diverse ethnic groups. I show that even if elites from the country's different ethnic groups often struggle against one another, along ethnic lines and along factional lines, they also fight within an agreed-upon structure that denies wider political participation for the population. In other words, ruling elites of different ethnic origins share common interests in preserving the authoritarian regime, as well as common norms about how relations between the rulers and the ruled ought to be organized. These shared interests and norms allow them to better resist domestic and international pressure for democratization and to maintain the basis of the authoritarian regime. Second, I analyze the symbolic and dramaturgical dimensions of political relations. Such a premise pertains to a larger conception of dramas as social moments that can directly or indirectly affect political relations and in which political actors fully engage one another. I compare three political dramas in Mauritania: a party congress, an Islamic ritual, and a presidential tour to the country's peripheral regions. I show that the shared interests and norms of the ruling ethnic elites are, in part, constructed and communicated through dramaturgical performances. In the course of political dramas, ruling ethnic elites fought one another by way of dramaturgical performances, but they simultaneously resisted domestic and international demands for democratization, by staging their elite solidarity and by symbolically conveying the restrictive definition of the rulers-ruled relationship they value