This paper examines the industrial action by Moroccan miners in northern France to protest the closure of coal mines in the 1980s, and in particular the strike in late 1987. These protests raised a series of specific issues, linked on the one hand to the specific characteristics of the mining community and the pace of its decline, and on the other to the nature of a wave of recent immigration from Morocco, which was confined to the margins of the community. This prompts us to question the dynamics of the miners' protests in the face of closures and their social consequences. Moreover, these strikes were led by migrant workers, caught between specific demands and the challenges they posed to the group, which put the notion of a "universal working class" - the shared demands capable of underpinning its unity-to the test. As such, they open the way for an analysis of the racial fissures within working-class solidarity in the context of deindustrialisation.
In the 1970s, prisoners in Switzerland staged protests and riots to denounce a system that, far from fulfilling its statutory duty to rehabilitate and prepare them for reintegration into society, resulted in deaths by suicide or neglect. Abolitionist and anti-prison groups amplified these protests, which initially found an echo in the press and eventually reached the authorities. In the Swiss context, young men who had been imprisoned for refusing to perform military service and feminist activists played a leading role. Drawing on the concept of "moral economy" developed by E. P. Thompson and on the sociology of public problems, this article analyses the various stages in the process of bringing the demands of prisoners to the fore, from the first hunger strike in 1972 to the implementation of reforms at the Champ-Dollon prison in Geneva following a 1979 riot.
This article examines the Portuguese imperial and colonial administration through the lens of its relationship with its archives. The aim is to shed light on a political and administrative concern that straddled the centralisation of the empire's records, attempts to organise documentation in the colonies, and diplomatic and commemorative practices. The creation in 1931 of the Arquivo Hist & oacute;rico Colonial coincided with a reform of the colonial administration that took archival issues into account. The process of designating old documents as heritage thus coincided with efforts to prepare the archives of the future. Straddling scholarly preservation and the political utilisation of written records, the case of the archives of the Estado da & Iacute;ndia crystallises all these issues at a time when Goa, a former Portuguese colony, was caught up in the process of decolonisation. Through this examination of the archives, the aim is to demonstrate how the state apparatus grappled with the management of written records, between the metropolis and the colonies.
In the United States, where debt impacts many areas of life, a union has been formed to bring together students and workers who are crippled by medical, legal and housing debts. Founded in the spring of 2012, in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Strike Debt framed itself as the first union for debtors. It addressed a vital need for millions of families and has made a name for itself through direct action against creditors, its handbook on debt resistance, and spectacular debt buy-outs on the financial markets. However, solidarity amongst debtors is undermined by the pervasiveness of debt, social isolation, economic pressures and the lack of shared working conditions. The uncertainties surrounding a genuine debt strike demonstrate that social struggles are not proportional to the scale of the economic problems being tackled: a single obstacle can both fuel and hinder mobilisation.
