Claire Negiar

posts by Claire Negiar

Everyone Has a Role to Play: Farce and Politics in France

Claire Negiar, Europe, Guest Posts / By

If you want to have a good laugh this week, I would suggest diving into the bountiful sea of articles on French politicians’ recent missteps. I will start my overview of recent political stumbling with the right-wing National Front before turning to France’s other parties.

The top of the hit parade features Marine Le Pen.  For all the Front National’s attempts to re-brand itself into a forward thinking, non-racist or xenophobic party, recent incidents show that the characteristics that were evident when her father was at the head of the party remain. Marine Le Pen was recently strapped with… – Read More

Cyprus: Between East and West?

Border Disputes, Claire Negiar, Europe, Geopolitics, Guest Posts, Islands, Self-Declared States / By

(Note: This is the second of two articles by Stanford student Claire Negiar that together contrast the situations of two geopolitically divided islands: Saint Martin and Cyprus)

Cyprus and Saint Martin – two very different islands sharing one key property: both are split by their “mother countries,” Greece and Turkey in the case of Cyprus, France and the Netherlands in the case of Saint Martin. However, these two islands have known very different fates over the past several decades, which are worth exploring in greater depth. What makes Saint Martin successful in its division, while Cyprus has remained in… – Read More

Saint Martin/Sint Maarten: An Island Divided

Borders, Claire Negiar, Geopolitics, Guest Posts, Historical Geography, Islands, Physical Geography, Special Municipalities / By

(Note: Today’s post is by Claire Negiar, a Stanford senior, soon to graduate. Claire will be writing a few posts over the coming weeks, many of them focused on France and French dependencies.)

Saint Martin. Sint Maarten. A crossroad between North and South, split between France and the Netherlands, Saint Martin has known a different fate in the aftermath of decolonization than most other Caribbean islands. Although the European colonial powers of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and even some of the Nordic nations usually battled it out for sovereignty over Carribbean islands in long back-and-forths, on the island… – Read More

Casamance – harmonious name, discordant reality

Claire Negiar, Geopolitics, Guest Posts, Insurgencies, Nationalism, Sub-Saharan Africa / By

The Casamance has long been a region in limbo, caught between worlds: today trapped between Senegal and The Gambia, it was subject to both French and Portuguese colonial efforts before the border was negotiated in 1888 between the French colony of Senegal and Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) to the south. The settlement resulted in Portugal losing possession of the Casamance, which was at the time the commercial hub of its colony. – Read More

Seek and Thou Shall Fiend: French Satirical Maps

Claire Negiar, Cultural Geography, Guest Posts, Nationalism / By

As any tourist who has traveled to France knows, the French are master critics. But they tend to spare nobody in the line of fire—not even their own compatriots. In the series entitled “La carte de France vue par ses habitants,” the French website CartesFrances.fr offers a variety of satirical mappings of the divisions of France as seen by inhabitants of some of its main geopolitical and cultural hubs: Paris, Marseilles, Toulouse, Brittany, and Normandy. – Read More