Consequently, postcolonial national constructions cannot be understood from the sole point of view of their relations with the Western powers and their position in the world economy, Bayart argued.
[8] From this perspective, Jean-François Bayart has developed original concepts, widely used in the field of social sciences, such as the concepts of: The same kind of misunderstanding arose during the publication of his book The Criminalization of the State in Africa (1997, in collaboration with Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou),[12] related to a problem of historical sociology, and whose analysis was limited to a handful of countries.
[13] That is despite the fact that the previous year Jean-François Bayart had criticized culturalism in L'Illusion identitaire (1996), a work in which he took the opposite view of Samuel Huntington's thesis on the “clash of civilizations” and developed a theory allowing readers to think of the consubstantial relations between culture and politics “without being a culturalist”, much as ten years before he had sought to think of the dependence of Africa “without being dependent”.
Ankara, Tehran, Dakar" (2010), Bayart again showed, with three supporting case studies, the inanity of the culturalist explanation of politics and replaced it with a sociological interpretation in terms of the formation of the state, insisting once again on its historicity, on the connections between national or imperial trajectories, on the interweaving of the durations constitutive of the political, on the importance of subjectivation practices.
[20] Beyond its monographic scope, this book was implicitly presented as a manifesto of comparative historical sociology of politics, like the small essay "Les Études postcoloniales, un carnaval académique (2010).
[21] In particular, Bayart stood against the current of political science known as "transitology" by refining the concept of "Thermidorian situation" that he had advanced in 1991 with regard to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and substituting it to that of the "transition" to democracy and the market economy in the case of regimes resulting from revolutions.
Jean-François Bayart has long criticized France's foreign policy, believing that it did not sufficiently serve third countries, in particular the former French colonies in Africa.
[23] He is also in favor of a total opening of the borders and denounces the efforts of Europe aimed at stemming African immigration, even calling for punishing European leaders, guilty in his eyes of having entered into cooperation agreements with Libya on this topic.
[27] According to Morgane Govoreanu, one of the peculiarities of his professional career is to have always distinguished the roles he it imposed on him, and of which he never failed to underline the specific logics: those of the researcher, of the teacher, the administrator, the expert-consultant, the militant commentator.