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During the last 50 years, descendants of Maghrebians who immigrated to France (beurs) have received French citizenship. Their societal position is paradoxical: French citizens by birth and soil, they live in French society; however, for many French de souche, they are still considered immigrants. Although the French government has a policy of assimilation, many beurs do not participate in the French way of life. They live in the projects, their children go to sub-standard schools, and beur youth unemployment rate is at least double that for the French population as a whole. Their practice of Islam alienates them further. However, while the anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim party is gaining in numbers, beur culture is increasingly a part of French culture: Arabic words have made their way into French, beur music is popular, and there is a strong beur presence in film. In this article, I will explore the portrayal of mixed-ethnicity couples in two films, Il reste du jambon (Anne Depetrini, 2010) and Mohamed Dubois (Ernesto Ona, 2012). These films reflect a growing preoccupation with mixed couples and their conflicts, and are paradigmatic of the process of assimilation of Arabs into French culture. In the first, a beur doctor,  Djalil (Ramzy Bedia) integrates and wins a blond, middle-class French reporter; in the second, Arnaud, the son of a rich French banker renounces his French identity, and adopts an Arab heritage to win a beur policewoman. Although both are French productions, the principal beur roles may be seen as breaking through the French stereotypes of Muslims/Arabs and therefore as counter-narratives of the nation, which, according to Homi Bhabha, ‘continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual – [and] disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities’. I suggest, however, that while the beur ‘essentialist identity’ is challenged in the films, there are strains of neo-colonialism, with its accompanying ambivalence toward the beur characters, who are subject to mimicry, which consistently maintains the position of the dominant French film-consuming culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experiment with 212 students (100 men, 112 women; M age=18.3 years, SD=0.9) was carried out to compare the effect of four techniques used by mediators on the number of agreements contracted by negotiators. Under experimental conditions, mediators were asked either to rephrase (reformulate) negotiators' words or to imitate them or to show active listening behavior, or finally, to use a free technique. More agreements were reached in the active listening condition than in both free and rephrase conditions. Furthermore, mediators in the active listening condition were perceived, by the negotiators, as more efficient than mediators using other techniques, although there was no significant difference observed between the active listening and imitation conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]