The fight against female genital mutilations (FGM), set up as a global cause, shows the paradoxical position of African societies in the international arena. Yet, are the anti-FGM policies (which have emerged in circumcising societies since the early 1990s) only an automatic response to international prescriptions for the eradication of those pratices? Adopting a political sociology perspective on policy-making - in situations of extraversion - this Ph.D. dissertation explores how a socio-cultural practice (FGM) becomes an issue, and a mobilizing cause ; and how this cause is politicized i.e. translated into the political field, in Mali and Kenya. Comparing anti-FGM policy framing processes (from ideas to action frames) - in globalized contexts - highlights contrasted paths of political appropriation of the issue. In Mali, appropriation is differential: anti- FGM policy is framed into "maternalist/educative" terms while the law is framed as a "non malian" option. In Kenya, appropriation is mimetic: anti-FGM policy framings are moulded by global policy frames (with for instance the vote of the Children?s Act in 2001). Those contrasted features question how extraversion is managed (even strategically) in the government of African societies. Beyond the FGM issue per se, this analysis helps to grasp the State in real, i.e. in action. Even contested, privatized, and reduced to technical functions, it still appears here as the glue for a multi-level and negociated governmentality of the the FGM cause.