Contenu du sommaire : Guerre et paix aujourd'hui

Monique Chemillier-gendreau, The Right to Wage War or to Have Peace ? War and law are not dissociable even if one appears as the failure of the other. The right to make war, attribute of the state, has been accompanied by doctrinal debates over the just war and its methods from which have emerged international rules governing armed conflicts. The Charter of the United Nations has upset these rules by prohibiting the recourse to force in favor of mechanisms of collective security. However, the failure of these mechanisms leads to a focus upon regulating war. In this context, the question of guerilla war is difficult to deal with.

Géraud de La Pradelle, The Role of Law in Existing Wars Democratic governments increasingly use juridical arguments to justify military operations. This practice relieves them of the necessity of providing more pertinent arguments. However, public opinion generally attributes to law the virtues characteristic of domestic order where the legitimacy of juridical argumentation is verified by a tribunal. But in foreign affairs the argumentation of a state escapes such juridical control The result in not very healthy.

Pierre Lantz, War : the Idea, the Practice and the Fantasy The practice of war cannot be dissociated from the intellectual, ethical, affective and aesthetic values that a social system legitimates, tolerates or rejects and that conditions its attitude toward violence. The modes of justification of arms production and their eventual use have greatly varied throughout the twentieth century.

Sonia Dayan, With Blood and Fire The question of war is constant throughout the work of Ernst Jünger. The study of it produces elements for an anthropology of contemporary forms of war. Relating war to a primitive, ludic passion linked to an unrestrained sexuality, this theory is underpinned by a philosophical vitalism which leads to fascism. An aesthetic without an historical or political dimension is added to a mystification of the warrior. According to Jünger, contemporary war has brought forth the figure of the Worker, a technical soldier, thanks to which a new world order is taking shape. According to Jünger, contemporary war has brought forth the figure of the Worker, a technical soldier, thanks to which a new world order is taking shape.

Hélène Puiseux, The Framed War The Gulf War was filmed as an American epic with large framed images of reassuring events historicized in such a way as to give them a particular sense as they were happening. In contrast, filmed coverage of ex-Yugoslavia does not succeed in lending coherence to narrow and fragmented framing. In spite of some attempts at historicization, televised images have produced neither sense nor perspective. This war is presented as confusion, the disintegration of time, the tenaciousness of life and the violence of death.

Nicole Gabriel, Eros and the death drive in Don Juan come back from war The present article puts forward an interpretation of Hovàrth's play Don Juan comes back from war based on the theory of drives as reelaborated by Freud after World War I, a development which he had already been anticipating in a previous text, The Theme of the three caskets, which several features in Hovàrth's play recall The era that opened in the post war years, the joyless era of the death drive, also ushered in the impossibility of narrative since the reality of human experience was called into question. The historical subject vanished behind an experience that it could neither apprehend nor transmit.

Claude Maillard-Chary, War Imaginary in Surrealist Poetry With Apollinaire, war imagery was introduced into vanguard poetry, depriving it of any reaction against the cult of violence which was dwarfed to the proportions of a child's game. Against this trend, and notwithstanding their fascination with « the Enchanter », the surrealists sought to revive the horror of war through use of automatic messages, accounts of dreams and psychotic minidramas based upon ravings and obsessions of soldiers back from the front. We see here, in the first surrealist generation's baptism of blood, the appearance of a crack in the edifice of modernity.

Olivier Roy, From Ideological War to Ethnic War The continuation of the conflict in Afghanistan is different from earlier ethnic and tribal conflicts : it is a consequence of the appearance of new ethnic identities founded upon a common language. This ethnitization is a product of the war, accentuated by external influences. On the one hand, neighbouring states, as well as most anthropologists and journalists, think in terms of ethnic differences. On the other hand, the dissolution of the USSR intensified ethnic and national identifications. This change has paralleled an unprecedented increase in the production and sale of arms and the disappearance of traditional mechanisms of regulation and arbitrage. most anthropologists and journalists, think in terms of ethnic differences. On the other hand, the dissolution of the USSR intensified ethnic and national identifications. This change has paralleled an unprecedented increase in the production and sale of arms and the disappearance of traditional mechanisms of regulation and arbitrage.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, Deadly Shiism : The New Fighters for the True Faith The Iranian revolution is a social movement in which urban youth play a key role. The revolutionary movement is inspired by a Utopia in which injustice, political repression and disinheritance are abolished For a minority within the movement, however, the failure to achieve these goals has resulted in a desire for martyrdom This martyrdom is different in that it is engendered more by a kind of despair than by any idealism It is a phenomenon that will have a negative impact on post-revolutionary Iranian society.

Annick Nenquin, Insecurity and Social War Insecurity as a social phenomenon must be understood especially as a sense of risk The risk par excellence is that of individual and collective violence relative to the weakness of public institutions. Insecurity, therefore, is a fear of a greater visibility of social tensions, of a generalized conflict that calls into question democratic "consensus" and which bursts upon the scene in the form of a war that is "social" as much as civil

Jürgen Habermas ; Jürgen Link, The Logique of the Gulf War Two years after the Gulf War, critical intellectuals are divided as perhaps never before. We see the adversaries of universalism converted to universalist arguments in justifying military intervention in the conflict between Iraq and Kuwait. The position articulated two years ago by Jürgen Habermas illustrates this aspect of the event. The critical reply made by Jürgen Link is concerned to demonstrate the conceptual weaknesses of « selective universalism ». If universalism can only be realized through such self-destruction, perhaps universalism is not a constructive path to world peace.

Jean-Marie Muller, Towards a Nonviolent Civil Defense The concept of peace must be demilitarized in order to transcend the logic of war. Strategies of nonviolent action employed by citizens mobilized within the institutions of the state and organizations of civil society possess the capacity to defend a democratic society founded upon the rule of law

René Gallissot, Europe and Transnationalization If the tendency towards economic and cultural centrality which has characterized nation states is whithering away at the present time, the social management function of the state remains. The nation suite persists as a national-social, neo-corporative state. This process of transnationalization, that is manifested most notably by a regional urban recomposition due to demographic movements and economic restructuring such as the creation of the European Economic Community, provokes simultaneously the intensification of extreme nationalism and a transfer of identity towards "Europe".

Stella Bresciani, From Political Astonishment to Scientific Certainty. Four representations of the French Revolution Comparative analysis of the works of Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, Hippolyte Taine and Hannah Arendt show that an aesthetic representation of crowds, cities and societies was formed at the beginning of the nineteenth century and preceded the formulation of a conceptual field that transformed them into objects of study. Part of this process was a change in orientation going from a strictly political perspective towards a growing acceptance of a normative neutrality deemed scientific This shift in the study of crowds was the expression of the desire to gain control over social phenomena that were perceived as frightening throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.