Contenu du sommaire : Guerre et contre-terrorisme

The war on “terrorism” does not only destroy; it also creates reciprocal links between the actors of the conflict: reciprocity of moral feelings, of identities, and especially of concrete practices. The argument developed in this article is that René Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry allows us to grasp the dynamics which do not only make this war an endless one but also contribute to its escalation. The theory of mimetic rivalry reveals that discourses and identities are shaped during the course of the violent relationship, the increasing inability of the adversaries to understand the motives of their opponents, and the extension of the field of rivalry. It constitutes an antidote to those explanations that radicalize and essentialize identities by denying the similarities that emerge from combat. It also constitutes an antithesis to those explanations based on the geopolitics of cultures and civilizations which feed ignorance on the dynamics at play in situations of violence.

Many quantitative studies have concluded that military interventionism is a central explanatory factor of terrorism. Yet, this literature is rarely mobilized in the correlate Francophone field of security studies. This blind spot seems to take root in a distrust of the positivist underpinnings of these quantitative studies and their apparent lack of reflexivity, in particular regarding the notion of terrorism. This paper argues that this distrust is partly justified but that it dissipates if one adopts a nominalist definition of “terrorism.” One does not measure, then, the weight of military interventionism on terrorism understood in a realistic fashion – provided that it is possible to grasp terrorism in such a way – but, rather, on the genesis of what the hegemonic discourse calls “terrorism,” namely violent attacks by non-state groups which the same discourse labels as “terrorists.”

What are the effects of armed interventions carried out in the name of the “war on terror”? Based on localized case studies in Afghanistan, Mali, and Chad, the article invites us to rethink the underlying conceptions of interventionism and shows why the “war on terror” cannot be “won” in the classical sense of the term. Instead, it shows how the “war on terror” contributes to perpetuating conflicts and undermining their resolution. While each configuration is unique, similar processes of conflict perpetuation and co-production of armed violence by a range of international and local actors can be found in all three countries.

On the 21st of November 2021, the investigative web magazine Disclose published a report on Operation Sirli, a secret mission organized between the French Military Intelligence Directorate (DRM) and the Egyptian security services of Marshal Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi. These revelations are based on hundreds of documents classified as confidential-defense transmitted to journalists by a source who preferred to run the risk of prosecution than to continue to endorse the practices s/he witnessed. Reproducing the text and follow-up answers sent by the anonymous source to the Disclose editorial team, we use this case to open up and discuss a broader set of questions developed in this special issue on war and terrorism.

In terms of criminal law and criminal procedure law, the last twenty years have been marked by two major changes: the convergence of criminal law and the law of armed conflict, on one hand, and the prevalence of the logic of prevention and anticipation, on the other. The war on terrorism has challenged the foundation of liberal criminal law. What remains of the essential role of appeasing the desire for violence when criminal justice itself is involved in the cycle of retribution?

In France, we have witnessed a flow of terrorist cases since 2015, unparalleled in the modern history of criminal justice. In their professional routine, magistrates thus find themselves directly involved in major geopolitical issues. It is in this context that this article aims to examine the emerging role of national criminal judges as transnational actors, how these judges reinforce, protect, and promote certain political goals and visions on a daily basis, and what the jurisprudential impact of these actions is, both nationally and transnationally. Based on an ethnographic approach, involving a multidisciplinary research team that observed dozens of terror trials in the Special Assize Court, this article demonstrates that terror justice is performed at the frontiers of ordinary justice, specialized justice and exceptional justice. At the same time, criminal judges play an important role in the enforcement of an alternative approach to the preventive and repressive doctrines, notably through the application of regular criminal law appreciations.

One of the research strands that has run through the journal Cultures & Conflits from its very inception deals with the relative exhaustion of the Clausewitzian heuristics of the “push towards the extremes of war.” Here, I delve into the implications and scope of these analyses of armed conflict with a retrospective view on the last thirty years. Clausewitz's heuristic concept of war as a duel (with dynamics of polarization and a push towards the extremes of war) and, more broadly, the more recent centripetal “models” of war in political science (focusing, on the one hand, on elimination struggles leading to a monopolizing impetus in civil war; on the other, on competitive state-centralization leading to the emergence of “like-units” in the context of interstate war) must be considerably complexified in order to thoroughly understand the multi-scalar and multi-centered nature of contemporary armed conflict. In the majority of contemporary wars, centrifugal and centripetal forces coexist and interweave multiple levels of political interaction, from the “local” to the “global.” 

This contribution provides an overview of conflict studies in Cultures & Conflits over the last three decades through an examination of how articles framed conflict situations, the actors involved and their agency. I argue that one of the main contributions of an anthropological and sociological approach is the de-reification of international conflict in stressing the contingency, messy and “humane-made” dimensions of conflict that contrasts strongly with those approaches that only see in a given “case” what they expected to see according to their theoretical lenses.

The end of the bipolarity has opened the way towards an unprecedented intensification of human and market mobilities. Whether in the form of a government of borders or a government of cities, similar control mechanisms have been put in place. They have essentially relied on the ability to tighten borders or secure moving spaces, turning to an excessive militarization of security techniques and technologies. The same suspension of the law and of rights, observable on the level of these devices of control and security, is found in the operating mode of markets - financial, but also economic or labor. All of them move with ease between the legal and the illegal, the licit and the illicit, under the benevolent gaze of the operators of the law. These questions are addressed from Franco-Brazilian research and from the point of view of North-South transversalities.

How can citizens relate to the possibility of nuclear war, so as to confront it politically? In order to answer this novel question, this essay builds on the scholarship on visual popular culture and makes three arguments. First, it reasserts the central role of imagination and fiction in seizing the possibility of nuclear war. Second, it identifies four aesthetic gestures which make this possibility imaginable. Third, through a detailed analysis of nuclear weapons in visual popular culture globally from 1951 to 2019 and tracing those aesthetic gestures, it requalifies the post-1990 period in contrast to the previous four decades as a time of production of an imaginary in which the possibility of nuclear war became invisible and nuclear weapons minimally harmful or salutary. It is based on untapped empirical material: interviews with nuclear war planners, disarmament activists, artists, and educators about nuclear dangers in France, the UK and the United States as well as a novel survey about the nuclear imaginaries and memories of a representative sample of residents in European countries which either possess nuclear weapons or host US nuclear weapons on their soil.