Area 5 "Violence, crises and
contemporary conflicts
Hosted by Walter Bruyère-Ostells and Benoît Pouget
This area is concerned with international relations, violence and conflict studies, and the military. By virtue of its interdisciplinary positioning, it is part of the War and Security Studies movement and uses transnational approaches. It is part of new scientific developments: anthropological approaches to violence and war, a new history of international relations and transnational mechanisms and actors, memory issues and collective representations.
Axis members
The aim of this area is to re-examine the notion of crisis in contemporary history and the present day, based on contexts of violence and extraordinary situations leading to political, social or economic restructuring on different temporal and geographical scales (Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa). These ruptures are discussed in a dynamic reading of the events and on several temporal scales, giving a good grasp of the microevolutions upstream and downstream.
In addition to the approaches traditionally developed in international relations, the aim here is to develop an approach based on individual or collective actors, understanding conflicts in terms of the people behind them. At the crossroads of national, international and transnational interpretations of tensions, the aim is to define the forms of rupture that make it possible to characterise crises and establish the forms of recomposition of public action; to grasp the thresholds and degrees of suffering and/or violence that may legitimise the intervention of armed forces.
Three thematic areas are given priority:
Keywords: International relations, violence, crises, new conflicts, memory, states, armies, non-state groups, diplomats, security.
