Led by Boyd K. Rutherford, the series offers a distinctive opportunity to examine contemporary American politics through the perspective of a political practitioner with first-hand experience at both the federal and state levels. Drawing on his experience in public office and political life, Boyd K. Rutherford will provide an informed perspective on the forces currently reshaping American politics and America’s role in the world.
Across five sessions, the series will move beyond the headlines to examine some of the most pressing questions facing the United States today: the defining features of the Trump administration, the evolution of U.S. foreign policy, the stakes of the midterm elections, the deepening of political polarization, and the rapidly changing American media landscape.
Each conference will combine political analysis, institutional insight, and discussion, providing an opportunity to better understand not only what is happening in the United States, but also why it matters—for American democracy, for U.S. institutions, and for the country’s relations with the rest of the world.
5 themes. 5 perspectives on a country undergoing profound political change.
- Enseignant: Guillaume Duseigneur
Intitulé du cours : THEORIES OF WAR
The course will look at war from a theoretical perspective, and will attempt to answer a series of questions throughout the semester:
- What distinguishes war from other forms of violence, and what is the relationship between war and politics? What role does war play in the constitution of the various political regimes, and specifically that of the nation-state? The nation-state is probably the most ruthlessly efficient war machine ever invented – is it how we are to understand the observation that war is the ‘health of the state’?
- What are the causes of war? Can we eradicate the causes of war, and what are the conditions for a “perpetual peace”? Is cosmopolitanism one of them, as some 18th century theorists thought, or would it on the contrary only unleash even more violence? Can war be a rational move, even though it seems at first sight to be an eminently irrational event?
- What is the relationship between law and war? What are the (moral, political or other) conditions of possibility of the legality of war? Is war to be understood as outside the framework of any law, or is it simply governed by a different set of rules? This opens the debate of the Just War theory and its contemporary avatars. Can war be outlawed?
- What is the relationship between war and religion, or more generally between war and the sacred? Why is it that war has very often been assimilated to a form of the sacred, in spite of its massacres, killings and general defilement of humanity?
- Why has war been an object of predilection of literature and art? We will attempt to analyse why, while poetry or art would seem radically antagonistic to the horrors of war, they might on the contrary be the truest way to remember them. Can war be memorialised in a comic form? Should it? We will here look at the relationship between ethics and aesthetics.
- What is the conceptual specificity of civil war?
- Is there a conceptual, political and strategic specificity of contemporary warfare? Do the ‘new wars’ differ in kind or in degree from traditional inter-state wars? Does the famed RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) really constitute a “revolution”? More generally, why did the 20th century show such an uncanny creativity in war, with its invention of totalitarianism, genocide, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare, whereas it had precisely decided to outlaw it?
Intitulés des séances :
Week 1: What is War?
What is the difference between war and collective violence in general? Is there any specificity of war, understood as inter-state conflict? War as game and contest.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, chap. 1.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, “Self-Consciousness”, parag. 178-190.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. XIII, XVIII.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, chap 2, pp. 81- 97 “War is a Contest”.
Titus Livius (Livy), Roman History, from p. 5 “Upon the death of Numa…” (middle of parag 20) till end of parag. 22 “… met him before the gate Capena”, p. 8.
Week 2: What Causes War?
What are the causes of war? Is it attributable to human nature? Or rather, to international relations, and/or to dysfunctional relationships within the polity itself? Security dilemmas.
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books, NY 1984, pp. 73-87 (Ch. 4).
Greg Cashman, What Causes War? An Introduction to Theories of International Conflict
chap. 7 “International Interaction: Game Theory and Deterrence Theory”, pp 193-223 and
chap. 10: Conclusion, pp. 279-288.
Daniel Gilbert, “He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t”, International Herald Tribune 24 July 2006.
Alfred Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Correspondence 1931-32: “Why War?”
Barry Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict”, in Survival, vol. 35, no 1, Spring 1993, pp. 27-47.
John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War, chap. 10, pp. 396-422
Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War, Introduction.
Week 3: War and the Nation-State. Theatres of War.
The nation-state as the most ruthless war machine ever invented.
Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, London: Allen Lane, 2002: chap. 8 “From State-Nations to Nation-States 1776-1914”, pp. 150-178 till “...other parts of Europe”.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chap. VI, X, XIV, XVII, XXIV-XXV.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chap. 2
Mark Neoclous, “Off the Map, On Violence and Cartography”, European Journal of Social Theory, 6(4), 2003, pp. 409-425.
J.J. Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, Chap. I-V, XII, XV.
Week 4: War and Technology; War and Cartography
The impact of technology on warfare. How military maps played a decisive role in the way we visualise not just conflict, but nation-states themselves.
Martin van Creveld, Technology and War, chap. 3 “The Infrastructure of War” and chap. 10 “The Rise of Professionalism”
Weeks 5-6: Law and War.
The issue of Just War Theory. Its origins, debates, contemporary avatars. Jus in Bello, Jus ad Bellum. Humanitarian Interventions. Can war be morally justifiable? Are there some intrinsically evil or unjustifiable weapons?
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, 40, “On War”.
Geoffrey Best, War and Law since 1945, chap 7 “Humanitarian Practice and the Laws of War” and chap. 8 “Methods and Means”.
Richard Betts, The Delusion of Impartial Intervention, Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994.
Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace, transl. A.C. Campbell, Book I, Chap. 1-3.
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 3.
Immanuel Kant, Science of Right, Section II. The Rights of Nations and International Law.
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, Part III, chap 1, “the Jus Publicum Europaeum”, pp. 140-152; Part IV “The Question of a New Nomos of the Earth”, chap. 4 -5, pp. 240-280.
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, part IV, chap. 15, pp. 233-250; chap. 16, pp. 251-268; chap. 18, pp. 287-303; afterword 329-336.
Week 7: The Psychology of Warfare
Killing does not come naturally: how does one become a killer? What are the effects on the constitution of the self? How does one survive war, how does one survive torture?
Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits, pp. 1-40.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, chap. 1 “The Structure of Torture”
Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, transl. Mary McCarthy, Marseilles: Cahiers du Sud, 1940-1941.
Weeks 8-9: War and the Sacred; War and Art
Why has war so often been assimilated to a form of the sacred? Why has it fascinated so many philosophers? War and religion. War and literature, war and art. What is the specificity of artistic, literary approaches to war? What do they say about war which neither philosophy nor political science can say? Is the aestheticisation of war ethically neutral?
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, transl. S.W. Dyde, parag. 321-329.
Kant, Critique of Judgment, “Analytic of the Sublime”.
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, “Pericles Funeral Oration”, Book 2, 2.34 - 2.46
Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel (1920), Penguin 1978, pp. 86-93.
Wilfred Owen, Poems 1914-18
Siegfried Sassoon, Poems, 1914-1918
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2003.
James Wurtz, “Representing the Great War: Violence, Memory, and Comic Form”, Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 14, No 2, 2009, pp. 205-215.
Week 10: The Specificity of Civil War
Stathis Kalyvas, “’New’ and ‘Old’ Civil wars – A Valid Distinction?”, in World Politics, 54, October 2011, 99-118.
Week 11: Peace, Resistance
Is peace only the absence of war? What would be the conditions of possibility of perpetual peace?
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.
Avishai Margalit, “Indecent Compromise, Decent Peace”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, May 2005.
Bertrand Russell, “War and Non-Resistance”, Atlantic Monthly Vol. 116, No. 2 (August 1915). 266–274.
Week 13: New Wars: Genocide, Totalitarianism, Guerrilla Warfare, Terrorism
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 119-156
Talal Asad,
- On Suicide Bombing, pp. 58-64
- “Thinking about Terrorism and Just War” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 23, No 1, March 2010, pp. 3-24.
Mark Danner, “Torture and the Forever War”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, April 2010.
Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter, “The Strategies of Terrorism”, in International Security, vol. 31, No 1 (summer 2006), pp. 49-80
Modalité de contrôle des connaissances et compétences :
Mode d’évaluation : Contrôle terminal : épreuve à la maison
Nature de(s) évaluations : A research essay.
Bibliography :
Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits, Bloomington, Indiana Univ. Press 1980, pp. 1-40
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II, 40, “On War”.
Hannah Arendt,
- The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 119-156
- On Violence, Harvest 1970, pp.51-55 and 66-87.
Talal Asad,
- On Suicide Bombing, pp. 58-64
- “Thinking about Terrorism and Just War” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 23, No 1, March 2010, pp. 3-24.
Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books, NY 1984, pp. 73-87 (Ch. 4).
Geoffrey Best, War and Law since 1945, chap 7 “Humanitarian Practice and the Laws of War” and chap. 8 “Methods and Means”
Richard Betts, The Delusion of Impartial Intervention, Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994.
Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, London: Allen Lane, 2002.
Judith Butler,
- Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Verso Books, 2010
- Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso Books, 2020
Greg Cashman, What Causes War? An Introduction to Theories of International Conflict, chap. 7 “International Interaction: Game Theory and Deterrence Theory”, pp 193-223 and chap. 10: Conclusion, pp. 279-288.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, transl. J.J. Graham, Book I, chap. 1-2.
Mark Danner, “Torture and the Forever War”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, April 2010.
Alfred Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Correspondence 1931-32: “Why War?”
Daniel Gilbert, “He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t”, International Herald Tribune 24 July 2006.
Dave Grossman, On Killing, Back Bay Books 1995, Section I, “Killing and the Existence of Resistance”, and Section II, chap I, pp. 5-50.
Hugo Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace, transl. A.C. Campbell, Book I, Chap. 1-3.
G.W.F. Hegel,
- Phenomenology of Mind, transl. J.B. Baillie, “Self-Consciousness”, parag. 178-190.
- Philosophy of Right, transl. S.W. Dyde, parag. 321-329.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. XIII, XVIII.
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section 3
Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel (1920), Penguin 1978, pp. 86-93.
Stathis Kalyvas, “’New’ and ‘Old’ Civil wars – A Valid Distinction?”, in World Politics, 54, October 2011, 99-118.
Immanuel Kant,
- Science of Right, Section II. The Rights of Nations and International Law
- Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.
- Critique of Judgment, “Analytical of the Sublime”
Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter, “The Strategies of Terrorism”, in International Security, vol. 31, No 1 (summer 2006), pp. 49-80.
Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince, Chap. VI, X, XIV, XVII, XXIV-XXV.
Avishai Margalit, “Indecent Compromise, Decent Peace”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, May 2005.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Chap. 2.
Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre”, in Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1972), pp. 123-144.
Mark Neoclous, “Off the Map, On Violence and Cartography”, European Journal of Social Theory, 6(4), 2003, pp. 409-425.
Wilfred Owen, Poems 1914-18
Barry Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict”, in Survival, vol. 35, no 1, Spring 1993, pp. 27-47.
J.J. Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, Chap. I-V, XII, XV.
Bertrand Russell, “War and Non-Resistance”, Atlantic Monthly Vol. 116, No. 2 (August 1915). 266–274.
Siegfried Sassoon, Poems, 1914-1918
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, chap. 1 “The Structure of Torture” and chap 2 “The Structure of War”, pp. 81- 97 “ War is a Contest”.
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, Part III, chap 1, “The Jus Publicum Europaeum”, pp. 140-152; Part IV “The Question of a New Nomos of the Earth”, chap. 4 -5, pp. 240-280.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, New York, 2003.
John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War, chap. 10, pp. 396-422
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, transl. Lionel Giles, chap I-XIII.
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, “Pericles Funeral Oration”, Book 2, 2.34 - 2.46
Titus Livius (Livy), Roman History, transl. John Henry Freese, Alfred John Church, and William Jackson Brodribb, book I, parag. 12-26
Martin van Creveld, Technology and War, chap. 3 “The Infrastructure of War”, chap. 5 “Irrational Technology”, chap. 10 “The Rise of Professionalism”
Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War, Introduction.
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, part IV, chap. 15, pp. 233-250; chap. 16, pp. 251-268; chap. 18, pp. 287-303; afterword 329-336.
Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, transl. Mary McCarthy, Marseilles: Cahiers du Sud, 1940-1941.
James Wurtz, “Representing the Great War: Violence, Memory, and Comic Form”, Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 14, No 2, 2009, pp. 205-215.
Legal documents (available on avalon.law.yale.edu)
- 1928 Briand Kellogg Pact on the Renunciation of War
- 1948 UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
- Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War 1864-1975, especially the 1949 Conventions
- Code of Hammurabi 1780 BC
- The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal.
- Second Lateran Council, Canon 29, 1139 A.D., banning the use of crossbows.
Iconography:
Otto Dix, The Match Seller
Flanders
Goya, El Tres de Mayo
Disasters of War (Series of Etchings)
Picasso, Guernica
John Singer Sargent, Gassed
Naram Sin Victory Stele
Emperor Akbar’s Mahabharata, or the Razmnama
Equestrian portrait of Aurangzeb Mughal
Mughal Army Elephants
Filmography:
- The Deer Hunter, dir. Michael Cimino, 1978.
- La Vita è Bella (Life is Beautiful), dir. Roberto Benigni, 1997.
- All Quiet on the Western Front, dir. Lewis Milestone, 1930.
- Tin Drum, dir. Volker Schlöndorff, 1979
- The Battle of Algiers, dir. Gilles Pontecorvo, 1966.
- Apocalypse Now, dir. Francis Coppola, 1979.
- The Bridge over the River Kwai, dir. David Lean, 1957.
- Lawrence of Arabia, dir. David Lean, 1962.
- Kingdom of Heaven, dir. Ridley Scott, 2005.
- Platoon, dir. Oliver Stone, 1986.
- Full Metal Jacket, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1987.
- The Paths of Glory, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1957.
- Gallipoli, dir. Peter Weir, 1981.
- Enemy at the Gates, dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2001.
- Das Boot, dir. Wolfgang Petersen, 1981.
- Waterloo, dir. Sergey Bondarchuk, 1970.
- Downfall, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004.
- Tora! Tora! Tora!, dir. Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku, 1970.
Documentaries:
- The World at War, BBC
- The Fog of War, Errol Morris and Robert McNamara, 2003.
- Enseignant: Anne-christine Habbard
Dans le cadre de ces conférences de méthode, les étudiants seront amenés à appréhender le droit international et le droit européen à travers l’analyse pratique de différends contemporains et la participation à des exercices de simulation.
Seront notamment abordés les thématiques suivantes : protection des droits fondamentaux, sécurité internationale, contentieux maritimes, sanctions internationales et européennes, contentieux climatique.
Les thèmes étudiés pourront évoluer à la marge en fonction de l’actualité internationale et européenne.
Ces conférences de méthode se poursuivront au semestre 2.
- Enseignant: Audrey Pietrzak-gratadour
Epistemic injustices are a specific kind of injustice that touches each of us in our role and capacity as knowers. For example, when law enforcement does not believe testimony based on prejudices against a certain social category, members of this group face a specific kind of injustice. Similarly, when somebody lacks a concept in order to interpret their experience (as was the case concerning sexual harassment before the introduction of the concept in the 1970s) then they also face an injustice in their role as a knower. This course will look at recent literature that deals with the phenomenon of epistemic injustices and their effects. This will include looking at vice epistemology, that is, the study of the intellectual bad habits that can lead to epistemic injustices and readings on the epistemology of ignorance, or the willful refusal to modify our intellectual practices in order to not see injustices. This course will also examine responses to epistemic injustices and the ways that resistance to bad intellectual practices plays a role in shaping the political landscape.
- Enseignant: Sequoya Yiaueki
This course attempts to understand the role of political protest in the public space. The course will start by looking at the “expressive” possibilities of the state faced with the assumption of neutrality in liberal democracies. It will then look at different theories of protest and civil disobedience in order to better elaborate the relationship between the state and citizens. It well then look at diverse manners that citizens can make their needs and problems known through protests. Using the tools from philosophy of language, and more specifically the theory of speech acts, this course then considers protest as a complex matrix of diverse speech acts that involves plural forms of collective and distributed agency, diverse goals and varied criteria for success. Within this framework, political protest is seen as having multiple objectives beyond the modification of legislation, such as the constitution of a political community, the construction of solidarity, the dissemination of information and the space for self-education.
- Enseignant: Sequoya Yiaueki
The idea of open society is threatened not only from the outside but also from the inside. Outside threats are the well-known despotic and autocratic regimes. But threats also grow from the inside of the open societies, from the free expression of opinions that favor illiberal governments. Governments that are democratically elected to rule illiberal policies against the proper values of the open society. How can we explain this phenomenon and how can we combat it? The course will present the genealogy of the idea of open society from Bergson to Popper, then expose its main characteristics and achievements before discussing its fragility and the reasons of the current threats from the inside.
- Enseignant: Patrick Mardellat
The discussion thread of this course is the assumption that the European construction failures have their roots in the ambiguity of the idea of Europe. So in order to strengthen the European idea, it is assumed that this very idea of Europe has to be cleared by deconstruction.
The premise to any success in the European construction not betraying the ideal of democracy, peace and hospitality - all virtues attached to the political ideal of Europe - is the deconstruction of the idea of Europe. So, the objective of the course is to go back up from some unsettled questions about the European idea to the idea of Europe that is to find in the writings of European philosophers, especially since Kant.
A distinction is made between the European idea and the Idea of Europe. By European idea I mean the constructivist idea of the European polity that the European unification attempts to realize by the creation of common institutions and common policies. So, the European idea refers to the implementation of the "founding fathers'" project until the apparent failure of the European constitution. By idea of Europe I mean the philosophical conceptions of Europe by European philosophers since Kant to Derrida through Valéry, Husserl, Patocka and many others. Philosophers thought Europe as apart from the rest of the world and of humanity, because of its intellectual achievement. They thought of a special connexion between Europe and the reason: Europe is self-declared as the birth-place of philosophy, and by this way of science, but also between Europe and democracy. Philosophy, science and democracy are conceived as essentially European inventions. In other words, philosophy, science and democracy are supposed to fulfil the idea of Europe. And we have by there the definition of Europe in a simple equation: Europe = reason, logos. And from this idea they claimed for Europe and Europeans a special destiny and a special mission in regard of the world. That is called the destiny and mission of the universal.
The objective of the course is to call this pretension into question and to appreciate the achievements of the European idea from the commitments rooted in the European self-image.
- Enseignant: Patrick Mardellat