For a Socio-History of International Relations. Interview with Mathias Delori

Mathias Delori joined CERI in September 2024 as CNRS research fellow. A socio-historian of International Relations, he focuses on critical war, peace and security studies. He answers our questions in this short presentation interview.

Could you tell us a bit about your career?

My PhD thesis, defended in 2008 at Sciences Po Grenoble, looked at Franco-German reconciliation. After completing my PhD, I undertook postdoctoral fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence (Max Weber) and at the University of Montreal before taking up my position as CNRS research fellow at the Centre Émile Durkheim in Bordeaux in 2011. Without ever ceasing my interest in Franco-German relations (La réconciliation franco-allemande par la jeunesse.1871-2015, Peter Lang 2016 ). I then started a new research project on war violence in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. For example, the original dissertation for my HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des recherches), defended in 2020 at the University of Paris 1 under the supervision of Nicolas Mariot, focused on the violence of the “global war on terror”, a violence that I describe as “liberal” (Ce que vaut une vie. Théorie de la violence libérale, Éditions Amsterdam 2021 ). I spent four years (2020-2024) at the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin, where I led the State, Conflict and Political Norms unit before joining CERI on 1 September 2024.

What does your recent research consist of?

My latest research monograph (La guerre contre le terrorisme comme rivalité mimétique, forthcoming from Peter Lang ) is partly the fruit of reflections carried out in the context of working with the OCTAV network, of which the CERI was a partner, on the relational nature of “terrorist” and “counter-terrorist” violence.1 The book is based on the observation that intelligence services had established by the mid-2000s that the use of war was counter-productive in the fight against terrorism, with military intervention creating more terrorist vocations than it eliminated. Accordingly, the book examines why the United States, the United Kingdom, and France have persisted with this approach rather than favouring traditional security instruments such as policing and intelligence. The argument is that wars against terrorists and terrorism are the fruit of mimetic rivalry in the sense explained by René Girard. The supporters of counter-terrorist wars have imitated the terrorists in their failure to recognise the relational nature of the two forms of violence, in their portrayal of the adversary as an aggressor and in their use of non-strategic violence that leads to escalation.

You contributed to the DATAWAR project hosted by CERI, which looked at the importance of quantification in the study of armed conflict. How does this project relate to your own research, and in particular can it contribute to our understanding of the effects of Allied bombing during the Second World War?

The research project I carried out in connection with DATAWAR is entitled “Why Destroy German and Japanese Cities?” It does not deal directly with Allied bombing in the Second World War—a well-studied subject—but rather with the expert opinions of the immediate post-war period on the (already) controversial question of its effectiveness. The most important of these was the United States Strategic Bombing Survey(USSBS). Between 1944 and 1947, the USSBS mobilised around 3,000 people who used the social science tools of the time to understand the effects of the bombings on Germany and Japan, particularly on the morale of the population. The USSBS concluded that strategic bombing had “demoralized” the Germans and Japanese and that, in so doing, it had played a “decisive” role in the Allied victory. This conclusion led to the creation of an independent air force in 1947 with thousands of bombers, which were used in Korea three years later.
Working on the USSBS archives in Washington DC, I realised that the USSBS's optimistic conclusion about the demoralising effects of bombing was based on an operation of “quantification” in the language of Alain Desrosières. Positivist psychosociologists at the USSBS constructed a “morale index” (a scale of numbers from 1 to 10) based on the answers to a questionnaire administered to the people bombed, in order to establish the covariations between this index and their independent variable (supposed to be causal): the number of bombs dropped. The argument of the new monograph I'm working on is that these experts did not measure morale in the same way as others have measured the distance between the Earth and the Moon, i.e. an object that can be thought to exist independently of the quantification operation. Their approach is closer to that of the inventors of the intelligence quotient, opinion polls, or the quantification of drug users. They have produced a new conception of the “morale” of populations at war, which, as in the classic theory of strategic bombing, does not materialise in concrete behaviour such as whether or not to support the war effort, but in the emotions felt during the bombing.

How do the three projects on which you will be conducting your research at CERI—on the quantification of war, the symbolism of reconciliation, and the memory of imperialist wars—complement each other and contribute to a socio-history of international relations?

I consider the socio-history of international relations to be an intellectual approach that draws on social science theories to study international phenomena in their historical singularity. The projects you have mentioned complement each other in that they draw on different theories –constructivism, the Halbwachsian sociology of memory, and the political sociology of the international—to bring together empirical material that is also different: archives and interviews. These projects are like CERI itself: epistemologically pluralist. I look forward to discussing these theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues with my colleagues, particularly in the context of the “Actors and Scales of Regulation in Global Space” and “Violence and Management of Danger” research fields.

Interview by Josefina Gubbins

• 1. The inverted commas, which I do not use below so as not to overload the style, are there to remind us that the word terrorist is more often used to disqualify an adversary than to describe a class of well-defined phenomena in a reflexive way.