June 7-9 2022

Sorbonne – Oury et Richelieu amphitheatres

University Panthéon-Sorbonne

Paris

This call for papers is part of an endeavour to decompartmentalise war studies in the Sorbonne War Studies programme run by the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (https://cessp.cnrs.fr/Programme-Sorbonne-War-Studies-SWS-ERC). It proposes to revisit the link between war and sovereignty, using an interdisciplinary approach, through the transformation of the State and of security governance practices.

War making, as an expression of the forces at work in all human societies, is one of various means of political action. The postulate that this collective activity must necessarily undergo an epistemological normalisation raises two notable difficulties. While war may be a common enough phenomenon in the sense that it recurs throughout history, it is nevertheless difficult to capture its full meaning in a comprehensive definition that accounts for its many forms and distinctive dynamics. It is, moreover, counterproductive to observe war outside the political, economic and social context in which it erupts, since this context actually contributes to its outbreak and spread, on every scale of time and space. The challenge is therefore to comprehend war without presupposing that there is anything exceptional about it in the context of social relations, and to analyse it with a method that is devoid of any pejorative, ameliorative or performative connotations.

There are various standard definitions of war: an act of violence designed to force the adversary to do as we wish (Clausevitz 2014), limited in time and space, and subject to variable legal rules (Bouthoul 1957) that allow two or more groups to conduct this armed conflict (Wright 1942). In these definitions, marked by the centrality of organised violence, the State is often implicitly or explicitly seen as the sole or principal stakeholder or, in any case, as the one most deserving of observation (Aron 1962). The empirical reality, however, does not fit neatly within the standard definitions. How can we make sense of the typological descriptions of war ("civil", "inter-State", "limited", "total", "revolutionary", "nuclear", "asymmetrical" or "hybrid", for example) and the functional descriptions of war ("urban", "cyber", "space war", "war of religion" or even "economic war", "psychological war") employed by war makers, and the plethora of adjectives that war theoreticians now associate with risk and "safety" (human, environmental, economic, health, etc.) rather than with threat and war.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the link between war and sovereignty prompts us to investigate not only how the exercise of sovereignty has changed but also the organisation of human societies. Even though war is traditionally seen as a way of establishing States and a way in which States relate to each other, many authors have long pointed out that it also involves non-governmental stakeholders,

who may be infra-state, supra-state or even trans-state (Flint 2005; Leander 2005; Gros 2006; Strachan and Shiepers 2011; Kaldor 2012). This trend reflects a deeper change, marked by a toppling of our markers concerning Westphalian territoriality and Weber's understanding of State legitimacy, and a redeployment of States' role in the dynamics of societies (Agnew 1994; Castells 1996, Sassen 1995; Strange 1996; Hibou 1999).

The States have given each other unprecedented guarantees of survival since the end of the Second World War and throughout the decolonisation process. In this sense, they have strongly consolidated the sovereignty norm and its corollaries in general (Badalassi 1994; Biersteker and Weber 1996; Dardot and Laval 2020), and in relation to war in particular (Glanville 2013; Patrick 2019). In law, the principle of sovereignty underpins the modern definition of the State and refers back to the power of command, above which there is no other power. This principle applies in the domestic political field and in the external field. In the first case, a State is sovereign insofar as it exercises a legitimate, inalienable and impersonal domination over a given territory (Weber 2003). Within its territory, it makes and unmakes laws, executes them, renders justice, resorts to force and so on. In the external field, the sovereign State is, in theory, recognised by the other States on the diplomatic and military level and in the international legal order.

However this is just one of many definitions of sovereignty. Sovereignty as defined by Bodin (1576) and Hobbes (1651) does not coincide exactly with the sovereignty in Rousseau's Social Contract (1762) or with Sieyès' sovereignty (1789). State sovereignty is not necessarily the same as sovereignty of the people or sovereignty of the nation, even if the concept of nation state was developed precisely to make these two sovereignties coexist. It is essential therefore to examine the issue in a socio-historic light to clarify the legal concept of State (Elias 1994; Chevallier 2003; Tilly 1992) and, it follows, to reveal its attributes, including that of to "want" and to "make" war.

The sovereign nation state model remains largely predominant as a framework and setting of social practices, but the States' sovereignty is renegotiated under the effect of long-term trends that change the ways in which wars are planned, prepared, begun and conducted: the neoliberal and neo-managerial trend, the globalisation and interdependency of economies, financial globalisation, the multiplicity of non-state stakeholders whose deployment runs counter to the interlinking of the states and the rise of reticular organisations, regionalism at different levels, the reinforcement of certain international institutions, etc... War, too, plays a part in redefining the boundaries of sovereignty and in the ways in which it is exercised, in the internal and external fields of public relations. For this reason, it is necessary to pay particular attention to, among other things, the relationships between States' sovereignty and the way they envisage or wage war in uncertain spaces, few or none of which have been territorialised, such as the high seas, outer space and cyberspace. Interdisciplinary papers on these aspects will be most welcome.

This colloquium has set out to analyse the effects of these trends on the war/sovereignty dialectic. Papers that borrow from or discuss concepts, methods and theories from other disciplines, or those supported by two or more specialists from different disciplines, are strongly encouraged. Papers should be between 5,000 and 6,000 signs long. They are to be preceded by a 100-word abstract and followed by a list of five bibliographical references. They should be sent to Yann Richard (Yann.Richard@univ-paris1.fr) by 31 January 2022. The scientific committee will announce its decision by 1 March 2022.

Scientific Committee

Alya AGLAN, Yves BUCHET DE NEUILLY, Olivier FEIERTAG, Olivier FRUTEAU DE LACLOS, Louis GAUTIER, Annie Lou COT, Caroline MORICOT, Olivier RENAUDIE, Yann RICHARD, Stéphane RODRIGUES

Bibliography

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- Aron, R., 1962, Paix et guerre entre les nations, Paris, Calmann-Lévy

- Badalassi, N., 2014, En finir avec la guerre froide, Rennes, PUR

- Biersteker, T., Weber C. (eds), 1996, State Sovereignty as Social Construct, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

- Bodin, J., 1576, Les Six livres de la République, 1986, Paris, Fayard

- Bouthoul, G., 1957, La guerre, Paris, PUF - Castells, M ., 1996, The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Oxford, UK, Blackwell

- Chevallier, J., 2003, L’Etat de droit, Paris, Montchrestien - Clausewitz, C. von , 2014, De la guerre, Paris, Astrée

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- Elias, N., 1994, La dynamique de l’occident, Paris, Calmann-Lévy

- Flint, C., 2005, Geography of War and Peace, Oxford University Press, Oxford

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- Gros, F., 2006, Etats de violence. Essai sur la fin de la guerre, Paris, Gallimard

- Hibou, B., 1999, La privatisation des États, Paris, Karthala

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- Kaldor, M., 2012, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Cambridge, Polity Press

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- Patrick, S., 2019, The Sovereignty Wars. Reconciling America with the World, Washington, Brooking Institution Press

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- Sassen, S., 1995, Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalisation, New York, Columbia University Press

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- Strachan, H., Shiepers, S. (eds), 2011, The Changing Character of War, Oxford, Oxford University Press

- Strange, S., 1996, The Retreat of the State : the Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

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- Wright, Q., 1942, A Study of War, 2 vol., Chicago, University of Chicago Press