Event Date: November 7, 2017 - 12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location: FSS 4006, 120 University Private

Presented by CIPS

This presentation discusses the contemporary transformations of the political and military-strategic discourses. More specifically, it offers an archaeological description of the discourse of the ‘war against terrorism’ by unpacking it, in order to show how this discourse disarticulates the conceptual matrix of modern war by dislocating some of its crucial concepts when it tries to capture, and therefore shapes in very specific ways the hostility involved in the contemporary terrorism/counterterrorism cycle. I develop the argument that the ‘martialisation’ of the terrorism-discourse releases violence from the tight regime of limits under which the modern discourse of war had confined it, paving the way for a ‘War against terrorism’ without limits in either time or space. This is enacted by a series of conceptual shifts that were initiated long before 9.11.

Philippe Bonditti holds a doctorate in political science from Sciences Po Paris (2008) and is currently an Associate Professor at the European School of Political and Social Science (ESPOL, UC Lille, France) and an associate researcher at the LabToP-Paris8-CNRS (Paris, France) and IRI/PUC-Rio (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). Previously an Assistant Professor at the Institute of International Relations of PUC-Rio, Brazil (2010-2013), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, USA (2008-2010), his research interests include: contemporary discourses on violence, war, and security, the transformations of the modern state and the art of government, (critical) IR theory, (critical) security studies, contemporary French philosophy and political theory.