Event Date: February 1, 2018 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: FSS4006, 120 Université privé

Presented by CIPS

The traditional understanding of war that arose with the Westphalian international order and the Weberian states that compose it appears to be in terminal crisis today. Established political and juridical framings of war no longer seem operant in an age of contingent, pre-emptive projections of force. Conventional figures of political enmity are displaced by those of the prey, the criminal, and the bureaucratic object of killing, each of which is submitted to increasingly global and individualised exercises in targeting. Finally, the customary conception of the battlefield as a distinct physical and normative space delineated from other social spheres is critically undercut by the sporadic eruptions of armed violence devoid of spatial contiguity or temporal continuity that characterise global conflict in the 21^st century. This talk will survey the demise of the Westphalian institution of war and outline the new constellations of armed conflict that are taking shape in its wake.

Antoine Bousquet is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Birkbeck College, University of London. His main research interests are in war and political violence, the history and philosophy of science and technology, and social and political theory in the digital age. He is the author of The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (Hurst Publishers & Columbia University Press, 2009), has published articles in a range of peer-reviewed journals, and has given invited talks to international audiences at universities, military academies, think tanks, and cultural centres. His second monograph entitled The Martial Gaze: The Logistics of Military Perception in the Age of Global Targeting will be published in 2018 by University of Minnesota Press.

Prof. Bousquet va faire la portion de questions et réponses en français et anglais.