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F16 fighter jets and their role in (media) conflicts
What role could F16 fighter jets play in the conflict in Ukraine? This is a question that is often asked in the media, notably by the french newspaper Le Monde. According to the American political scientist James Der Derian in his book ‘Virtuous War’, the effects and destruction caused by supposedly ultra-high-performance military technologies are not objectively realised in the reality of combat on the ground - quite the contrary. The American author and researcher reveals three striking examples...
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Artificial Intelligence as a threat
Artificial Intelligence is a threat, since “[AI] turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history”, according to Naomie Klein, the Canadian author of the famous book “The Shock Doctrine”. First of all, what is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? According to Naomie Klein and the designers of AI, it’s “the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital”, everything that humanity has written, said, or represented in the form of an image. In other words, Artificial Intelligence is all the human thinking recorded on our computers or on the Internet through Facebook, digital books on Amazon, Wikipedia, etc… In other words, the “big data”. So, it’s…
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Iran of the Pasdarans
Iran is a strategic crossroads between the Arab world, the Turkish world, the Caucasian world, and the Indian world. This Middle Eastern country has access to three seas with the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean through its strategic lock of the Strait of Hormuz where 40% of world oil exports transit. Iran has an area of more than 1.6 million km² (about four times the size of Germany) for a population of about 85 million people. Iran is also “the country of mountains” which are omnipresent in the landscape, especially with the high mountain barriers of the central Zagros. The country is experiencing a return…
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Political violence by the “text”
Political violence can be analyzed through the “flip side of the coin” that is the field of “counterterrorism”. Numerous scientific studies demonstrate that there is a reciprocal effect between the violence (structural or direct) of state institutions and activism. This phenomenon is known as the “backfire effect”, which means that repressive or “counterterrorist” policies have a counter-productive effect, leading to long-term “security losses”. According to Lindekilde, there are two dimensions of “counter-terrorism policies” that can be counter-productive: one refers to “hard counterterrorism” instruments of state coercion, such as surveillance or preventive detention, and the other corresponds to “soft counterterrorism” instruments of sensibilization, through the use of the media or social…
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Radicalization
“Radicalization” is the title of a book published in 2014 by Farhad Khosrokhavar, a sociologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), so that we can immediately understand that his study focuses on the phenomena of political violence. The context for the book’s production is at a time when Europe is facing an unprecedented influx of its young people to the Middle East, with “some 1,500 to 2,000 Europeans believed to have joined Syria, including a few hundred french”. What is “radicalization”? This notion of “radicalization” is defined by the author as a “process by which an individual or a group adopts a violent form of…
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Arms international regimes
Arms international regimes in a context of international “anarchy [are] what states make of it”. This quote from Alexander Wendt perfectly sums up the “structure of shared values” used by States in their international relations and, therefore, the application of “international regimes”, namely a set of norms and procedures in specific fields of common interest to States, especially in the fields of disarmament, arms control and/or non-proliferation. However, these “regimes” seem to have little impact on international peace and security, as they are limited to restricted categories of weapons and under limited circumstances. Therefore, the key questions are: How are these regimes interpreted by States? And, to what extent…
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Biopolitics of health in Africa
“We believe that capitalism bears within itself the [(viral?)] germs of its own destruction, but not in the sense that Marx thought“, this quote comes from Schumpeter in 1919 in his writings on the “sociology of imperialism”. Indeed, if we think of the EU as a regional empire, then we can understand the hidden interests that have underpinned its “neighborhood” policy on health since the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Alain Supiot, this pandemic crisis reveals the “decrepitude” of public health services because of neoliberal policies in Europe and the whole world. In order to fill these gaps in healthcare in “peripheral” countries that threaten the European market, the “EU for…
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Building peace and security in Congo
How building peace and security in Congo? This is a critical question for the Congolese, but it requires some perspective to provide the key elements needed to understand the tragic current situation in Eastern Congo, particularly through the prism of the (post)colonial legacy in Congo. Building peace and security in the Congo versus “logics of invisibility” The systemic massacres (murders, mutilations, organized starvation, etc.) committed by Leopold II of Belgium and the same massacres in Congo during contemporary times validate the thesis of a structural “homology“, in the sense of the sociologist Bourdieu, namely homologue relations of situation between these different chronological “fields”. This “structural homologies” aims to better…
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The omertà of the “international community”
The omertà of the “international community” is particularly surprising when it comes to the atrocities committed during and after the colonization of the Congo. In this regard, the massacres of “Ten million” of African by Belgium between 1884 and 1908, or the massacres of Congolese during the Second Congo War from August 1998 to June 2003, with more than five million civilians’ casualties, have received very little media coverage. Once again, as in colonial times, the tragedy of the Congolese people is overshadowed on the international agenda, with populations forced to flee their villages and take refuge in the forests. Let’s define the central concepts of this article entitled: “The…
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Colonial legacy of the holocaust in Congo (Zaïre)
According to Professor Adam Hochschild from the University of Berkeley: “It is an oversimplification to blame Africa’s [especially the Congo] troubles today entirely on European imperialism; history is far more complicated. And yet, consider Mobutu again. Aside from the color of his skin, there were few ways in which he did not resemble the [Belgian] monarch who governed the same territory a hundred years earlier”. Indeed, there is a colonial legacy that Mobutu perpetuated in the post-colonial era (from formal independence in 1960 to 1997). According to David Van Reybrouck: “Congo was independent, true enough, but the Belgians not only ran things economically, they also maintained a total grip…
