Security Policies

The study of armed conflicts, political violence and security policies is generally insulated from the study of the state, of political order or of the everyday experience of pacified societies.

This insulation is however partly factitious. Throughout history both inter-state and civil wars have been generative events that have shaped human relations and social institutions within and across societies.

Reversely, wars, armed conflicts and political violence cannot exclusively be analyzed as moments of paroxysm, extraordinary measures and utmost violence: they have their economies, their forms of (rebel-) governance, their own social order, and their own informal rules, all of which participate to global flows and interactions.

In our modern states, security policies play an important role in mediating the relation between violent and non-violent orders: they presuppose a certain level of control of violence on the part of the state, they usually involve some capacity to use force, but also – in the name of order – they might themselves contribute to dynamics triggering or quelling political violence.

For all of these reasons, the methodological choice underpinning this course is to deal simultaneously with intrastate and interstate conflict, the present and history, violent and nonviolent conflict. The theoretically clear distinctions between conflict / post-conflict, war / peace, interstate / intrastate, security / insecurity will here all be considered as sites of investigation rather than as taken-for-granted objects.

While presenting the main theories and concepts in the study of political violence, armed conflict and security policies, we will always give concrete examples and illustrations in order to show how theories and concepts can help in the understanding of the present world and the recent past. Theoretical and empirical considerations will very much be interwoven.

Therefore, the lectures are divided into two main parts:

• The first one tries to give a broad overview of the main topics, concepts and theoretical tools through which armed conflict, security dynamics and political violence have been dealt with in the social sciences. It also tries to understand their historical variations at the macro-sociological level.

• The second part deals with the social dynamics of contemporary wars and with the professionalization of security: the practices of the professionals of security (the military, the police, intelligence services etc.). While not losing sight of the broader perspective, the focus is here on the “microcosm” or the micro-sociological underpinnings of the “world” of security-professionals.