Abstract
At a time when military action is once again an immediate concern for liberal democracies, the human and social sciences are challenged to question the contiguity if not consubstantiality of the notions of war, state and sovereignty. The first step is to trivialise war and bring it into an epistemological perspective. In this respect, war does not suspend social relations, it reveals the structure of a given society. The historical, legal and sociological deconstruction of the ideal of sovereignty for the affirmation of state power through war is a second step that implies interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation. The ultimate goal is to join up our thinking about the transformation of war and the reshaping of states.
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Notes
- 1.
It is crucial to note the extent to which the use of the concept of “societal security” in official French documents prefigures the success of the particularly vague category of resilience advanced twenty years later by political authorities as a collective response to terrorist and/or pandemic risk.
- 2.
The “field” (champ), defined as a “network or a configuration of objective relations between positions” (Bourdieu, 1994, 72–73), enables us to examine the changing boundaries between professional groups involved in international security, and to trace how these actors relate to one another. “First, the social space of the professionals of security functions as a “field of force, or a magnetic field”, the dynamic of which creates homogeneity of interests – not of identity. […] Second, this social space is a field of struggles. Of course, actors neither share the same means nor pursue a similar end. […]. Third […] the social space of the professionals of security is a field of domination. Although fields are distinct social spaces, their boundaries remain permeable. Indeed, and this is the fourth trait, the field of (in)security professionals is a transversal field, the trajectory of which reconfigures formerly autonomous social universes and shifts the borders of these former realms to include them totally or partially in the new field” (CASE, 2006, 458).
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Daho, G., Richard, Y. (2023). The Contingency of the War–State–Sovereignty Triad: Updating a Canonical Debate. In: Daho, G., Richard, Y. (eds) War, State and Sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33661-4_1
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