• “War is not a strategic response to terrorism. Without being its sole cause, it feeds the phenomenon it claims to fight.” Such is the so-called “pyromaniac-firefighter” thesis, defended by sixty scholars, artists, and intellectuals, in an article published on the website of the French magazine L’Obs on November 14, 2020, and translated into English by Verso. This text, calling for a public and democratic debate on the wars and military interventions waged by France and other “Western” states, has partly achieved its goal: generating discussion.

Dix-neuvième épisode du CDF. Cet opus a été terminé quelques jours avant les attentats de Bruxelles. Nous en avons donc décalé la sortie pour éviter de surfer sur une vague un peu morbide. N’en reste pas moins que la vision du terrorisme par la science-fiction est intéressante. Dans des mondes dystopiques, le terroriste se fait […]

via La science-fiction face au terrorisme — le comptoir du futur

There has been considerable academic interest in studying the connectiosn between the varieties of dissident attitues at a time of generalise outpouring of protest against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and the turn by some from verbal violence to direct action. The question of whether and how the German student movement can be considered as a prequel to the rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) or the turn to direct action by some new Leftists be seen as a sequel to these same protests flares up periodically in German political and scholarly discussions. clearly, the question of extreme violence is a crucial battleground in the fight to define the legacy of the 1960s.

For an overview of the latest academic publications on the subject see Guittet, Emmanuel-Pierre, West German radical protest in the Long 1960s, Critical Studies on Terrorism (2016)

On ExplosivePolitics.com

• Overview of German repositories and of their collections on the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO), the student movements and other forms of radical protests in the Sixties and seventies West Germany
• Blog on the different archives of the Rote Armee Fraktion
• Translation in English of Blödoje in Fünf Thesen für die Spaßguerilla (The moderately unreasonable plea for the five theses on Fun Guerrilla)
• Review of Sedlmaier, Alexander (2014). Consumption and Violence. Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany

Images of war is a complex photographic genre impregnated with emotion, which unsurprisingly, carries enormous power in determining reality. War imagery carries that extra weight. Departing from the emotion-focused debates on the representation of war/wartime photojournalism and questions about photos’ authenticity, this chapter looks at how images shape both what we know and how we learn about contemporary war, its landscapes, actors, actions and causes. What we suggest in this chapter is that images are indexes of warfare’s mutation, admissible evidence of daily life in a war zone, war trophies and traces of actions, from a particular point of view and at a very particular moment. Photography works as an imaginary quilting point or a common reference, which creates our collective imaginary of heroism, cruelty and suffering.

Co-authored chapter with Andreja Zevnik and published in Linda Ahalland and Thomas Gregory (Eds.), Emotions, Politics and War, London: Routledge, 2015.

https://www.routledge.com/Emotions-Politics-and-War/Ahall-Gregory/p/book/9781138789050