International, Politics, Philosophy (IPP)

La responsabilité des experts : la convention internationale de 1949 sur la répression de la traite des êtres humains et l’exploitation de la prostitution

Jean-Michel Chaumont (UCL)

A propos de son ouvrage : Le mythe de la traite des blanches, La Découverte, 2009

Le Rapport du Comité spécial d’Experts sur la question de la traite des femmes et des enfants publié en deux parties (1927) par la Société des Nations offre l’exemple d’une mystification historique pleinement réussie. Aujourd’hui comme hier, il est donné comme un rapport scientifique sans équivalent (parce que rédigé au terme d’une enquête menée sur le terrain, grâce à des enquêteurs infiltrés notamment, dans 28 pays d’Europe et d’Amérique pendant deux ans) et dont les conséquences objectives furent majeures : il est censé d’une part avoir établi définitivement l’existence même de la traite des femmes, d’autre part le rôle causal majeur de la réglementation de la prostitution dans ce phénomène criminel et esclavagiste. A ce double titre, il fut une condition nécessaire de la Convention Onusienne de 1949 sur la répression de la traite des êtres humains et de l’exploitation de la prostitution. L’examen des archives, tant des 7 sessions du Comité d’Experts que de l’enquête proprement dite, révèle que les experts ont manipulé leurs données afin, surtout, de réaliser leurs objectifs idéologiques de lutte contre la prostitution.
A partir de ce constat, de nombreuses questions se posent relatives à l’expertise, à l’histoire de la protection internationale des droits humains et à la détermination des « formes modernes d’esclavage ».

Discutant : Emmanuel Decaux (Paris II)

CERI : 11.00 – 13.00 (salle du conseil)

Pierre Hazan (Sciences Po)

De l’ex-Yougoslavie au Soudan, du Proche-Orient au Cambodge, la question de l’intervention de la justice internationale se pose désormais à chaque conflit, suscitant immanquablement de virulentes controverses. Deux thèses s’affrontent: les uns ne voient dans cette justice qu’une arme utilisée ou délaissée par les gouvernements selon leurs intérêts du moment; d’autres considèrent au contraire la lutte contre l’impunité comme le socle d’un Etat de droit et d’une société démocratique.
La justice est-elle un obstacle ou une condition à la paix? Est-elle indispensable pour reconstruire des sociétés et rétablir une paix durable? A travers des cas concrets (ex-Yougoslavie, Libéria, Soudan, Liban…), Pierre Hazan analyse les effets de cette nouvelle diplomatie judiciaire.

Président de séance : Pierre Hassner (CERI Sciences Po)
Discutant: Guillaume Devin (Sciences Po)
CERI 17.00 – 19.00

The Nuclear Alternative and its Effects.
What It Takes to Read Nuclear History as an Alternative between Proliferation and Extended Deterrence

Benoît Pelopidas (James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies)

Within IR theory, the literature on deterrence, the one dealing with proliferation and finally the one dealing with disarmament are intuitively connected but this link is rarely stated clearly or explicitly. I posit here that “extended nuclear deterrence” is an interesting starting point to examine this nexus. Extended nuclear deterrence plays an important role in the narrative of the Cold War as nuclear peace. This paper will argue it is also a cornerstone of the narrative of nuclear history as proliferation history through what I label the “nuclear alternative” and will assess this alternative. The nuclear alternative can be stated as follows: either a protector provides a nuclear security guarantee to its ally/ies or it/they will get his/their own nuclear weapons. First, the paper will provide an assessment of extended deterrence as a non-proliferation tool based on comparative case studies, showing that it has neither been a necessary nor a sufficient condition for nonproliferation, which invalidates the notion of nuclear alternative. Second, using sociology of knowledge, it will analyze the “good reasons” (Boudon) to believe in such an alternative and debunks their implicit and faulty assumptions. The credibility problem emphasized in the literature on deterrence will therefore not appear as the only reason why the alternative is not valid. Third, the paper will expose the contemporary effects of such a view of history on the possibility of downsizing the US nuclear arsenal and on what is considered as proliferation.

CERI 5 – 7pm

Discussant: Richard Beardsworth

Jack Snyder (Columbia University)

Since September 11, 2001, religion has become a central topic in discussions about international politics. And yet the standard works of US international relations theory, which continue to shape much academic research, hardly mention religion. A handful of new works by young US international relations scholars have begun to fill this gap. The best of this new work is represented in Religion and International Relations Theory, edited by Jack Snyder, forthcoming from Columbia University Press in March 2011. Snyder’s overview of the project will focus on four approaches to integrating religion into theoretically-grounded international relations scholarship: (1) working within the traditional US paradigms of realism, liberalism, and social constructivism, (2) supplanting existing paradigms with a religion-centered theory, such as the “clash of civilizations” thesis, (3) analyzing secularisms as worldviews comparable to religions, and (4) treating religion as a variable in testable hypotheses about the causes of conflict international relations.

Discussant: Denis Lacorne (CERI)
CERI – Salle de conférences 5pm – 7pm

Charlotte Epstein (Sidney University)

From Hans Morgenthau to Kenneth Waltz, via Carl Schmitt, the writings of Thomas Hobbes have played a key role in shaping Realist understandings of the international system. Less appraised are the uncanny similarities that exist between his political ontology and that of Jacques Lacan. In this paper I return to this fount of Realism to I show how these two worlds – that of the early modern thinker of the post-modern psychoanalyst – reveal ontologies of dependence and relationality. Specifically, I show that the figure of the sovereign, the linchpin of Hobbes’ political order, represents none other than Lacan’s Other. The implications are significant, as, in the light of these resemblances, the conclusions realists have drawn with regards to the possibilities of states’ acting in that system appear a misreading of Hobbes. Underpinning Hobbes’s thought is in fact a sense of the fundamental dependence between the self and the Other that rule out the type of survivalist behavior that they describe and prescribe.

Discussant: Ariel Colonomos (CNRS-CERI)
CERI, Salle du Conseil – 4ème étage – 5pm-7pm

Erez Manela (Harvard University)

Scholars of international relations and law have been writing about international society for a while now, but historians, particularly in the United States, have been slow to adopt this term or wrestle with its implications. Though the field of international history has been experiencing a revival in the United States, with new work taking the field in exciting new directions, innovation has been coupled with disagreement and confusion about the changing shape of the field and its spatial, temporal, thematic, and methodological scope. This paper summarizes the debate about the state and direction of the field over the last several decades, outlines the state of the field today, and then attempts to show how reconceiving the field as the history of international society could help bring the numerous threads of recent developments into a coherent and common framework.

Discussants:
Karoline Postel-Vinay (CERI Sciences Po), Paul-André Rosental (Sciences Po-Centre d’Histoire)

Co-organized with Sciences Po Centre d’Histoire

CERI, salle du conseil 10.30 am – 12.30 pm

Martti Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki)
“International Law and Politics – What is Critical Method in Law?“

Discussants: Horatia Muir Watt (Sciences Po – Ecole de droit), Jerome Sgard (CERI)

The talk is co-sponsored by Sciences Po’s school of law (Ecole de droit)

Martti Kosekenniemi on « What’s the future of academia? »

Kate Nash (University of London)

Universalism in Practice: between the Law and Human Rights

Human rights are formally universal, applying equally to all human beings on the planet. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is also an attempt to make human rights universal in content, stipulating that they must apply to “Everyone…without distinction of any kind” (Article 2). Increasingly too, the principle of universal rights is becoming legal as well as moral, as international human rights law becomes more detailed and dense, especially through judgements made in courts, national and international. At the same time, however, the world continues to be organised into states that are territorially bounded and historically associated with struggles for democracy linked to sovereignty and nationalism. As they are legalised, human rights are increasingly positioned as ‘intermestic rights’, ‘in between’ national and international law. In practice (in part as a function of the proliferation of sites at which it is decided) law is uncertain and unpredictable with regard to enforcing human rights. Realising human rights ideals in practice will always be controversial; realising such ideals will never become simply a matter of ensuring the rule of law.

CERI
10.30 am – 12.30 pm
Salle de conférences

Milja Kurki (Aberystwyth University)

‘The normative and political dimensions of causal analysis’

Often the idea of causal analysis is separated from the analysis of normative issues and questions of moral and political responsibility, in IR and also in many circles in philosophy of social sciences. This tendency is generated by an unthinking acceptance and reproduction of a positivist fact-value distinction. When causal analysis is framed in non-positivist terms we can see not only that there is nothing a-normative or a-political about the analysis of causation, but also that complex issues arise concerning the exact relationship between the frameworks of causal analysis we use and our normative and political commitments. I will argue here that engaging in causal analysis is a deeply moral, normatively-loaded, and political matter, and moreover, that important issues are at stake in the kind of meta-theoretical frameworks we apply to causal analysis. Far from dismissing causal analysis as de-politicising, as has been the tendency in the interpretivist end of IR, we should recognise that it is around debates about causality, and frameworks of causal analysis, that much of the interesting moral and political debate in international relations takes place.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/interpol/en/research/MK%20project/Index.htm
CERI, 5-7 pm (salle de conférences rez-de-chaussée)

Christopher Bickerton (Oxford University)

Politics without Sovereignty :A Critique of Contemporary International Relations

CERI, salle de conférences 10.00 am – 12.00 pm