Theories des relations internationales

Un monde unidimensionnel

Dario Battistella (Sciences Po Bordeaux – Ehess)

Où en est l’ordre politique international vingt ans après la fin de la guerre froide? Dans son dernier ouvrage, Dario Battistella propose la thèse d’ « Un monde undimensionnel », inspirée par un réalisme critique appliquant au monde contemporain les écrits de l’entre-deux-guerres d’Edward Carr et de Carl Schmitt mettant l’accent sur la domination en termes de puissance pour le premier et en termes de normes pour le second. L’essai part des pronostics établis il y a une vingtaine d’année pour mieux analyser le monde de l’après-guerre froide comme une unipolarité enveloppée d’hégémonie : la distribution unipolaire de la puissance sur le plan matériel du système interétatique est intériorisée comme réalité par les grandes puissances et débouche sur le triomphe du libéralisme international au niveau de la praxis prévalant au sein de la société internationale. Concrètement, au sein du système interétatique prévaut le bandwagoning plus que le balancing, alors que la société internationale pratique la surveillance des Etats faillis et la punition des Etats voyous.

Discutant : Bertrand Badie (Sciences Po)

Mardi 5 Avril – 17-00 – 19.00
Ceri, Salle Jean Monnet

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