Paix | EPFL Graph Search

La paix est un concept qui désigne un état de calme ou de tranquillité ainsi que l'absence de perturbation, de trouble, de guerre et de conflit. Elle correspond aussi à un idéal social et politique. Définitions thumb|La colombe tenant une branche d'olivier est un symbole largement utilisé pour la paix Sociologiquement, la paix désigne l'entente amicale de tous les individus qui composent une ou des sociétés civiles et/ou militaires. Elle n'implique pas l'absence de conflits, mais une résolution systématiquement calme et mesurée de toute difficulté conséquente à la vie en communauté, principalement par l'écoute, la compréhension, le dialogue, la négociation ou par des échanges de biens tel le commerce ou le troc. La paix implique également le goût pour le calme, ainsi que la capacité à vivre sereinement avec l'autre : individu ou société. En cela, la paix est l'intérêt commun pour le développement qui prend ses racines dans la prospérité. Si cet intérêt n'est pas partagé

Sequestration, Scholarship, Sentinel: The Post-Politics of Peace (and War)

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos

n Lebanon, diverse sociopolitical projects have sought to mend the wounds, repair the cracks, and overhaul the loss of the devastating civil war (1975–90). Experts and technopolitics have featured centrally in almost all of them. In my anthropological research on expertise on peace and crisis in Lebanon, I explore how, in the decades after the war, an abstract ideal of peace gave way to a distinct space occupied by diverse groups of experts. I analyze how a previously political aim was transformed into a professionalized field around which specialized knowledge domains were developed and technopolitical practices deployed. In this essay I briefly explore this new architecture of expert power based on the technopolitics of peace (and war) in the contemporary Middle East.

Cambridge University Press2014

The Birth of the Workshop: Techno-Morals, Peace Experts and the Care of the Self in the Middle East

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos

In the article I examine through ethnography and contextual analysis one of the flagship techniques of peace expertise in the Middle East and elsewhere, the so-called conflict resolution workshop. For the transnational and hyper-mobile clan of peacemakers and peace experts, the workshop constitutes maybe the absolute travel device: it can be transported and deployed everywhere without the need for translation into local vernaculars; it can exemplify the moral ambition for peace in the world backed with technical arrangements of space, time and learning mostly imported from other disciplinary settings; it can address sustained needs for knowledge and hopes for personal betterment by introducing a unique style of pedagogy based on both academic credentials and moral superiority. I present ethnographic evidence that shows how assemblages of peacemaking, most of them centred around the technique of the conflict resolution workshop, had at least three, often unintended, effects in Lebanon and beyond: First, a massive trend towards what one might call the workshopping of peace, namely the idea that major issues of broad concern regarding past and future violence can be effectively addressed within secluded spaces of conflict resolution workshops. Second, the widespread acceptance and consequent proliferation of a particular version of what Michel Foucault has called ‘the care of the self’ (Foucault 1986) primarily premised on a new configuration of peacemaking that understood the individual as the primary target of expert intervention in a distinct moral and technical sense. Third, the (re-)production of a professionalized field of peace experts, whose degree of legitimacy and conditions of institutional existence crucially depended on the constant need to reiterate and reify the binary between an intrinsically ignorant and potentially uncivil society (that needs to be trained) and themselves (who need to train it).

2014

SWEDISH GRACE: A MERE INTERLUDE OR A FACET OF MODERNITY? First housing experiments in Stockholm

Chiara Monterumisi

Sweden forms a strange case in the modern development, which this paper aims to examine in detail through the first housing district experiments in Stockholm. Its position on the fringe of the radical ferment of Europe implied a belated advent of modernism in what some prominent critics see through a monolithic viewpoint, such as a homogenizing viewpoint of modernism. When European avant-garde gradually began to decline, functionalism (playfully nicknamed Funkis by the Swedish press) was born in Sweden, an event usually assigned to the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition. The importation of functional principles was overemphasized as a breakthrough, accompanied by engagement in building better housing and envisaging new spatial ideas. But mass housing was not uniquely a product of functionalism. Even before 1930, municipalities and housing cooperatives made great strides in shaping areas of the outskirts and improving communal spaces in courtyard housing blocks, paving the way for subsequent successful configurations. Yet what was conceived before 1930 tended to get overshadowed, such that socalled Swedish Grace with its classical resonances appeared alien to avant-gardism. Conversely to the image of rupture circulating at that time, this contribution aims to show how Scandinavian modern architecture followed rather a «fairly peaceful and trouble-free transition» (Paavilainen, 1982) Starting from the 1980s onwards, the global critical mainstream changed its tune on the multiple legacy of modernity, including neglected, almost forgotten, Swedish Grace. In actual fact, the Italian critical panorama even before, precisely in the in late 1930s and 1960s had already expressed comments in line with a such inclusion of the variety of ways of expression developed in the modern architecture. From being considered a «classical interlude» (Ahlberg, 1943) between National Romanticism and Funkis, Swedish Grace came to be viewed as a fully-fledged facet of modernity. No doubts that the exhibition “Nordisk Klassicism 1910-1930” played a crucial role in the spread of these instances; it opened at the Alvar Aalto Museum in 1982 and, then, it travelled for ten stopovers across Europe in the ensuing three years. In addition, some American scholars rediscovered that framework of Nordic architecture conducting thorough studies in this regard. Parallel to that, they saw valid and inspiring inputs for their “modern classicism” architecture in what was conceived in the Swedish Grace period. 1920s housing interventions indeed accepted the demands of a modern metropolis but also developed their critique of history through an imaginative abstraction which transformed the classical vocabulary of façades into a useful tool for aesthetic democratisation.

2019

The Birth of the Workshop: Techno-Morals, Peace Experts and the Care of the Self in the Middle East

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos

2014

SWEDISH GRACE: A MERE INTERLUDE OR A FACET OF MODERNITY? First housing experiments in Stockholm

Chiara Monterumisi

2019