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WASINSKI Christophe
Units
REPI Recherche et Études en Politique Internationale
REPI is a research unit, mainly dedicated to research and studies in international politics at the Université libre de Bruxelles. It is linked to the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences. REPI fosters fundamental research in the field of international relations and aims at providing a high quality framework for the research in this field (PhD dissertations, publications, conferences...). Depending on available resources, members of REPI can also provide specific expertise for national and international institutions. Furthermore, the research centre encourages the dissemination of knowledge in international relations to a larger audience and represents a convenient space for discussing the teaching of international relations within the university. REPI also organises seminars and summer schools for professionals and young scholars. Its scientific activities focus on two major areas of international politics: the study of security issues and international public policy (environment, health, international economics, development, etc.). These activities are rooted in several research traditions and schools of thought: foreign policy analysis, political sociology of international affairs, critical approaches to security, international political economy, etc., with the aim of better understanding power issues in international relations at different levels. The research agenda also includes the study of the European Union's external action and the main international institutions. Director : Christian Olsson
Projetcs
Traditionnally, in political sciences, researches on war have focussed on their explanatory causes. These researches have, for example, questioned the role of the international structure, of the type of the domestic political regime, or of the human nature as factors trigerring conflicts. Here, it is not so much question to explain but to understand what makes the use of military violence thinkable. The aim of the project is to analyze the process rendering military violence acceptable. In order to do that, special attention is devoted to the place of strategic thinking and of military doctrines that are largely contributing to establish the technical legitimacy of the operations and to justify wars.
This project is informed by the idea that the representation of the enemy plays a role in the conduct of war. If this problem is well documented regarding past wars, little is known however about the representations of the opponent in the contemporary wars, in particular during asymmetric conflicts that take place through the world for decades. This interdisciplinary research project (political science, sociology, history, economy) intends to highlight this blind spot by conducting interviews with the French, British and German servicemen who participated in foreign military interventions.
The legitimization of violence in international politics
International research project: technical legitimization of military violence through strategic thinking and military doctrines.The expressions of violence and the way they are comprehended or not - notably by international institutions - form a rich field for investigation. A link can be made with Barbara Delcourt's research related to the emergence of international norms and the analysis of structuring principles of international relations. It is a fact that the issue of violence legitimization or the attempts aiming at neutralizing its impact are closely linked to the way sovereignty is conceived in the domestic and international spheres and to the prevalence of more technocratic ideas ensuing from the success of the notion of governance, as precisely demonstrated by the way international institutions build their 'crisis management' policies.Within this frame, particular attention has been brought to the phenomenon of privatizing violence and the emergence of private military and security companies being increasingly involved in violent political crisis scenes.
This project studies the reshaping of dominant defence and security representations in Europe in the post-Cold War era. It starts with the observation that, since the end of the Cold War, security representations in Europe have been radically altered. Today, security actors tend to see themselves as institutions able of conducting multinational “peace”, “stabilization” or “crisis management” operations in distant countries. Classical theories of international relations as well as European studies approaches have failed to adequately explain this situation. In this project, we hypothesize that the security and defence representations that prevail in Europe can be explained by mobilizing a sociological approach of international politics inspired by the work of Bourdieu and his notion of "field". To do so, our analysis highlights the existence of a field composed of experts (civilian analysts, officers, diplomats or politicians) and having the ability to produce a series of credible representations (“strategic doxa”) of what European defence and security should be. We thus question the different ways in which these experts are involved in the production and reproduction of the European institutional landscape of security. Empirically, the construction of these representations is approached through the analysis of a sample of eight representative specialized journals dealing with security and defence issues. We consider these journals to be essential places involved in the definition and redefinition of defence and security.
The objective of this project is to show that the appeal to the military option within the "western" States to manage political crises is among others understandable by the generalization of representations which transform the military action into a "show".
