La politique par les armes

This book is the second in the framework of an interdisciplinary project (‘CONFLIPOL’) which aims at demonstrating how the ‘politicisation’ of internal or international conflicts leads to changes in the political field of interaction. The approach is broad and vast. The initial volume, published in 2010 and edited by Laurent Bourquin and Philippe Hamon, demonstrated how internal conflicts created ‘the political’, aloof from other societal spheres, and were interwoven with processes of politicisation from the Middle Ages onwards. The emphasis is on bottom-up actors’ conceptions, practices and political language, rather than on top-down construction of the state. Alain Hugon and Yann Lagadec, the present volume’s editors in addition to Bourquin and Hamon, trace a roadmap for the analysis of international conflicts (pp. 9–23) around four spheres: conflicts and state construction (pp. 25–91), mobilisations and resistances (pp. 93–167), occupation and politicisation (pp. 169–219) and, finally, new public spaces (pp. 221–313). In spite of this clear partition, numerous alternative themes emerge throughout the book. The selection of contributions is very extensive, conformable with the editors’ original intent. After reading through all fifteen articles, one could wonder whether the joint analysis of domestic and international politics constitutes anything new at all. Common theoretical explanations are rare, and synthesis is near impossible on account of the extreme variety of cases across space and time. The studies collected in the volume aim to transcend the formal-institutional stage, and show how relationships between the public at large and government were transformed by international conflict. Constructions of authority and ‘the political’ show various lively processes and debates, wherein similar factors produce different outcomes. As pointed out in Laurent Bourquin’s conclusions (pp. 315–21), the classical emergence of the state from a fiscal-military complex and the autonomisation of the political discursive arena are linked. Yet, this is not a new insight. The interest of this book lies in the detailed case-studies

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