War & Race

Aix-en-Provence, Provence, France

In all eras, human societies have been faced with armed conflict either within their territory or abroad. The age-old debate over the “natural” or “cultural” origins of war would seem to favour the first hypothesis at present, as Israeli historian Azar Gat has argued: “Contrary to the Rousseauite imagination, the evidence of historically observed hunter-gatherers and, more dimly but increasingly, that of paleo-archaeology shows that humans have been fighting among themselves throughout the history of our species and genus, during the human ‘evolutionary state of nature’” (Gat, Azar, War in Human Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2006, p.663). The way acts of collective violence are set up (aiming at unifying the community and thereby destroying the Other) has always been defined by specific cultural behaviours within a given group. One of the key focuses of this conference will be the rhetorical discourses elaborated by the promoters of a war which deliberately draw on “racial” difference, or discourses legitimising the start of hostilities which posit the Other as a scapegoat so as better to eliminate him. The aim will be to examine how the notion of “racial” difference has been – and is still – used as a prompting force as well as a sacrificial process, employed in different modes. Similarly, social-Darwinist and eugenist theories might be examined to explore how they are propounded to justify the pre-eminence of any one group in the context of martial propaganda.

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