War and peace

For a long time, the study of armed conflicts mainly concentrated on military operations and how conflicts were resolved through diplomatic and political channels within national frameworks. Several new approaches are renewing this field of research with the opening up of archive collections, the use of hitherto less-used sources (private archives, eyewitness accounts, audiovisual sources, etc.) and multidisciplinary research initiatives. This research takes a number of different directions - interest in the supra-national scale, the geopolitical dimension and the interplay of scales; focusing on different categories of civilian populations; in-depth analyses of border and frontier phenomena and the displacement of populations that involves; research into the many forms of conflict (social movements, armed struggles, coups d'etat, guerrilla warfare, civil wars, asymmetric wars, terrorism), combat experiences, imposed or endured forms of violence; studying colonial, imperial and colonial dimensions; work on post-conflict situations and demobilisation, material traces and memories trauma, representations and controversies; the study of peace (the relations between war and peace, reconciliation issues, justice).

These approaches combine anthropological, historical, legal, political, social and territorial aspects and are carried out at the CNRS's generalist laboratories, thematic laboratories and laboratories that concentrate more on area studies.

Research centers and networks