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International audience; This volume suggests a model of collective memory that distinguishes between two conceptual logics of memory fragmentation: vertical fragmentation and horizontal fragmentation. It offers a series of case studies of conflict and post-conflict collective memory, shedding light on the ways various actors participate in the production, dissemination, and contestation of memory discourses.With attention to the characteristics of both vertical and horizontal memory fragmentation, the book addresses the plurality of diverging, and often conflicting, memory discourses that are produced within the public sphere of a given community. It analyzes the juxtaposition, tensions, and interactions between narratives produced beyond or below the central state, often transcending national boundaries.The book is structured according to the type of actors involved in a memory fragmentation process. It explores how states have been trying to produce and impose memory discourses on civil societies, sometimes even against the experiences of their own citizens, and how such efforts as well as backlash from actors below and beyond the state have led to horizontal and vertical memory fragmentation. Furthermore, it considers the attempts by states’ representatives to reassert control of national memory discourses and the subsequent resistances they face. As such, this volume will appeal to sociology and political science scholars interested in memory studies in post-conflict societies.

International audience; This chapter will examine the impact of the ISAF mission on German domestic memory discourses, especially after the adoption of a counterinsurgency approach under General McChrystal after 2009. While this strategy was developed and applied by the US Army using perceived lessons of British and French colonial counterinsurgency experiences, the doctrine was relatively quickly adopted by German commanders on the ground, eager to overcome the growing frustration with escalating Taliban attacks in their zone of responsibility. However, a (literal but also doctrinal) “translation” of the concept was refused by the German military leadership, fearing that it would be associated with the German counter-partisan action during World War II and thus contradict the official memory discourse rejecting any use of the Wehrmacht as a ‘role model' for the contemporary Bundeswehr. This has enabled the emergence of a process of memory fragmentation in which the official discourses on the memory of World War II are publicly contested in at least three areas, namely the symbolic recognition of combat experience, the commemoration of military deaths, and the support of German society for its armed forces.

International audience; The concluding chapter summarizes the overall findings of this volume. Beyond the analytical value of increased sensitivity to memory discourses of non-state actors and how they may challenge or alter existing national frameworks of memory, we have identified three main findings. First, while governments should no longer be seen as the only relevant actors in the mobilization of collective memories, non-state actors do not always “challenge” this position but may also “complement” it, or circumvent it for the purposes of particular audiences. Second, the concept of memory fragmentation highlights the necessity to unpack the black box of the state as it allows the detection of the empirical occurrence of competing, sometimes even conflicting memory discourses produced by different agencies of the state, including military organizations. Third, even if the re-emergence of authoritarian regimes is often accompanied by efforts to reinforce state control of memory politics, the changing media systems and the increased involvement of international and transnational actors may continue to providing the basis for memory fragmentation. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the normative value of “memory fragmentation” and its relevance for understanding memory dynamics as part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

International audience; This chapter discusses, first, the relevance of studying the political uses of the past in the context of situations of armed conflict and post-conflict. While “memory politics” occur in everyday political life, these settings are both prone to thorough changes in the collective representations of the past of social groups, but also because the political mobilization of such representations appears to be a major source of legitimation of the use of violence as well as reconciliation efforts. It then introduces the concept of “memory fragmentation”: many existing studies on political uses of the past assume a rather hierarchical relationship between marginal and hegemonic representations of the past, the latter being typically the result of political and institutional uses of the past. By contrast, the concept of memory fragmentation points out that collective memory dynamics have become more diverse and fluid, challenging governments' capability of defining “national” hegemonic frameworks of memory. Furthermore, the chapter presents two analytical dimensions through which memory fragmentation can be usefully analyzed, namely “horizontal” and “vertical” fragmentation. Last but not least, the structure of the volume and the contributions of each of the subsequent chapters are briefly presented.

National audience; How do women engaged in ideological worlds based on hyper-masculine violence (Nazism and the Islamic State) justify their active participation in these movements?This chapter aims to better understand the discursive interaction between these murderous patriarchal ideologies and the commitment of women to assert their autonomy of action without questioning the foundations of these ideologies. It will therefore explore the strategies of discursive circumvention that are structured, on the one hand, by the individual and collective ambitions and identities of these women, and on the other hand by the windows of opportunity provoked by practical needs and internal contradictions within violent contexts based on hyper-masculine values. With this in mind, the contribution focuses on three aspects: the violent engagement of women under Nazism and Daesh, the official positioning of the institutions of these two worlds regarding the role of women and, finally, the evolution of the concrete practices of women within the said regimes.; Comment les femmes engagées dans les univers idéologiques fondés sur la violence hyper-masculine (nazisme et Etat islamique) justifient-elles leur participation active au sein de ces mouvements ?Ce chapitre vise à mieux comprendre l’interaction discursive entre ces idéologies meurtrières patriarcales et l’engagement de femmes voulant affirmer leur autonomie d’action sans pour autant mettre en question les fondements de ces idéologies. Il s’agira donc d’explorer les stratégies de contournement discursif qui sont structurées, d’une part, par les ambitions et identités individuelles et collectives de ces femmes, et d’autre part par les fenêtres d’opportunités provoquées par les besoins pratiques et les contradictions internes au sein des contextes valorisant l’hyper-masculinité. Dans cette optique, la contribution se focalise sur trois aspects : l’engagement violent de femmes sous le nazisme et sous Daech, le positionnement officiel des institutions de ces deux univers concernant le rôle des femmes et, enfin, l’évolution des pratiques concrètes des femmes à l’intérieur des dits régimes.

How are representations of violence influenced by the ‘agency of data’, in other words the social practices of data collection, analysis, dissemination, and practitioner reception? The DATAWAR project builds on the hypothesis that scientific output in quantitative conflict studies is driven less by theoretical innovation than by the ‘politics of data’: the availability, reputation, and mathematical malleability of numerical observations of conflict. We anticipate that the perceptions of conflict developed by practitioners who employ quantitative methods and sources are prone to distortion as a result of the nature of the available data, the type of mathematical models used to analyse and potentially ‘predict’ conflict, and reliance on a selective subset of theoretical approaches. DATAWAR will carry out the first systematic investigation of scientific practices in the field of quantitative conflict studies as well as the impact of these practices on practitioners’ vision of war, covering the full lifecycle of conflict data, from collection and analysis to their use and dissemination by military and diplomatic institutions, humanitarian organisations, and the media. The unique, cross-actor and cross-national perspective of DATAWAR aims to improve our understanding of the interactions between scholarly and applied uses of conflict data, beyond the established divide separating ‘data pessimists’ and ‘data optimists’.

This book analyses and compares instances of the diffusion of political norms and ideas in the history of Franco-German relations. While this relationship is often described as a history evolving from enmity over reconciliation to friendship, the book uses the concept of diffusion as a complementary analytical perspective to emphasize how political norms and ideas originating in one society have influenced the other, especially in periods of intergovernmental conflict. Established in International Relations to explain transnational normative change in contemporary contexts, the framework of diffusion is heuristically useful to explore how various types of actors have contributed, using analytically different mechanisms, to normative change across the Rhine. The book presents eight case studies featuring various contents and mechanisms of ideational diffusion taken from three contexts of Franco-German history, including the French Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, and Franco-German rapprochement after 1945. Arguing that phenomena that are often seen as genuinely ‘national’ evolutions, such as German nationalism or the French system of primary education, cannot be understood without taking into account the reception and emulation of norms from across the Rhine, the book should help students and scholars to overcome the limits of methodological nationalism when studying bilateral relationships, in the Franco-German context and elsewhere.

Ce chapitre présente la manière dans le statut de la Bataille de Courtrai (1302) s'est transformée d'une bataille médiévale en mythe fondateur du projet nationaliste flamand au 19e siècle.

This chapter conceptualizes friendship and operationalizes it through Mark Bevir’s and R. A. W. Rhodes’ Interpretive Political Science (IPS). This method is illustrated by assessing the political friendship between Winston S. Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Because friendship is such an unfathomable and highly individual phenomenon, this chapter takes a distinctly interpretivist approach. Therefore, this chapter is of particular interest to scholars who want to make sense of the role of personal relations in IR, but find traditional IR theories and methods unsatisfactory. Studying friendship between state leaders differentiates itself from the current state of the art in the studies of emotions and friendship in IR, because it examines friendship at the intermediary level, rather than at the individual or the collective level.

This chapter retraces the historical background of the Battle of Courtrai and above all the emergence of competing myths within the French, Belgian, and Flemish historiography. Featuring an unprecedented defeat for the royal army of the French King Philip IV, most controversies have focused on the interpretation of the question why the French knights became trapped in trenches on the battlefield of Courtrai, allowing the Flemish militas to slaughter them. While eventually the Flamingard narrative of the battle as a foundational myth for the Flemish nation has been the most influential, the battle has lost some of its relevance in contemporary Belgian politics.

How can the emergence of transnational memories be operationalized and measured using quantitative corpus analysis? This chapter suggests three core insights: on a theoretical level, it shows how collective memory shapes the uses of historical lessons in public discourses on contemporary wars and interventions, and why the analysis of these discourses can enable us to detect possible effects of memory transnationalisation. On a methodological level, it details a corpus-analytical framework that uses quantitative methods to perform a longitudinal comparison of discursive uses of historical references across different national contexts and thus to detect potential instances of transnational memory discourses. Finally, on an empirical level, it presents initial results of such analysis based on a corpus of newspaper articles on contemporary conflict from France, Germany, and the U.S. The results highlight that historical references are indeed mobilised in times of crisis and that one can identify a surprisingly large set of shared references used across all three national contexts.

How do political leaders manufacture collective emotions to justify the use of force? This article introduces the “hero-protector narrative” as a conceptual model to analyze how political leaders try to manufacture specific collective emotions to encourage their audience to perceive violence as the only morally acceptable course of action. In our model, we formalize a set of distinctive narrative structures (roles and sequences), which are combined to activate compassion and moral anger as well as identification with “heroic” behavior. Furthermore, we argue that the resonance of this narrative draws on values of hyper-masculinity in patriarchal societies. As such this narrative is to be found across different types of actors (state/nonstate) and culturally diverse settings. To test our model, we use a computer-assisted QDA approach. We compare systematically discourses produced by political actors legitimizing the use of force versus actors opposing the use of force. We find that discourses supporting the use of force, such as those produced by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in the context of the Iraq war, share the structural characteristics of the hero-protector narrative. In this regard, they differ remarkably from violence-opposing discourses, regardless of their cultural background.

Eric Sangar analysiert in seinem Beitrag die neue Kriegssemantik, mit der das politische Establishment auf die Pariser Terroranschläge vom 13. November 2015 reagierte. Aus Sicht des Autors zielt diese Semantik nicht darauf, die Bürgerinnen und Bürger zum aktiven Einsatz gegen den Islamischen Staat (IS) zu bewegen. Vielmehr dient sie dazu, die Handlungsfähigkeit der politischen Führung unter Beweis zu stellen.; L'article analyse les réactions discursives des élites politiques et intellectuelles en France suite aux attentats du 13 novembre 2015. Alors qu'on peut observer une prolifération de la rhétorique guerrière, les mesures du gouvernement ne visent pas une mobilisation active de la population, ni une augmentation radicale dans le financement de l'armée. Cependant, les restrictions des libertés individuelles, l'augmentation des pouvoirs administratifs et policiers, et la mise en scène des attaques aériennes contre Daesh peuvent être interprétée comme actions symboliques visant à rétablir la croyance en la capacité d'action du Chef d'Etat. Ainsi, la pérennisation de l'état d'exception pourrait devenir un instrument électoral à l'approche des élections présidentielles en 2017.

Cette note de recherche résumera d’abord les différentes approches existantes d’analyser le recours discursif à l’histoire en se focalisant sur la différentiation entre « poids» et « ressource d’action » dans les discours et processus de décision internationaux. Ensuite, le texte proposera un cadre analytique qui permettra de mieux saisir l’équilibre empirique entre l’usage conscient et influence inconsciente de l’histoire. Enfin, l’utilité stratégique de cette proposition sera illustrée à l’exemple d’une analyse potentielle des références à la chute de l’Union soviétique, employées par le Président Poutine.

This paper aims at shedding some light on the impact of the ISAF mission on the German armed forces. First, a short overview of the essential operational and strategic dynamics of the Bundeswehr’s ISAF deployment between 2003 and 2013 will be presented. Then, some of the resulting changes in operational design and military discourses are presented, including the perceived need for a “return” to classical war-fighting capabilities. Related to this, the third section presents some fundamental influences on the future of the Bundeswehr, including the impact on force evolution and organisational identity. In the conclusion, a few resulting consequences for the future shape of German security policy are discussed.

This text analyses the impact of the Afghanistan experience of military thought within the German Bundeswehr. It argues that this war has led to a renaissance of a technocratic vision of military strategy, understood narrowly as the efficient application of kinetic force.

African and external approaches to security governance and reform have come to stress the importance of local, national and regional ownership, embodied at the national level by the concept of 'local ownership' of Security Sector Reform and in the recourse to regional and sub-regional security mechanisms as 'African solutions to African problems'. While a normative consensus on this idea seems to have emerged in the policy sphere, we ask what traits can be discerned in the national and regional discourses and practices of security governance that might be plausibly considered specifically African. This article thus explores the discourses and practices of attempts to link aspects of security governance to specific times and places at the national and regional levels in Africa. Tracing the discursive recourse to identity across four eras of modern African history, we argue that specifically African traits of security governance at national and regional levels can be discerned in institutional legacies of repression and poor security governance, as well as the discursive commitment to norms of human security at the regional level, as embodied in the African Peace and Security Architecture.

This chapter looks at the impact of the Afghanistan experience on the German Bundeswehr's military traditions and to its relationship with the use of force.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the British military pointed to its colonial experience as a useful resource to perform its various missions in complex and difficult environments. For the Bundeswehr, lacking any institutional experience with counterinsurgency warfare, the participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) became the first combat mission abroad at all. The book explores in which way the British and German Armies have relied on historical experience in the making and adaptation of operational strategy. Eric Sangar defines »historical experience« as a body of useful knowledge that is constructed through the institutional analyses of past military campaigns with the aim of producing normative lessons for military operations in the present. In other words, Eric Sangar deals with the fundamental question if and how Armed Forces can learn from history, or if experience from the past is rather an obstacle to adaptation in the present. Dr. Eric Sangar is a research fellow at the Department of International Relations of the University of Stuttgart. He is a member of the interdisciplinary project »Corpus-based Analysis of News Coverage on Wars and Interventions« and teaches courses on conflict analysis, strategic studies, and IR theory. This study is based on his Ph.D. project, which he realized at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) between 2008 and 2012. -- 11 Introduction -- 33 Colonial experience in British military thinking -- 53 Historical lessons for Afghanistan in the British Army of 2010 -- 81 The initial neglect of historical experience in Afghanistan -- 113 The transformative impact of British involvement in Iraq 2003-2009 -- 137 Innovations in the British Army’s use of historical experience -- 169 Uses of historical experience by the Bundeswehr, from the Cold War to the 1990s -- 193 The Bundeswehr in Afghanistan -- 219 The impact of the neglected analysis of historical lessons at the operational level -- 237 Conclusion: Can historical experience provide guidance for the present? Published version of EUI PhD thesis, 2012

Defence date: 6 June 2012 Examining Board: Professor Pascal Vennesson (European University Institute); Professor Michael Daxner (Freie Universität Berlin); Professor Anthony King (University of Exeter); Professor Olivier Roy (European University Institute). PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses This PhD explores some of the ways in which the British and German Armies have used historical experience in their process of operational adaptation in Afghanistan. Historical experience is conceptualized as a body of useful knowledge that is constructed through the institutional analyses of past military campaigns with the aim of producing normative lessons for military operations in the present. Empirically, the research shows that for both armies, the use of historical references played a limited role during the preparation of initial deployment for the ISAF mission. However, having become aware of a lack of operational coherence on the ground in Helmand, the British Army “rediscovered” the importance of applying fundamental counterinsurgency principles that were identified with a comparative analysis of colonial counterinsurgency campaigns. This process has contributed to improve officers’ consensual understanding of doctrine on the part of the officers as well as to make the British military approach in Afghanistan more coherently focused on protecting the population rather than pursuing a predominantly kinetic confrontation with the insurgency movement. With regards to the Bundeswehr, a thorough discussion of the historical experiences that have potential utility for military operations in Afghanistan has been largely absent. Initially, the German military approach was dominated primarily by an unconscious reliance on the operational design used in the Balkans. The operational reaction to the escalating violence in the Kunduz area has primarily consisted in a hesitant introduction of kinetic means, while existing deficits in non-kinetic military activities have largely been ignored. Similarly, operational debate among Bundeswehr officers has been focused on the necessity to perform in combat implications of counterinsurgency operations for non-kinetic military tasks, such as the support of the local population, have received only marginal attention. I argue that this tendency could have been limited has an internal debate taken place on the historical lessons that incorporate the concepts used in contemporary Anglo-Saxon counterinsurgency. In sum, three primary findings of this research may be recapitulated as follows: First, the mere existence of a rich institutional past of colonial operations does not necessarily equate with superior knowledge in contemporary operations. Historical experience must be actively transmitted, analysed and institutionalised in order to have such an effect. Second, the ways in which military organizations use experience from the past are shaped by institutional traditions that have evolved over time. Third, despite the danger of dysfunctional historical analogies, the institutional discussion of historical lessons can prove to be useful for present operations – especially if consistency is promoted through consensually applied, ‘enduring’ principles of doctrine.