Friday May 3, the Paris campus of Sciences Po was once again evacuated. For the political scientist and international relations specialist Bertrand Badie, who taught there for more than fifty years, the path of repression is not the right one. According to him, we should not neglect the desire expressed by students to identify with international causes, even distant ones, and see it as a ” commitment “rather than immediately judging them “extremists or radicals”.
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You took part in a debate on April 30 at Sciences Po, entitled “Gaza and our world”, to which the mobilized students of the Palestine committee were invited. What did you think of the exchanges?
I went there with some apprehension but it was a very pleasant surprise. The students were extremely involved, in absolute calm, without any banners or forms of demonstration intended to disrupt the presentations. It reminded me of the lecture halls of yesteryear, attentive, the questions asked by the students were never violent, but always related to real topics of debate.
In my speech, I recalled that the nature of international conflicts had profoundly changed and that the conflict which now pits a State against non-State actors takes on a connotation which defies the classic theory of war. These are conflicts of a new nature, marked with the seal of domination and humiliation suffered, such as we experienced with decolonization; they present violent oppositions between actors who are not established – as is the case with Palestinian organizations – and which drift towards forms of terrorist violence.
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I made a parallel with the Algerian war: in Philippeville [Skikda aujourd’hui]in 1955, there were massacres of a horror similar to that experienced by Sderot on October 7 [2023, lors de l’attaque du Hamas contre Israël]. Then, an equally bloody and indiscriminate repression which resulted not in eradicating the FLN, but in strengthening it.
States are having difficulty adapting to these new forms of conflict: the relay is commonly taken by social dynamics like those we are observing on university campuses at the moment. In this, the phenomenon experienced at Sciences Po is not isolated, it expresses this social appropriation of international questions which today has a certain capacity to influence the very evolution of the foreign policies of States, as we have seen. in the United States regarding Vietnam and as we still observe today in the face of Biden’s embarrassments…
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