History of Political Violence and Radicalism: Challenges and Opportunities for an Epistemic Community
Why do we miss an established epistemic community of historians researching on political violence and radicalism?
9/11 abruptly reshaped the research environment dedicated to political violence and radicalism.
Currently, dedicated academic Research Centres typically find their institutional homes in Political Science or International Relations departments. Likewise, historically grounded works on political violence are numerically risible in prominent journals.
Similarly, the popularisation of the ‘radicalisation’ absorbed a similar and yet different concept as is radicalism. While the latter is closer to historical research agendas, the first energised sociological, anthropological, and psychological approaches. But the post-9/11 revolution might not explain all changes, after all, political violence has always been part of historians’ research agenda.
Totalitarianism, Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, Regicide, Revolutions, all pack University library's History sections.
Strong in their methodologies, historians aimed to emphasise difference among these alternative shapes of violence, creating, as a consequence, an archipelago of research communities loosely connected but well insulated.
Over twenty years on in the post-9/11 era, the SNSF-sponsored workshop History of Political Violence and Radicalism: Challenges and Opportunities for an Epistemic Community, which will take place on the 10th and 11th of June 2024, hopes to serve as an initial platform for stimulating an intellectual debate on research practices in the history of political violence and radicalism.
How far did 9/11 reshape the relevant ecology of research?
How did that relate to the long-standing hyper-fragmentation of research communities? When does radicalism produce violence and where does the first stand respect for radicalisation? How can we productively integrate ‘new’ historical epistemologies of violence such as Gender violence or Foreign Fighting? And, most importantly, how can we improve working conditions and create opportunities for young researchers and scholars?
FULL PROGRAMME
Organiser
Michele Benazzo is a PhD candidate at the International History and Politics Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute. His SNSF-funded PhD research focuses on the evolution of British Asian radicalism after the demise of the British Empire, with a particular emphasis on the interactions between local and international dynamics. He is research associate to the Pierre du Bois Foundation and affiliate to the Global Migration Center.
