Platon et la raison d’État

This article reviews several recent books on the Islamic State in order to understand its goals, motivations, strategy, and vulnerabilities. It argues that the Islamic State's ideology is powerful but also highly instrumental, offering the group legitimacy and recruiting appeal. Raison d'etat often dominates its decisionmaking. The Islamic State's strength is largely a consequence of the policies and weaknesses of its state adversaries. In addition, the group has many weaknesses of its own, notably its brutality, reliance on foreign fighters, and investment in a state as well as its tendency to seek out new enemies. The threat the Islamic State poses is most severe at the local and regional levels. The danger of terrorism to the West is real but mitigated by the Islamic State's continued prioritization of the Muslim world and the heightened focus of Western security forces on the terrorist threat. A high-quality military force could easily defeat Islamic State fighters, but there is no desire to deploy large numbers of Western ground troops, and local forces have repeatedly shown many weaknesses. In the end, containing the Islamic State and making modest rollback efforts may be the best local outcomes.

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The right to the future and chrono-logics otherwise: Resisting governmentality’s temporal conduct

Oñati Socio-legal Series ◽

10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1051 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (6) ◽

pp. 1289-1316

Author(s):

Heidi Rhodes ◽

Keyword(s):

Social Movement ◽

Future Generations ◽

La Paz ◽

Peace Dividend ◽

The Future ◽

Raison D’État ◽

The Government ◽

Black Pacific ◽

The Right

This paper attends to differing praxes of futurity circulating in Colombia, both in dominant and subaltern forms. It first considers temporality as an apparatus of governmentality, raison d’état, and settler colonial logics of violence deployed in the service of late liberalism, capitalist endeavor, and the so-called “peace dividend.” In contrast, it elaborates two distinct rights claims that counter official state claims on the future: the principle of the right to a distinct vision of the future in Colombia’s black Pacific social movement; and the legal claim of the right of future generations in a historic 2018 lawsuit brought against the government by several youth from diverse regions across the country. These claims pose what I name as a “chrono-logics” otherwise – temporal alterities that refuse the logics of settler colonial temporality and insist on an ecology of relations that pursue the survival and flourishing of diverse lifeworlds and futures. Este artículo se ocupa de diferentes praxis de futuridad que circulan en Colombia, tanto en formas dominantes como subalternas. En primer lugar, toma en consideración la temporalidad como un aparato de la gubernamentalidad, la razón de Estado, y las lógicas de violencia del colonialismo que se despliegan al servicio del liberalismo tardío, el empeño capitalista y el así denominado “dividendo de la paz”. Elaboramos dos reivindicaciones de derechos que contradicen las proclamas estatales oficiales sobre el futuro: el principio del derecho a una visión distinta del futuro en el movimiento social negro pacífico de Colombia; y la pretensión jurídica del derecho de las generaciones venideras en una demanda judicial histórica de 2018 que interpusieron jóvenes de diversas regiones del país contra el gobierno. Estas reivindicaciones plantean lo que denomino una “crono-logía” de otra manera – alteridades temporales que rechazan la lógica de la temporalidad colonialista y que insisten en una ecología de relaciones que persiguen la supervivencia y el florecimiento de diversos mundos y futuros.

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De raison d'état-politicus Johan de Witt

BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review ◽

10.18352/bmgn-lchr.1889 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 90 (3) ◽

pp. 379

Author(s):

J.C. Boogman

Keyword(s):

Raison D’État

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Political Technique, the Conflict of Umori, and Foucault’s Reading of Machiavelli in Sécurité, Territoire, Population

Foucault Studies ◽

10.22439/fs.v0i19.4829 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 172-190 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sean Erwin

Keyword(s):

Political Thought ◽

The Political ◽

Lecture Series ◽

Common Thread ◽

History Of ◽

Raison D’État ◽

The Difference

This article examines Foucault’s interpretation of Machiavelli in his 1978 lecture series, Sécurité, territoire, population. I argue that Foucault’s interpretation in these lectures deliberately misrepresents Machiavelli. This misrepresentation allows him to develop later traditions in political thought in a way that precludes any importance Machiavelli might have had for the concerns of these later authors. Further, thorough analysis of Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli uncovers a common thread between the two authors. For Machiavelli, the political is a space articulated by an immediacy of princes to peoples and generated from the fold formed by the difference between the qualities of the political humors. For Machiavelli, this difference of the humors—unstable and porous as it is—between those who desire to dominate and those who desire not to be dominated is immanent to the political. Read from this perspective Foucault’s critique of the tradition in anti-Machiavellian literature develops a reading of Machiavelli that, even if it misrepresents him, breaks Machiavelli free from the place his thought generally occupies in the history of raison d’État. The paper then closes developing the notion that Foucault’s interpretation of Machiavelli points in the direction of a clear theme shared by the two — the theme of historically generated political technique(s).

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