The New Frontiers of Risk | Figure for the Issue
The New Frontiers of Risk
PODCAST | La globalisation des diversités – Fabrizio Sabelli
Research Office, The Graduate Institute, Geneva.
The New Frontiers of Risk
Research Office, The Graduate Institute, Geneva.
The Dossier aims to explore new trends and expressions of violence in armed conflict in the 21st century. Taking as a starting point the changing paradigm of armed conflict – from conventional wars with clear contours towards more non-linear, fragmented and protracted types of civil and international conflict — it adopts a broad approach to portray changing forms of violence across different types of armed conflicts (including terrorism, international/civil wars or urban warfare). In the context of a fragmenting international order, with increasingly blurred lines between state and non-state, combatant and civilian, domestic and international, the number of actors involved in conflicts and concurrent strategies of violence have multiplied. In face of the ubiquity of violent conflict — despite an overall decline in interstate conflict and global number of casualties — the Dossier aims to shed light on new or changing forms of violence, their contexts, actors and victims. It explores the novelty, heterogeneity, scales and vectors of violent practices in contemporary conflicts by investigating the impact of a series of factors such as new military technologies (drones, robots), new communication tools (social media), gender, migration, or the subcontracting of security to private actors.
Neoliberal globalisation has not only transformed the role of the state; it has also shaken up the internal “DNA” of education policies, from schools to universities. New technologies have paved the way for new forms of transmitting knowledge; calls to decolonise curricula are growing louder; in the South, many countries face the challenge of financing public education policies in an era of new public management, while the model and transfer of these policies have become a key problem, compounded by the exclusion of historically marginalised populations and the advance of private and religious players. Against this backdrop of criticism of the public education model, the present Dossier seeks to better apprehend what could be done to restore the purpose and meaning of education and universities.
The essays in this volume are the product of a new ‘research practicum‘ course in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. They build on the debates on ‘Urban Morphology and violence’ to reflect on the associations between cities – their political orders and disorders – and outcomes ranging from occupation and resistance to marginalisation and containment. These texts foreshadow the possibility of centring – and challenging – the urban in our understanding of contemporary conflict, violence and peace. They are a first step in opening up a research agenda for a more textured analysis of spatial, geographical and temporal dynamics within the city in relation to violence, and, therefore, the mobilisation of spatial, temporal and visual modes of analysis. The promise is to make visible the varied roles of urban morphologies – adding to the debate on cities in and as sites of conflict.
