Studies nonviolence as a way of knowing, doing and being in armed conflict
Discusses the practice of Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) in South Sudan, Indonesia, Kosovo, Albania, the US, Northern Ireland, Syria, Israel and Palestine
Draws together feminist theorising from International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Critical Geography and Critical Military Studies
Challenges the centrality of violence in academic work relating to armed conflict by de-centring and displacing violent epistemological and ontological frameworks
Addresses the key conceptual building blocks of embodiment, space and temporality
Directly engages with assumptions around the efficacy and legitimacy of violence in the protection of civilians
This book takes the emerging practice of Unarmed Civilian Protection as a case study of nonviolence to interrogate the roles of violence and nonviolence in conflict knowledge production. By focusing on nonviolent actors using UCP, it decentres violence, which is often so prominent in peace research. This approach creates space to fundamentally reimagine how the world might be when imagined and enacted through nonviolence.
Drawing together feminist theorising from critical military studies, peace and conflict studies and international relations, Nonviolent Encounters argues that decentring violence in conflict knowledge production upsets the simple binaries of protector/protected and war/peace, underpinned by the ‘one-world’ onto-epistemology of much Western conflict knowledge. Instead, space is created to reconsider nonviolence, not as the binary opposite of violence, but as a way of knowing, doing and being – as a way of producing alternative ontological worlds.
In a previous piece in this series, I discussed Georges Dumézil’s student and colleague Lucien Gerschel and their discussions of the Roman general Coriolanus. Gerschel had attended lectures by Dumézil at the École Pratique des Hautes Études shortly before the Second World War. Dumézil describes him as “one of the most constant and most original of my auditors” (Mariages indo-européens, p. 21). He was attending Dumézil’s lectures alongside Roger Caillois, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt and Élisabeth Raucq in the late 1930s, and seems to have gone into hiding during the war because he was Jewish (see Mariages indo-européens, p. 26). After the war he attended Dumézil’s lectures until the very last one in 1968 (Le Roman des jumeaux, p. 218), as well as those of Émile Benveniste. He became an interesting scholar in his own right in the 1950s. Dumézil supervised his research, supported his career and Gerschel provided research support to him, including correcting proofs of his books. (There is more about Gerschel’s work in the earlier piece.)
Gerschel’s notes on Benveniste’s post-war lectures were the raw material from which Benveniste’s Vocabulaire, the Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, was shaped. The transcripts were typed up, Benveniste edited them, and then worked with Jean Lallot and series editor Pierre Bourdieu in getting them into the final form. I have remarked before that the work done on this text was just in time, because Benveniste’s stroke in December 1969 put an end to his writing and lecturing career. But until recently I hadn’t realised how close it also was to Gerschel’s death.
Gerschel’s death has puzzled me for a while. I knew it was in the early 1970s, since Dumézil’s return to the Coriolanus story in the third volume of his Mythe et Épopée in 1973 is in tribute to him. This would have been quite young if he was a student in the 1930s. Dumézil mentions his death in the 1973 preface to the second edition of the first volume of Mythe et Épopée (p. 27), in a way which indicates it happened after the first edition of 1968. C. Scott Littleton refers to him as “the late Lucien Gerschel” in the introduction to Dumézil’s Gods of the Ancient Northmen, also in 1973(p. xv). Dumézil said in 1979 that a posthumous collection of his essays was in preparation, to be edited by Georges Charachidzé (Mariages indo-européens, p. 22 n. 1). Hervé Coutau-Bégarie notes that this collection was due to rescue Gerschel “from oblivion” and was “ardently desired” by Dumézil (L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil, pp. 199-200). This collection was never published. But I couldn’t find any notice of Gerschel beyond those mentions. The only record I could find of someone with that name had a birth date which seemed possible, but said he died in the 1980s, which indicated this was a different person.
One of the last tasks in the revision of this draft of my manuscript on Benveniste and Dumézil has been going back over some texts I’d read before, but which I wanted to revisit. This included Dumézil’s last major project, the Esquisses de mythologie, of which he published three volumes of twenty-five sketches – ideas or short essays which he says that he lacked the time to complete himself, but which he hoped others might pick up, develop, criticise or otherwise engage with. He was in his mid-eighties when the first volume of Esquisses appeared, and a fourth volume appeared after his death. When I first read the Esquisses I was thinking of different things and had missed material relevant to Gerschel. Two things in this re-reading were interesting in relation to Gerschel and Coriolanus.
One was that Dumézil returns to the Coriolanus story in “De Méléagre à Coriolan”, esquisse 17 in Apollon sonore et autres essais. The second was that Dumézil mentions Gerschel’s tragic demise in 1983, in esquisse 47 in La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés. This is a text about the Finnish national epic the Kalevala and the magical object of the sampo:
Gerschel mourut en 1970, dans des circonstances très pénibles. Trouvé mort sur la voie publique, sans papiers, il ne fut identifié que plusieurs mois plus tard, alors que j’étais à Chicago, et ses abondants dossiers ont disparu. Aucun Nachlass ne subsiste de ce grand érudit, sinon dans ma mémoire, le souvenir plus ou moins précise de projets dont il m’avait fait confidence, et quelques notes que j’ai jointes aux brouillons de mes cours du Collège de France. Sept ans plus tard, invité à contribuer à un volume qui se préparait en Amérique, en l’honneur de mon ami, le folkloriste turc Pertev Naili Boratav, je voulus associer Gerschel à cet hommage et, sous nos deux signatures, je mis en forme sa note sur la production du sampo. Notre article parut en anglais en 1978, dans Studies in Turkish Folklore, in honor of Pertev N. Boratav, publié par Ilhan Başgöz et Marc Glaser (Indiana University), pages 89-94.
Gerschel died in 1970, in very tragic circumstances. Found dead on the street, with no identification papers, he was not identified until several months later, while I was in Chicago, and his extensive papers have disappeared. No Nachlass remains of this great scholar, except in my memory: the more or less precise recollection of projects he had confided in me, and a few notes I appended to the drafts of my Collège de France lectures. Seven years later, invited to contribute to a volume being prepared in America in honour of my friend the Turkish folklorist Pertev Naili Boratav, I wanted to include Gerschel in this tribute and under both our names I edited his note on the production of the sampo. Our article appeared in English in 1978 in Studies in Turkish Folklore, in honor of Pertev N. Boratav, published by Ilhan Başgöz and Marc Glaser [actually ‘Mark Glazer’] (Indiana University), pages 89-94 (La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés, p. 212).
Dumézil was in Chicago between October 1969 and March 1970, giving the Haskell lectures and working at the Chicago Divinity School, to which he had been invited by Mircea Eliade. Dumézil’s note therefore seems a bit confused on the chronology. If Gerschel died in 1970, and the identification was “several months later”, how could this be when Dumézil was still in Chicago? Perhaps he died when Dumézil was away in Chicago, and was identified after his return.
I have seen some of those notes by Gerschel in Dumézil’s archive at the Collège de France – he would send references, examples or other things relevant to Dumézil’s concerns, and Dumézil would keep them with the lecture notes. Dumézil’s handwriting is shocking, but his courses are very organised, numbering and dating each lecture, and indicating where something has been placed if he took material out of the sequence for use elsewhere. I hadn’t realised until rereading the Esquisses how relatively rare these traces of Gerschel were.
Given Dumézil’s mention of it, I went looking for the Gerschel and Dumézil text on the sampo published as the English chapter in 1978. The first place I went was the very useful L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil to check the reference. In the bibliographical entry on that English chapter, Coutau-Bégarie says that Gerschel:
avait eu l’intuition, en 1965, du caractère trifonctionnel d’un episode du Kalevala, la fabrication d’un objet magique, le sampo. Il est mort en 1970 sans avoir publié sa découverte. Des parents éloignés, ignares et uniquement soucieux d’argent, ont dispersé sa bibliothèque et versé à la décharge ‘ses abondants dossiers’.
had discerned in 1965 the trifunctional character of an episode of the Kalevala, the fabrication of a magical object, the sampo. He died in 1970 without having published his discovery. Distant relatives, ignorant and only caring for money, sold off his library and dumped ‘his extensive papers’ at the rubbish tip (p. 134).
Cover of Studies in Turkish Folklore, which contains Gerschel’s posthumous text
The Festschrift was available in the Bodleian library in Oxford. Dumézil’s contribution is mainly in editing Gerschel’s text, and he only wrote a short paragraph to preface it. As far as I’m aware the French text is unpublished. Here’s Dumézil’s brief introduction:
In this Feschrift [sic] in honor of my dear friend (who was in Istanbul at the beginning of my university life, and who was the most brilliant of listeners and the most efficient of assistants), I would like to evoque and invite, the one who was for thirty years, until my retirement, my most constant and original collaborator in Paris, Lucien Gershel. He has published important articles, but when he died tragically in the beginning of 1970, while I was teaching in Chicago, his Nachlass was dispersed: nothing remains. I had, however, numerous joint projects which we had worked on together. In view of this “chain of friendship” which is one of the joys of our lives as researchers, I have edited for you this one which if I remember correctly dates from the fifties.—G.D. (p. 89)
Coutau-Bégarie says that Gerschel’s text dates from 1965, not the 1950s (p. 135). I know of no other mentions of Gerschel’s death, or the disposal of his papers, or what the collection due to be edited by Charachidzé might have contained. But the notes from Dumézil and Coutau-Bégarie which I’d previously missed have opened up a little window on this story. When Dumézil died in 1986 the last volume of his Esquisses was in draft, and was published eight years later, edited by Joël H. Grisward. Esquisses 84-87 are on the Kalevala, and number 84 continues the discussion of sampo.
References
Émile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 2 volumes,Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969; Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer, Chicago: Hau Books, 2016; originally published as Indo-European Language and Society, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1973.
Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, L’Œuvre de Georges Dumézil: Catalogue raisonné, Paris: Economica, 1998
Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée I: L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans les épopées des peuple indo-européens, Paris: Gallimard, second edition, 1974 [1968].
Georges Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée III: Histoires romaines, Paris: Gallimard, 1973.
Georges Dumézil, Mariages indo-européens, suivi de Quinze questions romaines, Paris: Payot, 1979.
Georges Dumézil, “De Méléagre à Coriolan”, Apollon sonore et autres essais, Paris: Gallimard, 1982, 164-70.
Georges Dumézil, “La Fabrication du sampo”,La Courtisane et les seigneurs colorés, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, 209-18.
Georges Dumezil, Le Roman des jumeaux et autres essais, ed. Joël H. Grisward, Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Georges Dumezil and Lucien Gerschel, “The Production of the Sampo”, trans. Mark and Diane Glazer, in Ilhan Başgöz and Marc Glaser eds. Studies in Turkish Folklore: In Honor of Pertev N. Boratav, Bloomington: Indiana University Turkish Studies, 1978, 89-94.
Lucien Gerschel, “Coriolan”, Éventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage à Lucien Febvre, Paris: Armand Colin, two volumes, 1953, Vol II, 33-40.
C. Scott Littleton, “Introduction Part I”, in Georges Dumézil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen, ed. Einar Haugen, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, ix-xliii.
This is the 69th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic organisation here.
Europe has often been the target of criticism: Europe has lost touch with its core values, its leaders are indecisive and its citizens are confused, unsure whether they should be proud of their past or embarrassed by it – the litany of accusations is long, and the writers of obituaries have never been at a loss for words to descibe the death of the Old Continent.
Many of these criticisms are exaggerated and misguided, but nevertheless the time has come to rethink post-imperial Europe, assigning proper place to the burdens of its mixed history, including its colonial past, but also recalling its civilization-defining advances like its singular culture of learning and inventiveness, its permanent revolution of the critical spirit, its management of pluralism, its ever-evolving organization of general welfare, its dissolution of hierarchies of social origin, and its promotion of dignified living conditions for all.
In this extraordinarily wide-ranging and erudite work, Sloterdijk opens up a few bookmarks in the Book of Europe. If Europe too often is a book rarely read by those whom it concerns, Sloterdijk’s bookmarks help orient readers – teaching Europeans, from the script that they themselves have written, about where they stand with themselves and about their role within the whole. In Sloterdijk’s view, the true Europe can be found wherever creative passions have overtaken those of resentment, and it will survive as long as creativity keeps resentment in check.
Famously described as the Twenty Years Crisis by the international relations historian E.H. Carr, the period between the First and Second World Wars was an important moment in British philosophy, theatre and culture. This symposium considers Shakespeare and his plays in relation to the developments in intellectual life in Britain in this period. Papers include discussions of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, John Maynard Keynes, and A.N. Whitehead. A closing panel discusses Richard Wilson’s 2025 book, Shakespeare’s Fascist Followers: Modern Friends. Speakers include Sarah Beckwith, Martin Harries, Christoph Schuringa, and Michael Witmore.
Preliminary programme: 10-11 h Welcome and Introduction Christoph Schuringa: Russell, Wittgenstein, Shakespeare
11-11:30 h Coffee/tea
11:30-13 h Sarah Beckwith: Austin’s Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Austin: Tragedy and Moral Encounter Martin Harries: Keynes on Art and the State
13-15 h Lunch
15-15:45 h Michael Witmore: Shakespeare and Whitehead: Two Philosophers of Eventuality (Zoom)
15:45-16:00 h Coffee/tea
16:00-17:30 h Panel on “Shakespeare’s Fascist Followers”
It is a truism that the last one hundred years have been defined by the accelerated and increased propulsion of people and information across seas, land, and air. Also a truism is that literature and art reflect this enhanced mobility in their formal composition, from modernism’s transoceanic voyages and the avant-garde’s images of racing automobiles and gyrating wheels to postcolonial narratives of migration and cultural transmissions broadcast across the planet. Arresting Ecologies challenges these truisms. It argues that writers and artists from around the world drew inspiration from experiences of stalled and impeded mobility and used them to critique the accelerative impulses of the Anthropocene. It provides an alternative literary history of the twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone novel.
The book examines a multi-genre archive from the interwar era through today from Britain, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, illustrating how novels, travel guides, paintings, and photographs respond to distinct shifts in energy and telecommunication regimes. These works are set on merchant ships and harbors confronting coal shortages and slumping international trade. They are located at forgotten but once important sites of oil and asphalt extraction and refinement. They take place on islands conscripted into Cold War battles from the skies and airwaves, in pirate states located along the world’s busiest shipping corridor, and at remote deserts being harnessed for wind power by neocolonial governments. What connects them is a pervading affect of uncertainty during transitional moments: moments in which seas, land, and air were re-codified by states and private entities under the banner of development. All of them betray skepticism toward promises of social progress, environmental sustainability, and global connection.
Skepticism toward myths of more egalitarian and prosperous futures used to justify new extractive and communication systems is encoded through the breakdown of developmental genres and sub-genres, and the revision of anti-developmental ones. The overlooked formal preoccupation with stalled mobility among both neglected and well as canonical and well-known figures of major literary and artistic movements from modernist to contemporary periods reveals how climate- and communications solutions to environmental and social problems failed to convince those at frontiers of capitalist growth.
In the latter half of the seventeenth century, Spinoza effected a reversal in the relationship between philosophy, politics, and religion, thereby laying the foundation for modern democracy. This shift, and his plea for philosophical critique, did not pass unchallenged. The idea that there is no equality without freedom, and no freedom without equality, was maligned by those who insisted it would lead to rebellion and anarchy. Still, Spinoza was no solitary figure, but formed part of a larger European movement. Inspired by several anonymous clandestine treatises, the republican writings of his contemporary De la Court, the democratic ideas of his former teacher Van den Enden, and the subversive criticism of his friend Koerbagh, Spinoza continued the trajectory established by Machiavelli. The resistance which his work encountered played a role in the radicalization of his ideas, the return to Machiavelli’s revolutionary principles, and the recognition of the multitude’s crucial role.
Why should we think about the home? Most would agree that it is central to children’s development-a healthy, stable, and hopefully loving environment where they can prepare for adulthood. But for women, the duties and expectations bound up with life at home have historically often meant stunted development, confinement to the home and domestic work, subordination to a man who goes in and out of the home freely. While societal advancements have helped to close this gap for some, these problems endure for many. The writings of women philosophers, some going back many centuries, reveal insights on these challenges that deserve close study.
In No Place Like Home, Sandrine Bergès calls attention to women philosophers’ ideas and arguments, starting in antiquity and continuing into the twenty-first century. Through their writings, she examines the concept of the home in all its historical richness and variety, thus reinstating the home as a philosophical problem, worthy of deep inquiry. Bergès examines writings about domesticity from numerous female thinkers and writers across history, including but not limited to, Perictione, Angelina Grimké, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Beecher, Sojourner Truth, Margaret Cavendish, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marie Kondo.
Through their perspectives, she reveals the rich and varied history of philosophical reflections on the home, from which we are given the tools to draw our own conclusions about its place in our modern lives.
Pierre Déléage, Inventing Writing: Prophets, Shamans, and the Transmission of Ritual Discourse in North American Indigenous Cultures, 1600–1900 – trans. Victoria Bergstrom and Matthew H. Evans, HAU, March 2026
A groundbreaking study that rethinks the origins of writing, revealing how Native American ritual scripts expand our understanding beyond state-centered, universal models.
Why have humans repeatedly devoted immense intellectual energy to inventing writing? In world history, writing was independently created four times—by the Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, and Mayans. These traditions developed universal scripts, systems of symbols theoretically capable of recording any utterance in the spoken language. On this basis, a long-standing scholarly view has held that the origins of writing are inseparable from the rise of states and bureaucracies.
However, this book turns our attention to another trajectory. Between 1700 and 1900, prophets and shamans in Native American societies devised “bounded” forms of writing. Unlike universal scripts, these were not intended to capture the entirety of speech. Instead, they served a precise function: to ensure the faithful transmission of ritual discourses within ceremonial frameworks. Their principles of notation differed profoundly from those of the great phonographic traditions.
Pierre Déléage’s analysis not only illuminates these overlooked episodes in the history of writing but also advances a methodological shift: rather than treating selective scripts as “failed” or “incomplete,” he interprets them on their own terms. In doing so, he opens up a broader framework for understanding writing as a diverse cultural practice, one that can emerge outside of state power, bureaucracy, or universal phonographic systems.
Now published in English translation, Inventing Writing makes the work of a leading French scholar available to new readers. It offers a groundbreaking perspective: writing does not emerge only as a universal technology of language, but also as a bounded tool shaped by ritual, institution, and culture.
Real and imagined versions of the island and the microbe come together to tell a new story about geopolitical relations between two successive Anglophone empires: the British and the American. Bassam Sidiki assembles a vast archive of literary, cultural, and medical documents to argue that claims of British or American insularity are specious; these Anglophone empires have been economically, culturally, and scientifically interdependent since the turn of the century to the present as the British century gave way to the American. Ironically, the inter-imperial relations that refute imperial insularity are often most visible in island-like spaces such as gardens, ships, and brothels, and in actual tropical islands where the two imperial powers have worked together—or at odds—to hold infectious diseases at bay.
Sidiki documents historical and imaginary representations of infectious diseases such as the plague, venereal disease, Spanish flu, and Hansen’s disease in the long twentieth century, and how these diseases brought the British and US empires into simultaneous collaboration and competition across the Anglophone world.
Explores the nature of modern authoritarianism to confront and counter the increasing dangers it poses to contemporary democracies
New understanding of the character and motives of modern authoritarian leaders
Examination of the distinction between populists and authoritarians
A new typology of authoritarian leaders, distinguishing between the nationalist, religious and ideological tyrants
A new ‘manual’ of authoritarian leadership, providing a novel theoretical account of the techniques deployed by ‘smart’ authoritarians
An assessment of the modern tools employed by authoritarians, including propaganda and communication technology
An evaluation of the theoretical and political vulnerability of democracy to modern authoritarianism
The Modern Tyrant argues that modern authoritarian leaders resemble classical tyrants but are distinctive in three ways: their ambitions for wealth and glory are shaped by modernity (especially nationalism, religion and ideology); their techniques are novel, combining authoritarian and democratic forms, and finally, they are much more powerful, able to exploit modern propaganda techniques and technology to enhance their control and dominance.
