Editorial
François Rastier‘s study is part of a body of research on the controversial issues of colonisation, decolonisation and related themes, such as cultural identity, race and gender. The author provides a critical reading to situate the ideological interpretations and the issues they underlie, and to resituate them in relation to the complexity of the field addressed and the methodological and scientific principles required for its global understanding.
Yves Beigbeder and Benjamin Ferencz remind us, with reference to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that the aim of empires is, as in the past, based on the unshakeable myth of an eternal cultural identity and the unrestrained means that ensure its domination at the expense of any other political project. If any concept of right, individual or collective, national or international, adopted since the Nuremberg trials is thrown into the dustbin of history, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is called upon, along with other institutions, to ensure its perpetuation.
In this same perspective, Corinne Lepage refers to the various international conventions relating to the laws and rights of humanity adopted before Nuremberg at the turn of the 20th century. She highlights the innovations up to the proposal of the Universal Declaration of Humankind Rights (UDHR), which states that humanity is a subject of rights and includes in this respect the concept of the human heritage, which encompasses, in addition to cultural goods, the ecological, food, health, economic and security dimensions at the political level.
Scott Straus analyses the concept of genocide from the point of view of the debates it generates. This concept is indeed subject to multiple competing interpretations and must be treated, according to the author, by considering its contradictory uses in order to agree on a definition that is as clear as possible, beyond the collective connotations associated since its appearance with such notions as essentialism and identity.
The joint text by Aït Ali Abdelmalek, Paul Ghils and Vera Kopsaj addresses the issue of social structuring from a sociological point of view for the first and third authors, and from a philosophical point of view for the second. The approach consists, on the one hand, in unravelling the interactions between individuals and society and the theoretical controversies of which ‘social demand’ is one of the expressions, and on the other hand, in situating, in a historical, multicultural and philosophical context, the factors that contribute to their hierarchy in the human psyche, between scientific data and imaginary projections.
Nicole Morgan‘s article reopens a chapter that is still relevant today, following the publication of her book Cold Hatred. What is the American Right Thinking? in 2012. The author examines the impact of political philosophy and religious ideologies, as well as the thrust of the imaginary, on the evolution of political institutions and the distribution of power in the world, and particularly in the United States, where conflictual factors are creating a particularly destructive climate.
Paul Ghils