International Relations: the Era of Anthropologists
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Both perpetrators and forms of violence change. States are no longer the central referents of contemporary conflicts. We can no longer understand them as the outcome of a linear history starting from tribal societies and leading to Western political structures.
In the future, different worlds will exist alongside one another: anthropologists are uniquely placed to help understand and manage conflicts taking place within frameworks that do not correlate with our state-based logic.
Article published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 79, No. 3, Fall 2014