Writing the History of Extreme Violence in the Present: What Is at Stake?

The International Research Network on Researchers Confronting Extreme Violence (RICEVE), dedicated to analysing and problematising the indirect effects of extreme violence on those who study it, is organising, on the premises of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, a study day entitled: "Writing the History of Extreme Violence in the Present: What Is at Stake?".

The study day will be held in French.

This study day aims to reflect on the conditions under which history is written when extreme violence is unfolding, without the benefit of temporal distance or a clearly delimited endpoint. It draws on contemporary situations marked by forms of brutalisation that appear to exceed both the conventional frameworks of political conflict and the recognised thresholds of international law and human rights. The challenge is to understand how to analyse, describe and contextualise forms of violence occurring before our very eyes, through fragmentary traces, real-time circulating images, and partial or constrained testimonies.

Taking the situated case of Iran as its starting point, while progressively opening up to other conflicts (Syria, Palestine, Ukraine and Sudan), the discussion will seek to identify a set of transversal questions: how does the contemporaneity of catastrophe affect historical work and the social sciences? How can temporality be conceptualised when a sudden event reshapes long-term research fields? What kind of knowledge is produced when it is indirect, mediated through screens, informational blackouts, or activist circulations of images?

The study day will also examine the position of the researcher in relation to such violence, whether personally affected or observing from a distance. Writing while events are unfolding requires navigating moral urgency, factual uncertainty, emotional strain and political risks, while maintaining a commitment to form and intelligibility. The aim, therefore, is to reflect on a history of the present that does not relinquish analytical rigour or awareness of its own conditions of possibility, while exploring how extreme violence, when it crosses certain thresholds, reshapes its objects, its methods, and the ethical stakes of its writing.

Speakers

• Sarah Alhamed
• Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau
• Parand Danesh
• Chowra Makaremi
• Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi
• Anne Poiret
• Richard Rechtman
• Ioulia Shukan

The RICEVE programme, an international network of researchers working on and in contexts of extreme violence, seeks to examine how scholars—whether historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and others—may be confronted with violence and atrocities such as crimes, genocides, torture, wartime rape, executions, and more, in their fieldwork. RICEVE is dedicated to analysing and problematising the indirect effects of extreme violence on those who study it.

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