Roberto Farneti

A Mimetic Perspective on Conflict Resolution

Current theories of international justice and conflict resolution seem to rest on the assumption that discord among humans can, in principle, be settled by means of a fair allocation of a limited set of available goods. The assumption, in turn, is grounded in the idea (supported by John Rawls) that peoples of genuinely democratic and liberal societies “have nothing to go to war about,” once their basic needs are satisfied and their fundamental interests made fully compatible with those of other democratic peoples. The article builds on René Girards theory of “mimetic desire” to show that the notion of “peace by satisfaction” is problematic: peoples needs and desires, which are mimetic in nature, are hardly extinguishable. Classical approaches to conflict resolution fail to address this mimetic dynamic and wrongly assume that there is an objective measure of desire to be filled to satisfy the contenders. The solution to the dilemma involves the reflective ability of the people engaged in a dispute to address the (mimetic) sources of their animosity.

The Network Is the Message: Social Networks as Teaching Tools

This chapter draws from a pilot project at the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano consisting in using an electronic forum in a political science class. Students were challenged to respond to a ‘prompt’ from the instructor on some topical issues in EU politics and to engage in informed discussion on topics addressed in class. We argue that beyond the content-specific elements involved, the forum was designed to train students in such practices as discussing and debating issues that feature prominently in current EU politics. The forum prescribes a method of discussion and critique and presents itself as a miniature of the democratic ‘public sphere’. This chapter refers to Jurgen Habermas’s seminal studies on the notion of ‘public sphere’ and shows how the EU public sphere is largely shaped by the new electronic media. This chapter bears on Gretchen van Dyke’s chapter on civic education in this volume and connects current issues and challenges in higher education with the ever more relevant problem of the so-called democratic deficit of the EU. It concludes with an analysis of electronic media that draws on Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the particular status of messages in complex societies.

Bipolarity redux: the mimetic context of the ‘new wars’

This article challenges the theorem of non-polarity in international relations theory by employing ‘mimetic theory’, a notion associated with the French anthropologist René Girard. The article argues that non-polarity is a distorted visual effect that conceals the actual polar configurations in global politics. So-called ‘new wars’ are seemingly asymmetrical and are said to mobilize fronts ‘on the basis of identity’. However, on closer inspection new wars appear to be shaped by underlying mimetic forces, whereby the contenders behave like ‘doubles’, each reflecting its own image in the wishes and actions of the other. The article picks up and develops a clue from political theorist Herfried Münkler, that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a miniature copy ‘of global political line-ups’. The conflict is placed here in its mimetic context, and implications for political theory and the theory of international relations are drawn.

Introduction – Teaching European Studies: Educational Challenges

The increasing importance of the European Union as a central player in both domestic and international politics since the late 1980s has given a strong boost to an academic research agenda moving beyond nation-oriented approaches (Keeler 2005). This development found promptly its way into university curricula, be it in economics, law, history, political science, cultural studies, IR and other programmes. These traditional disciplines saw the raise of new courses, specialised tracks and even entire master’s programmes focusing on the impact of the EU on their respective discipline. In addition, the multifaceted character of the European integration process also led to the creation of new multi- and interdisciplinary bachelor’s, master’s and even PhD programmes specifically focusing on the EU. These programmes were mostly labelled European Studies or European Union Studies. While the term European Studies could be considered to be broader in scope and reflecting an interest in the European continent in more general terms, in practice both terms are being used interchangeably. In the framework of this study, we have chosen for the most commonly used term of European Studies. If the author however specifically wanted to emphasise that a programme was exclusively focusing on the EU, we have allowed for the term EU Studies.

Hobbes's paradox redux

The article focuses on a paradox that Carl Schmitt either detects or perhaps fabricates in Hobbess text, concerning the possibility of deducing viable normative arrangements from psychological facts. The paradox concerns a difficulty in the ‘attribution of accountability’ to individuals in principle ignorant of the clues required to engage proficiently in normative tasks. This ‘attribution of accountability’ was seen by both the early Schmitt (in 1917) and the legal theorist Hermann Heller (in 1927) as a critical condition in order for the ‘empirical’ individuals to be able to treat each other as normatively capable, namely, as reliable and accountable ‘contractual parties’. Schmitts solution of the paradox was supported by a suitable reading of Hobbess text: given that no normative outcome could ever come from the psychologies of each single empirical individual, it is a ‘decision’ that introduces a first basic normative distinction within the norm‐free zone of the state of nature.