Colloquium organized jointly with Profs. Anne Cheng, chair Chinese Intellectual History and Henry Laurens, chair Contemporary History of the Arab World.
In June 2019, an international colloquium entitled "Historians of Asia on political violence" was held at the Collège de France. It brought together eminent historians from India, Japan, Vietnam and China, who addressed and discussed various aspects and emblematic events of political violence in these Asian countries. It seemed both interesting and desirable to extend these discussions to the so-called "Middle East".
In the European imagination, there are still hints of the orientalism denounced by Edward Said, with an implicit dichotomy between, on the one hand, a "Middle East" readily perceived as the arena par excellence of political violence, or even as the home of fanaticism congenitally arrayed against all the values most cherished by the West, and, on the other, a "Far East" where all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and prosperity. And yet, these two opposing representations belong to the same type of phantasmagoria, the anhistorical and ideological nature of which will be demonstrated.
The 2019 symposium had already attempted to show the optical illusion and Orientalist preconceptions that still lead us to believe in a "harmonious" China, an "aesthetic" Japan or a "non-violent" India. On the contrary, the Arab East today appears as a "land of blood" from which violence radiates in the form of terrorism to other regions of the world. Recent events show that this reputation is well-founded. Yet violence is not innate in this region; it is the product of a whole series of factors.