Validar a guerra: a construção do regime de Expertise estratégica

This article is intended to contribute to the interpretative analysis of war. For that purpose, it investigates how some apparatuses located in strategic thinking help to make modern war a social practice considered both technically feasible and, at the same time, legitimate for soldiers. In so doing, it makes use of two different but closely related theoretical fields, pragmatic sociology (finding inspiration in the work of scholars such as Luc Boltanski, Nicolas Dodier and Francis Chateauraynaud), and the sociology of scientific knowledge (based mostly on the work of Bruno Latour). On the one hand, the sociology of scientific knowledge has developed a productive questioning of the construction of scientific facts that is particularly relevant to the present research. On the other hand, pragmatic sociology generates a compatible framework able to describe collective actions. The combination of both approaches allows the description of the formation of a strategic expertise regime that supports the technical legitimacy of the use of military force. Together, the sociology of scientific knowledge and pragmatic sociology bring a particularly relevant perspective to research pertaining to war.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Affective Dissent in the Heart of the Capitalist Utopia: Occupy Hong Kong and the Sacred

Hong Kong has been represented as a politically indifferent, capitalist utopia. This representation was first deployed by British colonial elites and has since been embroidered by Hong Kong’s new political masters in Beijing. Yet, on 15 October 2011, anti-capitalist activists identifying with the global Occupy movement assembled in Hong Kong Central and occupied a space under the HSBC bank. Occupy Hong Kong proved to be the longest occupation of all that was initiated by the global Occupy movement. Situated in a space notable for previously having been the haunt of Filipina domestic workers, the occupation conjured a community into the purified spaces of Hong Kong’s financial district. I describe this in terms of an eruption of the sacred that placed conventional norms of Hong Kong city life under erasure, releasing powerful emotions into spaces once thought to be immune to the ritual effervescences of the transgressive