Les investigations esthétiques ont un double objectif : elles sont à la fois des investigations sur le monde et des enquêtes sur les moyens de le connaître. Cela signifie qu’elles cherchent à être redevables à la fois des événements et des dispositifs avec lesquels nous les percevons. Elles cherchent à établir des prétentions à la vérité tout en critiquant les institutions du pouvoir et du savoir qui revendiquent le monopole des mécanismes de production de la vérité.

Entlang zweier ineinander verschränkter Erzählungen – einer epistemischen Verschiebung im Internationalen Recht, in der die Bedeutung forensischer Praktiken schrittweise auf Kosten derjenigen menschlicher Zeugen zugenommen hat, und der Karriere des »Kampfschadengutachters« Marc Garlasco – wird die Entstehung einer analytischen Methode zur Untersuchung von Gewaltereignissen, wie sie sich in räumliche Artefakte und gebaute Umgebungen einschreiben, und deren Rolle in der Untersuchung von Kriegsverbrechen verfolgt. Moving along two intertwining narrations – the epistemic shift in International Law towards an emphasis on forensic practices (...) to the detriment of human witnesses and the career of »battle damage assessor« Marc Garlasco – the paper follows the development of an analytical method to examine events of violence that inscribe themselves in spatial artifacts and constructed environments, and outlines the method's role in the investigation of war crimes. (shrink)

Moving along two intertwining narrations – the epistemic shift in International Law towards an emphasis on forensic practices to the detriment of human witnesses and the career of »battle damage assessor« Marc Garlasco – the paper follows the development of an analytical method to examine events of violence that inscribe themselves in spatial artifacts and constructed environments, and outlines the method's role in the investigation of war crimes.

Israel’s 22-day attack on Gaza in December 2008—January 2009 exposed a paradox: the attack was not only one of the most violent and destructive of Israel’s recent wars on the Palestinians and the one most strongly opposed by its critics, but also the one in which Israeli experts in international humanitarian law — the area of the law that regulates the conduct of war — were most closely involved. The article demonstrates how these facts are connected.

The maneuvre carried out by the Israeli army at Nablus in April of 2002 consisted of interpreting the private house as an open passageway, and « walking through walls. » It involved a conception of the city as not just the site, but as the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid matter that is forever contingent and in flux. Who makes such interpretations ? Since the end of the cold war a vast intellectual field has been established (...) in order to rethink military operations on urban terrain. Soldiers take crash courses to master topics such as urban infrastructure or complex system analysis, and appeal as well to a variety of theories developed within contemporary civilian academia. The military appropriation of these theories is studied here by way of interviews with officers, in order to turn our attention to the possibility that, as Herbert Marcuse suggested, with the growing integration between the various aspects of society, « contradiction and criticism » could be equally subsumed and made operative as an instrumental tool by the hegemony of power. The subversion of the wall becomes the prerogative of the Israeli military in the Palestinian refugee camps. (shrink)

The principle of the lesser evil--the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice--has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical philosophy. From its roots in classical ethics and Christian theology, to Hannah Arendt's exploration of the work of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi regime, the author explores its development in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of Medecins Sans Frontisres in mid-1980s in Ethiopia; the separation wall in Israel-Palestine; (...) and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of new research, the author charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea. In doing so he shows how military and political intervention acquired a new humanitarian acceptability and legality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.--Publisher description. (shrink)