Interview with Didier Bigo

The quarterly journal Cultures & Conflits, founded in 1990, celebrated 35 years of publication in 2025. This is an opportunity to look back, with its founder, Didier Bigo, professor emeritus at Sciences Po’s Centre for International Studies, on the longevity of an independent journal and the richness of an intellectual approach open to transdisciplinarity and internationalism.

In what context was the journal Cultures & Conflits created, and what role did it seek to play at that time?

Cultures & Conflits was created in 1990 in a particular international setting, namely the end of bipolarity. Many representatives of the so-called structural realism considered this bipolarity impossible to change, as it seemed structurally stable and relatively independent of the desire of actors to cause harm (this was particularly the case for the American political scientist Kenneth Waltz, founder of this school of thought).⁽¹⁾ The surprise at seeing the collapse of one of the tenets of this doctrine, which some called a “scientific law”, led to a deep divide. On the one hand, there were those who sought to understand how such an error could have occurred by revisiting the epistemological and methodological principles of international relations. In contrast, there were those who preferred to adjust the dogma at the margins in order to perpetuate the same pessimistic perspectives of human nature and the capacity of superior force to impose itself and establish legitimacy, by defining itself as power and eliciting obedience, through submission or soft power. 

Cultures & Conflits, a journal created by a non-profit association under the French law of 1901 and independent of any single university or discipline, has succeeded in creating a meeting place for political scientists, internationalists, sociologists, geographers, historians, and criminologists from grandes écoles and universities throughout France, as well as from French-speaking countries. It is this creative diversity and a genuine effort to reflect on the major problems of the world that have made it possible to propose an approach that is both committed to the complexity of the social and “critical” in the sense expressed by political scientist Robert Cox, whereby the aim is not to deconstruct through fruitless opposition, but to reformulate more adequately the questions raised by political and social actors.⁽²⁾

The emergence in France of a transdisciplinary approach to international issues, alongside more epistemological approaches to the foundations of international relations and what have been called critical approaches to security in the United States, Canada, and, in particular, Denmark, has made it possible to rethink the study of conflict, security, and violence (in all its forms).⁽³⁾ This was done on a basis that allowed for a profound renewal of research, opening the way to questions about ordinary lives and actors, about cities, provinces, and regions and not only at the national level, about the environment, about solidarity and distant struggles between social actors, about the forms taken by “symbolic violence”,⁽⁴⁾ but also on the mechanisms by which ethics can influence the behaviour of actors and institutions, on the strengths and weaknesses of international law in its national and local relays, in short, a whole series of subjects that were not then considered to be “real” international relations.

What was the situation of French political science at the time, particularly the study of international relations ?

Political science in France, as in other countries, was originally taught in law faculties and was sometimes considered part of the “general knowledge” required to pass major competitive examinations. International affairs were equated with the “foreign affairs” of states, and were often coupled with a pre-Braudelian nationalist and culturalist history.⁽⁵⁾ While some more specialised institutions existed and developed knowledge of international relations (the Sorbonne, Sciences Po Paris, Sciences Po Bordeaux, etc.) by introducing the concepts of transnationalism, complex interdependence, agency of actors, social configuration, and fields, many other institutions were merely repeating a conventional history dressed up as what was called Aronian realism,⁽⁶⁾ but without its philosophical depth. There was therefore enormous dependence on American debates, on a discipline—political science—that had only been a specific field for about 20 years, and on the minor place given to international relations within it compared to electoral and governmental studies and public policy. The lack of knowledge of the English language and the low level of funding allocated to French scholars’ participation in international conferences did nothing to improve the situation. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, a divide emerged between the growing scientific activity of a few research centres, particularly the CERI, which had an international dimension and brought together researchers of worldwide renown, and the majority of lecturers, who were not very involved in research and reproduced the so-called realist canons and assumptions.

After 1990, this divergence became even more pronounced, with significant momentum coming from students interested in international issues, social movements, global ecology, deterritorialised violence, population displacement (including migration) and the plight of refugees. This enabled authors from various disciplines to become the most cited and most active in understanding the processes of disjunction linked to globalisation.⁽⁷⁾ Philosophers, geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists have all contributed to these issues. The works of Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Beck, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Saskia Sassen, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly have far exceeded, in terms of the number of citations in internationalist journals, those of Robert Gilpin, Stephen Krassner, John Mearsheimer, or even Kenneth Waltz, proponents of the realist school. They have profoundly inspired, to varying degrees, a different understanding of international relations, and we have had the pleasure of having some of these authors contribute to our journal.⁽⁸⁾

How can these developments be explained?

Those who continued to call themselves “realists” even though their position consisted more of a denial of the realities of the social world and an overly simplistic interpretation of the world gradually and significantly reduced their presence at international conferences, including in France. They turned to activities as columnists and journalists and, to do so, changed their style: far from taking up and developing the rational choice approaches of classical realism, which still have intrinsic value, they recycled culturalist and sometimes xenophobic or chauvinistic approaches in line with Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” and aligned themselves with the questions raised by the neo-conservatives and finally the radical right, whether to promote or combat them.

Our journal, on the contrary, has always taken a position in favour of a relational analysis of identities, emphasising the constant changes that reconfigure actors according to the temporality of conflicts and alliances. Identities are forged in struggles or indifference to others. They change according to relationships, insofar as social processes, actor configurations, and dynamics at work form a social universe or social fields (local, national, or transnational), and it is these variations that enable us to understand the complexity of the present. The authors we have chosen to republish in the anniversary issue, despite their diversity, all share this underlying theme of relational approaches and have accompanied all the French-language works that have managed to retain this sense of action, this reflection on the practices of actors, and the humility that goes hand in hand with long-term research work, rather than apocalyptic predictions.⁽⁹⁾

Unfortunately, we are currently seeing a resurgence of ultra-simplistic discourse combining suspicion, prediction, and fear-mongering about identities, open citizenship and migration, gender, and ethnicity, often ignoring the knowledge accumulated by sociology, anthropology, and history. This makes these authors incapable of understanding the complexity of the issues, as well as the possible structural solutions, as they are eager to propose immediate responses, often based on a binary friend-enemy logic, promoting populism and stereotypes at the very heart of the transnational academic field of social sciences.

The most striking example is that of academics who declared themselves Trump supporters during his first term, a phenomenon studied by David Swartz and revisited in the latest issue of Cultures & Conflits.⁽¹⁰⁾ These academics changed their career paths by moving closer to a certain form of journalism, notably blogging, and although they are far from having gained scientific recognition from their peers, their strategy has worked very well on social media, television programmes, and rolling news channels run in particular by reactionary billionaires.

Their success is therefore primarily due to the congruence of their reciprocal temporality. The media, seeking to capture attention, even if only for a short period, look for answers that fit their very short and very assertive format. This discredits long explanations and complex reflection on the interdependencies of networks, individuals, and associations.

Very recently, with the rise of autocratic and radical right-wing populist movements, these individuals hope to return to the academic scene by forming alliances with their new partners in the media and political think tanks. 

Does this popularity have implications for academic knowledge as such?

Many universities and researchers are continuing their work, aiming to advance knowledge of global social complexity and the cross-cutting lines that run through “pluriverses”, or these forms of “lateral” universalisation. However, politicians can also be seduced by the simplistic controversies that influence their electorates. Here, the strength of public universities in these fields, and that of international associations (in sociology, anthropology, international relations) bringing together departments for the critical study of peace processes, conflicts, and security (see the cases in Germany, Finland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom in particular) has been, in order to remain credible, to inform that academics whose private funding does not allow them scientific autonomy cannot claim the title of professor to present articles of which the research dimension has not been proven.

The independence and academic freedom of research centres cannot go hand in hand with the dominant position given to former political actors or large private entrepreneurs in appointments or research areas. This is nothing new. As John Mueller pointed out in his article published in Cultures & Conflits, many of these studies have no interest in describing the objective responsibilities of all the actors involved in conflicts and do not want to appear as propagandists. As a result, they engage in “fictional” research, which Mueller describes as a “proliferation of disaster scenarios” to maintain a “politics of fear”. James Der Derian⁽¹¹⁾ adds another characteristic, with the establishment of a “military-industrial-political complex” that also includes “entertainment” via 24-hour news channels, social networks, and video game developers since the 1990s. These are lessons to be learned at a time when Ukraine and Palestine are in the spotlight.

Issues such as public or private funding of research, managing the risk of going and staying in the field, access to archives and “counter-archives”, and the indirect political influence of governments are still present, and mean that academic freedom goes far beyond the simple management of demonstrations (whether untimely or justified) during events where government decisions (action or inaction) are challenged in academic circles. It is academic knowledge that is at stake. The two issues published in 2025 echo this sentiment, particularly the one devoted to academic freedoms.

How has the journal Cultures & Conflits positioned itself over time, and has it undergone any major changes during these 35 years?

The journal has accompanied the profound movement I just mentioned, approaching international relations not as a sub-discipline of political science, but as a transdisciplinary questioning of global issues, cross-cutting social logics and professional developments that influence the use of violence, the relationships between ideology, technology, surveillance, the digital world, the challenges of the commons, and the establishment of centrifugal dynamics where proximity (geographical or social) no longer correlates with alliance, but can instead generate conflicts between those who are close and alliances at a distance. This shift toward greater consideration of the global, the multiplicity and complexity of worlds and social universes, which has emancipated the international questioning of inter-state military issues and the argument of survival, has enabled a complete overhaul of the analysis of conflicts and security thanks to transdisciplinary approaches. This is why the journal is both a sign of change and a driving force in the consideration of new topics, thanks to the openness of its subjects and authors.

Initially, Cultures & Conflits was conceived to replace the journal Études Polémologiques, at a time when the Foundation for National Defence Studies wanted to merge the latter with the Revue stratégique, combining the two into a single analytical tool for the government. It seemed to us that the merger with a given government, although it provided long-term funding, represented a threat to academic freedom and the autonomy necessary to formulate fundamental questions that were “disinterested” in the immediate political and ideological context. We therefore chose to form an association under the 1901 law, bringing together academics from different disciplines and research laboratories. Men and women, researchers at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, the Sorbonne, Nanterre, and Sciences Po Paris, came together and broke with the institutional rivalries of the time. Several significant issues emerged from these meetings and their implementation in conferences of the French Political Science Association, as well as of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and, even more so, the International Studies Association (ISA). Publishing in several languages (French, English, Spanish) was a key ambition from the very first issue.

After some 20 issues, the journal was better known in the French-speaking world (Canada, Belgium, Switzerland) and the English-speaking world that read French than in France itself. It was this “detour” into the international arena that made our reputation, with the publication in French of major texts by English-speaking authors in collaboration with young French researchers whose originality of fieldwork and approaches were unpopular with certain political scientists.

It could be said that the second stage for the journal was its publication in English as a supplement to the journal edited by R.B.J Walker, Alternatives, Global, Local, Political, and the regular co-publications that followed thanks to major European research contracts on the issues of freedoms and security in the early 2000s, then the creation of the International Political Sociology (IPS) section and the journal of the same name within the International Studies Association. The creation of this new journal, which is international in its attachment to the International Studies Association, the affiliation of its two co-editors-in-chief (R.B.J Walker in Canada and myself) and its team members, has enabled the establishment in France of a common epistemological reflection on the so-called reflexive currents within international relations on a global scale. The support of Bruno Latour and the Scientific Office of Sciences Po at the strategic moment of the journal’s inception was crucial in developing these cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary, and transnational lines of inquiry. Far from seeking to create a “French school”, the aim was to redefine the possibilities of doing, not interdisciplinary work, where we believe we can accumulate knowledge, but transdisciplinary work, where we question the presuppositions of each discipline and pre-constituted objects of knowledge, such as the idea of associating the international with the foreign policy of states.⁽¹²⁾

The last 20 years have seen a profound renewal of themes and generations of internationalists who have developed European and international networks, who are confronted with diverse intellectual traditions and are able to compare and interweave, sometimes referred to as “tinkering”, creative approaches to original subjects, to ways of thinking and writing about history and the social sciences. I invite readers to take a look at the list of our titles over the past 35 years and compare them with journals that claim to study international affairs through the prism of geopolitics. They will be able to judge for themselves.

The journal has continued along this path in what I would describe as a third stage, with strong complementarity and the publication of common themes between Cultures & Conflits and the journal PARISS, an acronym for Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences, which is co-published by Brill. Cultures & Conflits is widely read outside the traditional circles of political science. It is read by geographers, sociologists, specialists in criminology and surveillance studies, critical security studies, and also French literature departments abroad and arts departments. It is these multiple perspectives on international affairs that matter, and we have seen how, in recent events in Ukraine and Palestine, those who correctly predicted the consequences of these conflicts came from these forms of knowledge, independent of government policies.

With the emergence of autocracies within representative democracies themselves, it is essential to combine these points of view so as not to fall into a mimetic rivalry, where everyone would succumb to the belief that the selfishness of the strongest is a solution. This is precisely what we contributed to through our strong presence at the EISA convention in Bologna in August 2025.

Finally and to conclude, on the occasion of this 35th anniversary, the editorial team at Cultures & Conflits has undergone some renewal, but above all, the journal is changing publishers. What is the aim of these changes?

Our partnership with L’Harmattan publishers and the fact that we have been co-publishers of the journal for 33 years is due to the welcome and support that its director, Denis Pryen, showed us when we created Cultures & Conflits to take over from Études Polémologiques. While La Documentation Française, our publisher at the time, asked us to pay a considerable sum in advance to launch the journal, Denis Pryen, convinced of the merits of our approach, helped us cover our initial deficit for more than five years. Then, thanks to our sales and the support of various French-speaking universities, we were able to break even and, for a while, pay salaries, which we unfortunately had to give up when cultural and university funding policies began to shrink, leading to the current situation, which poses a structural problem for all association-based journals. Furthermore, in recent years, the introduction of online editions and the sharp decline in library subscriptions to paper formats have changed the game. Our existence in electronic format for many years and our presence for over 15 years in JSTOR and Cairn have enabled us to hold our own where many journals have had to cease publication. This has recently led us to strengthen and prioritise our association with Cairn, and perhaps Brill-de Gruyter in the future, in order to develop online distribution on an even larger scale. Nevertheless, the transition is difficult, and it will take us at least five years to achieve our goal of financial autonomy through sales alone. During this time, we will still need the help of our readers and the institutions that support us to get through this transition. 

The arrival of new editors-in-chief to collectively make decisions about this transition is fundamental for the journal. It also better reflects the structure in terms of gender, diversity of backgrounds, disciplines of origin and this common desire to work collectively. The first issues to be published after this special issue demonstrate the dynamism of a collective at work and the passionate discussions that this generates, with exchanges of views that are fundamental to understanding the different facets and other issues, such as academic freedom around the world or the role of international law in relation to force.

Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.
Find out more about Cultures & Conflits :
-       On Cairn
-       On Open Edition Journals
Find out more about the Centre d’étude sur les conflits, Liberté et Sécurité (CECLS) .