Journée d’études
“Beyond 1945: Rethinking the ending of the Second World War”

19 janvier 2024, 9:00-18:00
Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po, 1, place Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, 75007 Paris

Organisers: Thomas Bottelier (CHSP), Guillaume Piketty (CHSP).
With the support of: programme Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions de la Commission européenne.

The end of the Second World War is normally depicted as an event defined by German and Japanese defeat in 1945: in other words, by the cessation of ‘regular’hostilities. The purpose of this conference is to rethink this idée fixe. Rather than a simple matter ofAxis defeat and Allied victory, we explore the war’s ending as a process that that began years before 1945 and continued for years after across the world, and which required massive political, social and personal effort. Beyond the guns falling silent, it encompassed collective processes such as occupation, demobilisation, and law or treaty-making, as well as intimate experiences involving trauma, memory, the body and more. The conference thus seeks a double reorientation of inquiry: away from victory/defeat and towards peacemaking, and away from a primarily top-down view topaying equal attention to agency from below. The ultimate goal is to challenge 1945’s totemic statusas the twentieth century’s hinge year, which has served to sever the study of the Second World Warfrom that of supposedly ‘post-war’ questions such as decolonisation, development, democratisation, or the Cold War.

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