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This article offers a novel historical interpretation of the problem of jihadism through a critique of the philosophical foundations of Olivier Roy's scholarship on Islam and jihadism. In particular, the article elucidates the consequences of the dominant positivist ontology and secular episteme of the social sciences for the analysis of jihadism. To this end, it formulates an alternative conceptualization of the main terms of analysis (namely, Islam, the ummah, the caliphate, and jihad), highlighting their political significance and disavowing thereby the epistemic prejudices of Eurocentric social science. The article argues jihad designates a political phenomenon tied to Islam's presence as a universal order and Muslims as an autonomous community. It is a signifier of the organized, collective warfare of Muslims as a distinct political group, represented by the caliphate as an 'Islamicate great power', and waged by its professional armies. Jihadism represents the venture to recover jihad in a world without a caliphate, its condition of possibility being the disappearance of the caliphate, and in that it signifies the fragmentation, disorganization, and de-politicization of jihad.

The contemporary social sciences emerged in the West from the eighteenth century as new modes of technology and scientific research developed. There is no doubt that technological advances led to the triumph of empiricism over metaphysics. This was the basis for the transformation of the nomenclatures of natural philosophy and moral philosophy into natural science and moral science respectively. As the empiricist methodologies of the natural sciences became successful, the social sciences chose to emulate their techniques. Thus, the methodological claim was made that that the social sciences and their division of labour compartmentalisation of the social world reflected that world in objectivist terms. But the fact that humans themselves were involved in describing and explaining the behaviours of other humans meant that a subjective element would be always be involved unless serious attempts were made for cognitive correctives and a self-conscious regard for consistent objectivity. While research in archaeology is relatively objective in its scientific findings, this is not the case with the other social sciences – especially anthropology and history. There has been an arbitrary Eurocentric creation and reification of theories and terms founded on whimsical and unsupported claims concerning the evolutionary status of Homo sapiens Africanus.






Lansana Keita, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Email: keitalans7@gmail.com

In The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, I suggested that international law began in the 1860's as part of liberal entrenchment in Europe as the clouds of nationalism, racism and socialism were rising in the political horizon. It began as a project of practicalmen, attorneys and lawyers active in politics and parliament, and not out of philosophical contemplation or system-construction. University professors were involved, but these were professors of something that was seen more as a craft than a science. What they aimed at was to "civilize" the behaviour of their nations, but also the colonies, and to do this by coordinating liberal legislative reform in Europe, by supporting formal empire in the colonies, and by doing all this as part of a set of cosmopolitan legal projects they grouped into their "international law" (Droit international, diritto internazionale, Völkerrecht). .

Through a narrative analysis of three of Bong Joon-ho's films: The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017), this thesis explores the impact of global media flow of transnational cinema, foregrounding its potential to convey broader (but more effective) social and ecological political messages through its wider reach to audiences. Each film selected highlights a specific aspect of transnational cinema – postcolonial transnationalism (Shohat and Stam, 1994), transnational odor (Koichi Iwabuchi, 2002), and ecocinema transnationalism (Kääpä Pietari, 2013) - illustrating the fluidity of cinema in the 21st century and further, the unique position Netflix holds in our contemporary mediascape as a global producer and distributor. Netflix is disrupting the traditional cinema system, offering its users worldwide the possibility to watch films and series on demand from home. Using Homi. L. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's theories this thesis will show how Bong Joon-ho's films destabilize the Eurocentric perspective of traditional cinema. Moreover, it will become clear how the transnational character of Bong Joon-ho's films and their form of distribution has the potential to engender deconstructive viewing positions, and by doing so, challenge Eurocentric perspectives.

L'aventure coloniale constitue un événement important pour la compréhension théorique des rapports entre don, religion et marché dans la mise en place du processus civilisateur des sociétés du Sud. Dans ce texte, nous voulons cerner les particularités et les paradoxes du pacte colonial qui sous-tend la colonisation ibérique en Amérique Latine envisagée du point de vue de la modernisation planétaire. Cette dimension paradoxale et multiple de la colonisation est actuellement l'objet de réflexion de la part des théoriciens post-coloniaux.