CERI

Cette séance du 19/01/2026 est organisée dans le cadre du séminaire Sciences sociales et psychanalyse. Approches comparées.

Intervenante : Houria Abdelouahed, Professeur à l'Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, psychanalyste et traductrice.
https://www.desfemmes.fr/essai/face-a-la-destruction/

Autant les ouvrages de la littérature arabe conservent soigneusement les poèmes où l'homme donne libre cours à son fantasme, voire à son libertinage ou à son blasphème, autant les femmes ont été massivement livrées à l'œuvre de l'effacement. La censure semble s'abattre avec une grande régularité lorsque des femmes entendent parler librement de leur corps et de leur désir. Les controverses dans la littérature contemporaine sont nombreuses sur ce thème, ce qui signale une évolution de la place des récits portés par les autrices. La valorisation de figures mythiques, de la Reine de Saba à Elyssa, fondatrice de Carthage, ouvre, par exemple, de nouvelles perspectives.

Avant ces bouleversements, comme ailleurs, des femmes rebelles ont bien existé dans le monde arabe, confrontées à une norme islamique prégnante. Mais des pans de leur histoire furent effacés, ou déformés, lorsqu'ils n'ont pas été déformés. Plus ces femmes s’affirmaient libres, plus les historiens dominants, sous le poids du politico-théologique, s’acharnaient à effacer leurs traces.

L'histoire officielle et le sens commun, en s'appuyant sur les commentaires des hagiographes, ont largement fabriqué un récit conforme à une politique du pouvoir, voire du surpouvoir (si l'on fait nôtre cette expression de Foucault) et à un discours de domination dans un monde hiérarchisé recevant ses lois du ciel. Il a institué une suréminence masculine, fondant le politique sacré, qui s'oppose quasi systématiquement au travail de pensée, le renvoyant à une forme de blasphème. Les textes des hagiographes sont ainsi devenus le texte de la pensée politique et constituent le terreau conceptuel qui a longtemps permis l'exclusion des femmes des dispositifs qui permettent une autonomie, une émancipation ou une parole sur son désir, son corps ou sa chair.

Responsables scientifiques : François Bafoil, Sciences Po-CERI/CNRS (UMR 7050) et Paul Zawadzki, Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (GSRL/UMR 8582).

Annual Conference of the Sciences Po South Asia Program
December 15 and 16, 2025

December 16
Caste
Chair: Aminah Mohammad-Arif, CESAH-EHESS/CNRS
Jusmeet S. Sihra, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge
Old Problem in a New Place: Redlining of Ex-Untouchable Ghettos
Julien Levesque, GSRL-CNRS
Caste, religion, and official categorization in Pakistan: a review of recent scholarship

Religion
Chair: Lola Guyot, DEVSOC, Paris 1/Panthéon-Sorbonne
Gilles Verniers, CERI-SciencesPo
The institutional exclusion of Muslims in India
Charza Shahabuddin, CERI-SciencesPo
Violence and invisibilisation against ethnic and religious minorities in Bangladesh

Policies
Chair: Manisha Anantharaman, CSO-SciencesPo
Nadeera Rajapakse,
Reducing Inequalities for Sustainable, Equitable Human Development in Sri Lanka
Stéphanie Tawa Lama (CESAH-EHESS/CNRS)
Local elections and the deinstitutionalisation of political equality in India

Meeting the Sciences Po South Asian alumni and students’ association
Chairs: Léa Abrieux and Alexandre Mariani (DAI-SciencesPo)
A panel discussion with office-bearers of the Indo-French Circle:
Vithursan Wigneswaran, President
Hanna Elizabeth John, Vice-President
Saee Vaidya, Head of student events and communication
Manucheher Shafee, UN Social Protection Specialist at the World Food Programme
(crédits : CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 World Bank Photo Collection)

This event of 16/12/2025 is organised as part of the Nuclear Knowledges Seminar and will be held in a hybrid format.

President Harry Truman was perhaps the most influential American president with regards to the path of global nuclear history. Over the course of his presidential term (1945-1953), he oversaw the first (and so far only) use of the atomic bombs in war, the creation of the system of unilateral nuclear use authority, the creation of the hydrogen bomb, and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal. But this new book argues that nearly every aspect of the current understanding of these events, and his broader nuclear legacy, has been dramatically misunderstood by both the general public as well as other scholars. Truman was, rather, perhaps the most anti-nuclear president of the 20th century, and did more to push and reinforce the idea that nuclear weapons could never be used again than perhaps any leader since, and during a key period in which it was by no means an obvious conclusion. Using new historical and archival research, this book attempts to make the case for this argument while resolving the apparent and obvious paradoxes that it presents, offering up a new understanding of how we ought to understand Truman's nuclear legacy, especially in our current geopolitical moment.

Speaker: Alex Wellerstein (CERI - Sciences Po and Stevens Institute of Technology)
Chair: Benoît Pelopidas (CERI - Sciences Po)
Discussants: Manuel Dorion-Soulié (École Polytechnique) and Lori Maguire (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardennes)
Scientific coordinator: Benoît Pelopidas (CERI - Sciences Po / CNRS)

Annual Conference of the Sciences Po South Asia Program
December 15 and 16, 2025

15 December

Protest and conflicts
Chair: Christophe Jaffrelot (CERI-SciencesPo/CNRS)
Mirza M. Hassan, BRAC University
The July Popular Upsurge in Bangladesh: The Class and Political Inequalities at Work?
Gameela Samarasinghe, Colombo University
Inequality, Injustice, and Power Imbalances as Root Causes of Suffering in Sri Lanka - Exploring Psychosocial Responses to Crises.

Gender
Chair: Laurent Gayer (CERI-SciencesPo/CNRS)
Farah Said, Lahore University of Management Studies
Gender Norms and the Dynamics of Agency and Power within Households in Pakistan
Kamala Marius, Université Bordeaux Montaigne and SciencesPo Bordeaux
Rethinking Women’s Work and Gender Inequalities in Globalized India

Regions
Chair: Loraine Kennedy (CESAH-EHESS/CNRS)
Mahendran Thiruvarangan, Jaffna University
Ethnically Unequal: The Northern Muslims of Sri Lanka during the Post-war Years
Kalaiyarasan A., Madras Institute of Development Studies
The Political Economy of Regional Inequality and Fiscal Transfer in India

Class
Sonalde Desai, University of Maryland and NCAER
Class of Mind? Subjective and Objective Dimensions of the Middle-Class Status in Modern India
Shandana Mohmand, IDS, Sussex University
The Political Economy of Progressive Tax Reform: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

This webinar of 10/12/2025 is co-organized with German Institute for Global and Area Studies within the framework of the Franco-German Observatory of the Indo-Pacific.

Speaker:

Plamen Tonchev has been the Head of the Asia Unit at the Athens-based Institute of International Economic Relations (IIER) since 1998. He is a founding member of the European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC) and a contributor to its annual reports. His latest (co-authored) publication, released in August 2025 by the IIER, is entitled China in the Security Conundrum of Europe’s Southeastern Periphery. Mr Tonchev is currently being hosted by the Institute of National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) in Taipei.
Moderators:

Dr Jérôme Doyon, Assistant Professor (CERI, Sciences Po)
Ms Mahima Duggal, GIGA Researcher and former Visiting Doctoral Scholar at the CERI.

Scientific coordinators : Christophe Jaffrelot, Sciences Po-CERI / CNRS, David Camroux, Sciences Po - CERI, Jérôme Doyon, Sciences Po-CERI, Patrick Köllner, GIGA and Johannes Plagemann, GIGA.