Since the creation of the United Nations, and in line with the civilizing mission’s rhetoric used to justify colonialism, racist arguments about the African continent as halting, obstructing,…
“Trust in humanitarian action” was the top item on the agenda of the 33rd international conference of the Red Cross movement which took place in Geneva in December…
This essay was written seated on my couch, trying to make sense of the contemporary ‘state of emergency’ as the world around me has gradually come to a…
What kind of practices, forms of moral reasoning and ethical orientation does Muslim humanitarianism entail? In what contexts and in response to what social problems does it arise?…
Be free. Eat sweets. Do not go to university (but use the university to print for free). Resist academic hierarchy. Do not believe what professors say. Doubt, always.…
As we start into 2018, we seize the opportunity of this post by Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan on their influential edited volume States at Work to…
This summer, Allegra has been particularly inspired by the intricacies of global bureaucracies. Our readers may have already read the report of the workshop ‘The Bureaucratization of Utopia̵…
This is part two of our virtual Meeting on Meeting. Read the Minute of our First MoM here. Date: 12 July 2017 Chair: Julie Billaud (JB), Director of…
Our students do not dream of global change anymore! It is on these pessimistic words that Alessandro Monsutti opened our workshop « The Bureaucratization of Utopia: International Governance, Audit…
The twenty-five years since the end of the Cold War have been a historical watershed for the project of international governance embodied by the United Nations, a project…
Are those developments, usually condemned as corrupting us as scholars and leading to the death of pure research, introducing some kind of innovation vis-à-vis established academic work? For…
When Vladimir Nalivkin, a Russian officer who had served in several military campaigns, and his wife, Maria Nalivkina, took up farming in 1878 in the village of Nanay…
1. To what extent does the notion of political agency help to understand political change? I started engaging with the notion of political agency in my earlier work…
Last May, an international workshop entitled Rethinking political agency in the Middle East: Engaging political anthropology took place in Fiesole at the European University Institute. We published b…
Those who have followed Allegra’s adventures from its creation in 2013 will probably remember that our initial motto was “Slow down!”. Prior to launching the website, Allegra’s…
My fieldwork in Afghanistan in 2007 involved a substantial amount of time spent at wedding parties. It was rare to spend a week without being invited to one.…
The sexual assaults that occurred in Cologne on New Year’s Eve will long be remembered in Germany and in Europe more broadly. What a pity that each time…
What is an academic blog? Who form its audience and who are, or should be, its authors? How does blogging resonate with more ‘serious’ – or at minimum…
De-Colonizer: Research and Art Laboratory for Social Change is a project that we, as Allegra Lab, could not ignore when doing our researches for this thematic thread on…
Gish Amit is a historian who has been involved in non formal education for twenty years. He taught cinema and literature at the Arab Democratic School in Jaffa,…
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) is a program run by The New School for Social Research for the second time this year. It brings together graduate…