Launch of the inaugural seminar cycle of the DÉCRIPT program

This talk examines how polarization and identity politics affect the role conception and enactment of IGOs. Drawing on role theory, I argue that IGOs can be understood as role carriers, enacting roles such as mediator, stabilizer, reformer, or custodian, depending on the interplay between member state expectations, institutional self-perceptions, and external crises. Polarization and identity politics - whether within or across member states - alters these expectations and may generate pressures for role adjustment, adaptation, innovation, or even abandonment. The recent redefinition of the European Union’s foreign policy roles in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates how ontological security crises force IGOs to renegotiate their identities and align their external roles with shifting internal cleavages.

By bridging comparative IGO research with role theory, the analysis highlights two broader implications. First, polarization reshapes IGOs’ external agency by limiting consensus, producing fragmented role enactments, and constraining their capacity to project stability. Second, identity politics transforms IGOs internally, as competing narratives of “who we are” among member states spill over into organizational role conceptions, sometimes strengthening cohesion through shared threat perceptions, other times deepening internal fractures.

This presentation aims to clarify the notions of crisis and civilizational narrative using examples drawn from the wider Middle East. First, the notion of identity regime as a hierarchical organization between groups (ethnic, religious) will be clarified. From there, we can approach the civilizational narrative as a particular form of identity narrative, whose distinctive feature is its claim to make sense of events as a whole (a meta-frame). These identity-based narratives inspire the definition of foreign policy (defense of Eastern Christians, for example) or transnational mobilizations (caricature of the prophet and defense of Islam). Secondly, we'll look at crises that lead to changes in social structures. More specifically, we'll show how conflicts over the interpretation of disruptive events enable the mobilization of competing narratives (jihad or nationalist struggle in Afghanistan, the events in Gaza as genocide or defense against Islamism), which condition the definition of situations and the resources that can be mobilized. In particular, identity regimes are redefined by new narratives (Kemalist revolution, status of non-Sunnis in Iran after the revolution).

This presentation surveys the post-2010 turn to civilizationism—an ideology that elevates civilizational identity as a primary political frame. Scholarship increasingly understand civilizationism not as a fixed cultural essence but as a flexible and politically constructed identity, rather than as immutable entities destined to clash. Such new ‘imagined communities’ emerge both from elite discourses and from popular understandings, raising questions about the balance between top-down mobilization and bottom-up identification. More broadly, civilizationism functions as a counter-hegemonic ideology, contesting liberal universalism and articulating alternative systems of belonging and value. This presentation places particular emphasis on how civilizational narratives are mobilized in Russia and in the West, highlighting their role in shaping domestic legitimacy and international confrontation.

This session will propose a conceptualization of political Salafism and sovereignism as they manifest themselves in three countries of the Sahelian interior, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Issues analyzed will include the narrative structure of the two ideological discourses, their convergences and divergences, and what they reveal and conceal about power stakes - at both an "event" and structural (sociological) level - in the countries concerned.

This inaugural session of the Indo-Pacific seminar offers multidisciplinary reflection and cross-views on the cultural and civilizational registers mobilized in the region. It will focus in particular on three key notions - "civilization", "culture" and "Asian values" - which are used to narrate national or regional histories and to assert the singularity of political trajectories. The challenge will be to examine both the way in which these notions structure discourses and practices, and their circulatory dimension, on regional and international scales, between revivals, appropriations and reinterpretations.

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