Centre for the Study of War and Violence
Mission statementRecently created in late 2025, The Centre for the Study of War and Violence at the University of Liège is committed to advancing critical and interdisciplinary research on the dynamics and consequences of war and violence. We seek to challenge conventional paradigms and explore the sociological, political, and cultural dimensions of armed conflict, emphasizing its profound impact on societies and individuals. Through rigorous scholarship and collaborative networks, the Centre aims to foster informed debate and contribute to the pursuit of peace and justice. Our vision is to become a leading hub for Critical War Studies, shaping academic and public understanding of conflict and violence in modern history and our twenty-first century. The Centre is founded on principles of intellectual rigor, interdisciplinarity, and critical inquiry. We uphold academic freedom and safeguard intellectual independence through transparent public funding that avoids conflicts of interest. Our commitment to ethical research ensures that our work not only advances knowledge but also serves the broader goal of building a more just and peaceful world. |
Members |
Julien Pomarède
Bio: Julien is founding director of the Centre for the Study of War and Violence and Associate Professor of International Politics at the Department of Political Science at ULiège. Before joining the Department in September 2022, I held a postdoctoral research position at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and was a Wiener-Anspach Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford. I received my PhD in Political Science from ULB in October 2018, which focused on a political sociology of NATO's counterterrorism professional networks, practices, and policies after 9/11. My research interests focus on Critical War Studies, with a particular emphasis on the historical sociology of Western organized violence. Publications (selected): (2025) Devastation: Field artillery, conventionality and the pathological economy of modern warfare. European Journal of International Relations (online first: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13540661251366737). (2015) "The Fetish of Force: Why Weapons Are Not Just 'Instruments' of War", E-International Relations, October 13, 2025 (https://www.e-ir.info/2025/10/13/the-fetish-of-force-why-weapons-are-not-just-instruments-of-war/) (2024) Deadly ambiguities: NATO and the politics of counter-terrorism in international organizations after 9/11. Security Dialogue, 2024, 55(6), 588-606. (2021) Imagining (in)security: NATO's collective self-defence and post-9/11 military policing in the mediterranean sea. Review of International Studies, 47(2), 192-210. (2021) Nettoyer, contrôler et cibler : les engrenages de violence et la guerre de l¿OTAN contre le terrorisme en Afghanistan. Critique Internationale, 92(3), 71-94. (2021). Ethnographie et secret diplomatico-militaire : Réflexions sur une observation participante dans le contre-terrorisme de l'OTAN. Cultures et Conflits, 118(2), 37-69. (2020) La fabrique de l'OTAN : Contre-terrorisme et organisation transnationale de la violence. Bruxelles, Bruxelles : Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles. (2020) Archipelagos of death: the assemblage of population-centric war in Afghanistan. Defence Studies, 20(3), 202 - 223. (2018). Normalizing violence through front-line stories: the case of American Sniper. Critical Military Studies, 4(1), 52-71. |
Andrea Restaldi
Bio: Andrea is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Université de Liège working within the WEAPONS research project, funded by the FNRS (2025-2029). His doctoral research focuses on the socio-historical foundations of violence in warfare and the role of conventional weapons in the normalisation and legitimation of mass destruction, supervised by Prof. Julien Pomarède (ULiège) and Prof. Benoît Pelopidas (Sciences Po Paris). He holds a master's degree in International Governance and Diplomacy from Sciences Po Paris and a bachelor's degree in International Studies from the University of Turin. He speaks English, French and Italian. Research interests: Critical War and Security Studies – Conventional and Nuclear Weapons - Sociology of War – War and the Environment - Historical Sociology." |
Marie Kwon
Bio: Marie Kwon is a PhD researcher in International Relations, supervised by Professor Julien Pomarède at the University of Liège and Professor J. Peter Burgess at the Chair in Geopolitics of Risk at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). Supported by a FRESH fellowship from the F.R.S.–FNRS, her doctoral research examines the emergence of the Indo-Pacific as a regional political space through geopolitical genealogies, environmental imaginaries, and security practices. Currently a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Marie is a Fulbright Scholar and an Associate at Harvard University’s Asia Centre. She has recently collaborated with the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean at University College London (UCL), the Department of International Relations at the University of Indonesia (UI), and the Asia Centre at Seoul National University (SNU). She holds degrees from SOAS, University of London; Sciences Po Paris; and New York University. Marie has previously worked with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the International Crisis Group, and the Jeju Peace Institute. Research interests: Critical Security Studies; Indo-Pacific Studies; Political Geography International Political Sociology; Infrastructural Approaches; Ocean Studies. Research Summary: “Navigating the Indo-Pacific: Geopolitical Genealogies, Epistemic Infrastructures, and the Production of Regional Space” Grants and Awards: Marie’s work has been supported by numerous prestigious institutions, including Fulbright, the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.–FNRS), Wallonia-Brussels International, the David-Constant Fund, the French Embassy in the United Kingdom, PSL Research University, the Rotary Foundation, and the Foundation of the University of Liège. Conferences & Invited Talks: Marie has presented her research at major international conferences, including those of the International Studies Association, the European International Studies Association, the European Consortium for Political Research, the International Convention of Asian Scholars, the Belgian Political Science Association, and the International Political Science Association. She has also delivered invited talks at institutions such as Seoul National University, Sciences Po Paris, Queen Mary University of London, and the Maison Française d’Oxford. Event Organisation: Marie regularly convenes conference panels on Indo-Pacific security and has organised academic workshops on critical approaches to space and on the legacies of the Bandung Conference. She is also a convenor of the annual International Political Sociology: Doing IPS Belgium Seminar. Publications: Book chapters
Peer-reviewed outlets
Policy commentaries
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Marijn Hoijtink
Bio: Dr. Marijn Hoijtink is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp. Her research combines insights from International Relations, critical security studies, and science and technology studies to understand how war shapes technology and vice versa. Her research project, PLATFORM WARS, funded within the framework of the Odysseus program from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), investigates the expansion of the platform model in defense, and how this impacts military innovation and procurement, practices of warfighting, and regulation and ethics. She is also one of the lead researchers on the Realities of Algorithmic Warfare project, which investigates the innovation, deployment, and impact of AI systems in the military domain and how these affect civilian harm, security, human rights, and democratic principles. |
Benoit Pelopidas
Bio: Benoît Pelopidas est Professeur des universités (Full Professor) en science politique et fondateur du programme d'étude des savoirs nucléaires (Nuclear Knowledges) à Sciences Po (CERI). Il est l’auteur de Repenser les choix nucléaires (Presses de Sciences Po, 2022) et éditeur de Nuclear France (Routledge, 2024). Ses recherches et celles de l’équipe refusent tout financement porteur de conflit d’intérêt et ont été récompensées par cinq prix académiques internationaux. De 2016 à 2019, il était titulaire de la chaire d’excellence en études de sécurité (Sciences Po – USPC). Depuis 2012, il est chercheur associé au Centre pour la Sécurité Internationale et la Coopération (CISAC) de l’Université Stanford. Nuclear Knowledges est le premier programme universitaire français de recherche sur le phénomène nucléaire qui soit indépendant et transparent sur ses sources de financements (Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche, ANR, ERC, 2 financements Marie Curie pour des contrats postdoctoraux, Carnegie Corporation of New York) et refuse catégoriquement le financement des acteurs de la filière et des activistes antinucléaires afin d'éviter le conflit d'intérêts et d’objectiver ces effets sur la production de connaissance. Outre l’objectivation de ces effets, cet effort interdisciplinaire de recherche indépendante a permis d’établir l’incapacité de l’arsenal nucléaire français à atteindre ses cibles, au moins jusqu’en 1974, la sous-estimation des effets des essais nucléaires français en Polynésie, le rôle de la chance dans l’évitement d’explosions nucléaires non-désirées jusqu’à présent, l’absence de consensus dans les opinions publiques françaises et britanniques au sujet des armes nucléaires, la surestimation de la prolifération horizontale et une mauvaise compréhension de ses déterminants, et le rôle de la nostalgie et des imaginaires de l’avenir dans la détermination des politiques nucléaires possibles et désirables, les angles morts de la prospective eu égard aux effets des transformations planétaires sur les armes nucléaires. Ces résultats sont enseignés en France, au Royaume-Uni, aux Etats-Unis et en Australie. Ils ont été mobilisés notamment par le comité Nobel, le Congrès des Etats-Unis et les Nations Unies. |
Mathias Delori
Bio: Mathias Delori (he/him, born 1978) is a specialist of critical war, peace and security studies. He completed his PhD at Sciences Po Grenoble in 2008 and his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) at Paris 1 Sorbonne in 2020. He is currently CNRS associate research professor (chargé de recherche CNRS) at the Centre for International Studies (CERI) from Sciences Po Paris. Mathias was also a research fellow or invited professor at the European University Institute in Florence, the Université de Montréal, the Colorado University in Boulder, the Centre Emile Durkheim in Bordeaux and the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. Mathias is co-editor in chief of Cultures et Conflits and member of the editorial board of Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS) and Deutsche-französische Perspektiven in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. He is currently supervising the PhD dissertations of Antoine Younsi, Lou Villafranca, Emilie Bigand, and Katharina Egle. |
Christophe Wasinski
Bio: Professor of Political Science (International Relations) at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is a member of the Center for Recherche et Etudes en Politique Internationale (REPI) and an associate researcher at GRIP. His research focuses on weapons, military and security issues. |
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Projects |
Julien Pomarède (Principal investigator) Andrea Restaldi (PhD candidate) – “WEAPONS”"WEAPONS" is funded by two grants from the FNRS (PDR-2025-2029 – 320 000 euros) and ULiège (CDR-SH – 2023-2026 – 43 500 euros) dedicated to the historical sociology of conventional weapons in ground combat between the mid-19th century to the late 21st century. The project seeks to explain the uses of modern weapons on the battlefield. The project argues that these uses are conditioned less by means-ends logics (instrumental-rational paradigm), social perceptions (constructivism) or the ethical/socio-technical calibration of force (critical constructivism) than by deep sociological structures such as the organizational anatomy of the state and its military institutions, socio-economic mutations, and ideological penetration in combat. Drawing on Historical sociology, Science and technology studies, with a particular focus on US, French and British artillery warfare and a strong accent put on archival research, this project intends to offer fresh insights on the connections between society, military technology and organized violence. Marie Kwon (PhD candidate)“Navigating the Indo-Pacific: Geopolitical Genealogies, Epistemic Infrastructures, and the Production of Regional Space”. Funding: FRESH FNRS.Marie’s doctoral research investigates how the Indo-Pacific has been produced as a geographical framework and a contested geopolitical space through the security discourses and practices of both regional and extra-regional actors (2014-2022), and how this process reshapes Asian regionalism. Although the Indo-Pacific now anchors global strategic debates, existing analyses often privilege external, primarily Western, interpretations of Asian regional space. Drawing on six months of fieldwork and 60 elite interviews in Indonesia, Singapore, and South Korea, her work recentres the perspectives of policymakers, strategic communities, and scholars embedded in the region. Her project approaches the Indo-Pacific as an emergent and performative spatial construct shaped by geopolitical genealogies, temporal narratives, and intellectual legacies of thinking about connectivity and oceanic space. These dynamics generate new forms of non-alignment, exclusion, and vulnerability. By tracing how East and Southeast Asian elites interpret, contest, and operationalize the Indo-Pacific, the research shows how regional actors navigate great-power competition and shifting security environments to (re)articulate their visions of regionalism and regional space. Situated at the intersection of International Political Sociology, Political Geography, and Critical Security Studies, this dissertation contributes to broader debates on how geopolitical categories are produced and stabilized. It further offers policy-relevant insights for Europe’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific, underscoring the need to ground external strategies in local perspectives. |
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