This seminar offers to explore the comparative and transnational history of domestic threats in modern societies. At the crossroads of political, social, and cultural history, we wish to distance ourselves from the dominant ‘pathological’ understanding of the enemy trope and take these anxieties seriously in a sociological perspective. We will examine how the figures of internal enemies took roots, socially and politically ; and what kind of transformations they engendered in terms of institutions, laws, practices, and conducts. What is a domestic enemy? In what contexts and through what processes did their successive figures emerge? What type of discourses framed the threats? Drawing from what kind of cultural references, repertoires, and experiences? How did these representations travel and transform? What kind of political and social reconfigurations did they produce? These are a few of the questions we will addressand discuss through a series of historical and contemporary cases.
