Advanced Diploma in War Mapping and Political-Activist Knowledge Production

The challenge: to transform a catalog that has been evolving for almost two decades into a coherent journey woven together by a series of reading hypotheses. Not along a single line of thought, but along several: a populated map. To practice cartography and use texts, thought, and imagination to share experiences; to understand the world, to challenge it, to make room within it for new experiences. Specifically: a map for political intervention.

The publication of political essays makes this intervention explicit; not as promoters of fashionable discussions, but because we are interested in thinking about, and inviting collective reflection on, the wars in which we are all embroiled. Wars that permeate and transcend us; that surround us and explode in our hands—the ever-present every man for himself, now exacerbated by the multiplication of crises.

We are living through a violent offensive by neoliberal fascism. References to war, against diverse and mostly diffuse enemies, are incessantly repeated. Syria, but also Mexican drug cartels, the coup in Bolivia, the territorial control of mafias in Slavic countries, drone warfare in Afghanistan, Islamic terrorism, and the pervasive spread of bellicose gestures during the Trump administration.

In contexts of social upheaval, this intensifies. How can we not take seriously the issue of war and violence, which in recent decades has emerged as a model of social relations and a basis for legitimizing the global order? How can we not try to consider, in contrast, the impotence that these military offensives produce and against which, as a backdrop, we live and produce?

The overarching matrix of all power relations and techniques of domination, war is the continuation of politics and vice versa: means and ends blur their boundaries. War brings death, but above all, it must produce life: population control is indistinguishable from the reproduction of social life itself. A war, like capital, has indeterminate limits in time and space, and the enemy—the populations—is elusive, ungraspable. It blends in with the population and takes the form of civil resistance. This seminar is therefore a map of wars that also includes resistance. That is to say, a map of intensities, of points of condensation. A map that is always handcrafted, provisional. A catalog is a journey, and every worthwhile journey has detours and meandering paths, moments of anxiety and flat stretches. A map of multiplying wars requires a multiplication of maps (and weapons). War between imperialist powers around the world and war of ways of life in the neighborhoods: the city turned into a battlefield. War against the poor, against women, against Black people. War against insecurity, against inflation, against drugs, and against terrorism. War of pacification, for control of territories, the environment, and its natural resources. War of subjectivities and subjectivations, and for the regulation of behavior. War, in short, as the inevitable key to understanding the present of a world that is spiraling out of control and sweeping us away.

The Higher Diploma in War Maps: The Editorial Catalog as a Production of Political-Militant Knowledge is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students; teachers at all levels; activists and militants of trade union organizations, social movements and political parties; public officials; members and managers of non-governmental organizations and professionals interested in the subject.

The program consists of 5 modules with weekly classes, each taught consecutively and linked to the others.

The modules that comprise the advanced diploma are:

MODULE 1: War as a key: accumulation, subjectivity and crisis

CLASS 1: War as a key to understanding

Teacher: Lemon Ink

CLASS 2: War and Accumulation 

Teacher: Silvia Federici

CLASS 3: Wars and Capital 

Teachers: Maurizio Lazzarato

CLASS 4: Neoliberalism and civil war: a cartography of the present  

Teachers: Pierre Dardot and Pierre Sauvêtre

MODULE 2: The war against the poor - and the poor against war -

CLASS 1: The war against the poor – and the poor against war –

Teacher: Lemon Ink

CLASS 2: War and precarity

Teachers: Leandro Barttolotta and Ignacio Gago 

CLASS 3: The Doctor and the Monster: Latin America in a Self-Consuming World

Teacher: Fabio Luis Barbosa Dos Santos

MODULE 3: The war against women and dissident bodies

CLASS 1: From biopolitics to war and towards social reproduction: A feminist shift?
Teacher: Verónica Gago

CLASS 2: Another kind of strength
Teacher: Alessandra Chiricosta

CLASS 3: A feminist critique of disappearance investigations
Teachers: Celeste Perosino and Emanuela Borzacchiello

MODULE 4: The war for territories and the struggle for the commons

 

CLASS 11: The war for territories and the struggle for the commons
Teachers: Lemon Ink


CLASS 12: The war for territories: lithium and energy transition
Teacher: Bruno Fornillo

CLASS 13: Water, tangible wealth and social struggle
Teacher: Gladys Tzul Tzul

MODULE 5: Sensitive Warfare

CLASS 1: The Sensitive War

Teacher: Lemon Ink

CLASS 2: Libertarian-Capitalist Supremacist Brutalism

Teacher: Franco "Bifo" Berardi