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.

• Diego Picotto (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• Ezequiel Gatto (National University of San Martín, Argentina)
• Ignacio Gago (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• Andrés Bracony (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• Veronica Gago (National University of San Martín - CONICET, Argentina)
• Maurizio Lazzarato (University of Paris, France)
• Silvia Federici (Hofstra University of New York, United States)
• Rodrigo ruiz (University of Chile)
• Leandro Barttolotta (FLACSO, Argentina)
• Susana Draper (Princeton University, United States)
• Bruno Fornillo (CONICET, Argentina)
• Arturo Escobar (University of North Carolina, United States)
• Franco Bifo Berardi (University of Bologna, Italy)
• Suely Rolnik (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brazil)

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 assembly

• CLASS 1: Why talk about “world civil war”?
  
  Teacher: Maurizio Lazzarato
  
  

• CLASS 2: Body, capitalism and reproduction of labor power

  Teacher: Silvia Federici
  
  

• CLASS 3: Neoliberalism and civil war: a cartography of the present  

  Teachers: Pierre Dardot, Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval and Pierre Sauvêtre

MODULE 2: The war against the poor (and the poor against war)

• CLASS 4: The war against the poor (and the poor against war)

  Teacher: Lemon Ink
  
  

• CLASS 5: War and precarity

  Teacher: War and precarity

• CLASS 6: Chile: from revolt to conservative closure: political evaluation of a process and New right and state of exception in El Salvador  

  Teachers: Rodrigo Ruiz and John Gibler

MODULE 3: The War Against Women

 

• CLASS 7: The war against women and current feminist struggles
  
  Teacher: Verónica Gago
  
  
  
• CLASS 8: Capitalist accumulation and the war against women: key interpretations from the struggles 
  
  Teachers: Susana Draper and Emanuela Borzacchiello
  
  
  
• CLASS 9: The art of combat: another way of thinking about war
  
  Teacher: Alessandra Chiricosta

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

• CLASS 10: The war for territories and the struggle for the commons
  
  Teacher: Lemon Ink 
  
  
  
• CLASS 11: The war for territories: lithium and energy transition  
  
  Teacher: Bruno Fornillo
  
  
  
• CLASS 12: Occupation of territories, ontology and counter-narratives    
  
  Teacher: Arturo Escobar

MODULE 5: Sensitive Warfare

• CLASS 13: The Sensitive War
  
  Teacher: Lemon Ink
  
  
  
• CLASS 14: From the micropolitics of malaise to the desire for insurrection (and de Brazil to the world: a characterization of the global far right     
  
  Teacher: Suely Rolnik and Rodrigo Nunes
  
  
  
• CLASS 15: War and Subjectivity  
  
  Teacher: Franco "Bifo" Berardi