Nuclear Proliferation, Close Calls, and Luck.

Today, March 4th 2024, France becomes the first country in the world to enshrine the right to abortion in its Constitution. In the United States, by contrast, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, and ruled that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, sending legal and social aftershocks throughout the…

To mark Black History Month, Vis A Vis spoke to Maboula Soumahoro, one of the leading transatlantic thinkers on race, racism and the African Diaspora. While French and American societies struggle against racism, intolerance and discrimination take different forms on each side of the Atlantic. The French republican tradition emphasizes “laïcité” (or secularism) and color-blindness,…

As the United States embarks on a new election cycle, Vis A Vis is looking back on the Obama Presidency for insights on the challenges the country is now facing and how we got here. Last spring saw the launch of the Obama Presidency oral history, an archive of over 400 interviews with Obama cabinet…

According to many scientists and historians, we have entered a new historical period: the age of the Anthropocene. For the first time in history, as a result of climate change, humans are altering the makeup of planet Earth. In this episode of Vis A Vis, history professor François Hartog and Frédérique Aït-Touati, historian of modern science,…

Public debate today often focuses on uncertainties about the future: what to do about climate change, how to prevent the next pandemic, how to cope with technological revolutions? But many issues that divide societies also have to do with the past. How do we ensure continuity with the values that have shaped us? How should…

This episode delves into a critical examination of how the legal system is increasingly becoming a frontline battleground in the fight against climate change. In a conversation that covers the impact of climate-related court decisions on governments and corporations, the potential outcomes of landmark cases like Juliana v. the United States, the legal obligations towards…

There is no denying the fact that social media and the Internet have the power to inform, educate, spread knowledge and create new pathways of activism. At the same time, the online world is full of deep, dark spaces. Fake news, misinformation, cyber-harassment and hate speech proliferate. They endanger the social fabric of our communities. They also threaten our democracies. European Union-imposed regulations have attempted, for some time, to address hate speech and protect individuals’ privacy. The latest regulation – the Digital Services Act – was adopted in the spring of 2022 and will force social media companies to moderate content on their platforms. Can online regulation be effective? Will it offer protection from disinformation or will it, as some critics argue, stifle freedom of expression? In order to tackle these issues, Vis A Vis invited Columbia University’s Anya Schiffrin and Julia Cagé, professor at Sciences Po in Paris.

Today, more than ever, climate change and its effects are in the news. One the one hand, what we learn is a constant cause for alarm: the number and the intensity of hurricanes is on the rise; forests the world over are being decimated by wildfires; and communities in low lying lands (like Bangladesh and Pakistan) are devastated by floods. Many countries are not keeping up with their carbon-zero commitments. But perhaps we should also draw comfort from news coverage on climate: it’s a sign that the threat of climate change is being taken seriously by an increasingly large part of the population. And there are some positive developments, too. The US is back in the Paris Agreement. The COP 27 recently led to a breakthrough on “loss and damage” funding to support developing countries suffering the worst effects of climate change. So, does this amount to a real shift? Have we finally reached a tipping point in our collective determination to fight climate change? Will historians of the future say: the 2020s was the decade where humanity started walking away from the precipice?

In the wake of current debates on racism and racial discrimination in the US and Europe, the question of reparations for slavery is gaining renewed interest. In her book Faire justice de l’irréparable, (Justice As a Response to the Irreparable), Magali Bessone, Professor of Philosophy at Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, explains that the French abolition of slavery in 1848 did not put an end to economic exploitation, nor did it generate political and economic equality for formerly enslaved people. Similarly, in the United States, promises of compensation made to formerly enslaved people after the civil war were not kept. On both sides of the Atlantic, the issue of reparations for slavery is a source of controversy: who should be compensated? What kind of compensation should be envisaged? On what basis? To mark Black History Month, Vis A Vis is featuring a conversation with Professor Magali Bessone, the author of several books on theories of justice, racism and slavery reparations – among them, Faire justice de l’irréparable. Esclavage colonial et responsabilités contemporaines, Vrin, 2019 (Justice As a Response to the Irreparable: Colonial Slavery and Contemporary Responsibilities)

As our societies in Europe and America struggle with economic inequality, police violence and social injustice, it is quite clear that we are still dealing with the long-term after effects of colonialism and historic racism. This power imbalance is visible in the cultures we inhabit and the languages we speak. Of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, half are endangered and may disappear by the end of the century. In fact, we are losing one language every two weeks. How do we ensure not only that languages survive, but that no one language rules over the others? How can languages interact on a basis of mutual respect rather than domination and supremacy? In this new episode of Vis A Vis, I speak to Columbia philosophy professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who has long thought about these issues. In his latest book, De langue à langue: L’hospitalité de la traduction(From language to language: The hospitality of translation), he describes translation as an antidote to colonialism and to the asymmetric power relations it creates. Translation, he claims, forces us to take a step back from our own language, in order to welcome the Other in our midst and open a pathway to our common humanity.