Habiter l’entre-deux - 1ere table ronde

Between wars, exiles and multiple identities, how can we inhabit a world in which the provisional becomes permanent? Round table moderated by Soulayma Mardam Bey Participants: Ahmad Ashour, Albert Dichy and Laura Ruiz de Elvira

The Mediterranean is a geography of the in-between, between several shores, several identities and several languages. But also between the promises of revolutions and their disillusioning aftermaths, between exiles and returns, wars and new beginnings.

For many, this in-between is not simply a passage, but a way of inhabiting the world: a space without stable foundations, where our relationship with time becomes blurred, where the provisional becomes permanent, and where the future is difficult to imagine as anything other than repetition or rupture. Neither fully here nor already elsewhere, neither entirely in the catastrophe nor truly in the aftermath, how can we live when nothing ever seems definitively secured? What does it mean to inhabit war when everything is shaken? How are interpersonal relationships (familial, romantic or friendly), individual affiliations and narratives rethought and recomposed amid uncertainty? Is it possible to construct a thought, a work or a commitment without giving in either to despair or nostalgia? Faced with injustice, the denial of dignity and even of the right to exist, it is life itself that must be defended through various forms of political and cultural resistance.

Beyond war and peace, this also means questioning the possibility of welcoming multiplicity within oneself, allowing it to unfold and assert itself, in a world increasingly tempted by narrow, fixed and monochrome visions of identity.

Latest publications

Albert Dichy, Les valises de Jean Genet. Rompre, disparaître, écrire, Éditions de l’IMEC, 2020. Laura Ruiz de Elvira, Charities and Politics in Bashar al-Asad’s Syria: The Unravelling of the Old Social Contract, Edinburgh University Press, 2026 Laura Ruiz de Elvira and Saeidnia Sahar Aurore (eds.), Les mondes de la bienfaisance. Les pratiques du bien au prisme des sciences sociales, CNRS éditions, 2021. Laura Ruiz de Elvira, Vers la fin du contrat social en Syrie : associations de bienfaisance et redéploiement de l’Etat (2000-2011), Karthala, 2019.