Call for Papers - Special issue of the French academic journal Flux

Networks in Peril

Destruction, Subversion and Sabotage

(XIX^th-XXI^th Century)

Benjamin G. Thierry and Valérie Schafer (ed.)

From the appearance of the word “sabotage” in France at the end of the nineteenth century - and its theorization notably by Emile Pouget (Albertelli, 2016) - through the destruction of communications infrastructures in times of war, to the spate of recent worldwide cyber attacks, infrastructure networks always possess a large number of vulnerabilities despite their diversity (information and communications networks, energy, banking, transport, engineering structures...). They may become prime targets for what they represent or because of the organizations that they support.

Are networks the subject of a particular technophobia, of a misotechnie (Jarrige, 2016)? Do they have specific or shared vulnerabilities (Baran, 1964; Abramovici and Bradley, 2009)? How are these vulnerabilities negotiated, evaluated and managed? How and why do networks become targets in conflicts? (Kempf, 2014; Pinsolle, 2015). Have the targets, issues, objectives and actors (Pasquinelli, 2010) fundamentally changed over time and are they different over space and between scales?

This special issue aims to explore projects and acts of destruction, subversion and sabotage of infrastructure networks in an interdisciplinary approach, and to analyse past and current vulnerabilities and attempts to overcome these.

Submissions

Please submit proposals (in French or English) for papers to both

benjaminthierry@gmail.com

valerieschafer@wanadoo.fr

Initial proposals should be one page long, outlining the specific focus and approach of the paper and providing a short bibliography.

Selected authors will then be invited to submit a full paper which will undergo full peer review before acceptance for publication.

Timetable

Deadline for the submission of proposals: May 15^th 2018

Notification of proposal acceptance: June 15^th 2018

Submissions of full papers (French or English, 8000 words): October 15^th 2018

References

Abramovici M., Bradley P., 2009, Integrated circuit security: new threats and solutions, in: Sheldon F., Peterson G., Krings A., Abercrombie R., Mili A. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5th Annual Workshop on Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research: Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Challenges and Strategies (CSIIRW '09), New York : ACM.

Albertelli S., 2016, Histoire du sabotage. De la CGT à la Résistance, Paris : Perrin.

Baran P., 1964, On distributed communications. Introduction to distributed communications networks, août 1964 - Rand Corporation, Online archives.

Jarrige F., 2016, Technocritiques, Paris : La Découverte.

Kempf O., 2014, Penser les réseaux. Une approche stratégique, Paris : L’Harmattan.

Pasquinelli M., 2010, The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage, Policy Futures in Education, Vol 8, Issue 6, p. 671-682.

Pinsolle D., 2015, Du ralentissement au déraillement : le développement du sabotage en France (1897-1914), Histoire, économie & société, vol. 34e année, n°4, p. 56-72.