Pascal Lottaz: Neutrality, An Urgent Necessity

Our world is dominated by war, news of war, legacies of past wars, and rumors of coming wars. Switzerland, however, has famously chosen not to conduct its international affairs in the register of violence, preferring instead diplomacy, trade, and armed neutrality.

Pascal Lottaz, a Swiss native researching at Kyoto University, is a pioneer in neutrality studies, or the study of, as Professor Lottaz puts it in this fascinating interview, taking the oxygen away from war by embracing the complexity of political and transnational interactions.

People around the world are turning to neutrality as a way of avoiding the ruin of war (including Washington’s preferred method of proxy war). The trouble, though, is that neutrality requires conversation, and Washington and its proxies control many of the global means of communication. Professor Lottaz considers how to continue talking to one another across political divides as censorship, and the wars that censorship fuels, proliferates.

The painting is "Allegory of Justice Punishing Injustice," by Jean-Marc Nattier; painted in 1737.