"A Support Network for Endangered Scholars during the Late Cold War. The Committee of Mathematicians and a Human Rights Broad-based Coalition in France"

Résumé En

This article focuses on a non-state player created in the 1970s to defend mathematicians persecuted for their political opinions and commitments under non-democratic regimes of both the political left and right. While being built incrementally as an internationalized advocacy network, located in several countries and invoking as its mission the defense of human rights, the International Committee of Mathematicians succeeded in gathering around it a heterogeneous and variable coalition of allies, and even in occupying a pivotal position within a network that extended beyond the mathematical milieu. Based on a survey conducted mainly on its French component, the article aims to map out the progressive construction of the committee’s broad coalition of allies and the intersectoral dimension of its action. It retraces the trajectories of some of the main ‘cause entrepreneurs’ involved and the dynamic extension of ties to committees anchored in other scientific disciplines, associative circles, trade unions, and professional milieus (such as lawyers and psychiatrists), as well as to partisan and state players. The broader configuration within which the French branch of the International Committee of Mathematicians was located provided it with varied types of resources, skills, knowledge, and know-how and helped diversify its forms of intervention, while also increasing their impact. This cooperation, however, did not exclude distinction from, and even competition with, other players. By taking heed of social actors, their backgrounds and their prior incorporation of political ideas and practices, this contribution breaks away from the assumption of an ex-nihilo emergence of the human rights activism in the 1970s and shows that the patterns of its advocacy, its relevant agents, and their practices were much more intricate and provided with history.