Romain Huët
Bio
Romain Huët is a professor at the University Rennes 2 and an ethnographer and social theorist whose work explores the lived experience of war, uprising, and social suffering. A specialist in the anthropology of conflict and contemporary violence, he focuses on how ordinary individuals face the extreme, how they come to accept, resist, or transform the experience of killing, loss, and survival. His research belongs to a broader sociology of disaster, attentive to subjectivity, vulnerability, and the fragile conditions of democracy.
He has been conducting long-term ethnographic research in Syria and Ukraine, exploring both armed groups and civilian lives to understand how people navigate the moral, emotional, and political challenges of war. Through these intertwined fields, he examines how individuals give meaning to violence and commitment, and how endurance, conviction, and exhaustion shape their ways of inhabiting conflict.
His most recent book, La guerre en tête. From Syria to Ukraine (Presses Universitaires de France, 2024), is considered a reference work on the anthropology of combat and engagement. Through intimate testimonies and immersive observation, it investigates how political conviction, exhaustion, and emotion intertwine in the decision to fight and what it means, ultimately, to “carry war in one’s mind.”
Romain Huët’s previous works include Le vertige de l’émeute (PUF, 2019) and De si violentes fatigues (PUF, 2021), which examine the ethics of revolt and the political potential of fatigue.
His work opens a rare window onto the ordinary life of war, showing how human beings reinvent meaning, emotion, and moral imagination under extreme conditions. Through this ethnographic sensitivity, he restores to the experience of violence and conflict its complexity, its fragility, and its profoundly human dimension.