research

postdoctoral research

ANR TROC project (2023-2024)

From September 2023 to August 2024, I was a postdoctoral researcher within the ANR TROC project (Terrorists Reintegration in Open Custody), coordinated by Nicolas Amadio (DynamE, Université de Strasbourg), at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH).

This multidisciplinary research project studies the obstacles and drivers of the social reintegration of individuals convicted of terrorism or suspected of radicalization. Grounded in desistance studies, it focuses on the links between the individual and collective dimensions of social reintegration, and explores two hypotheses:

1. Reintegration practices in open custody require identifying the issues related to the (mis)adjustments of interpretations and expectations between the main actors involved and social demands.
2. Individual resistance and the impact of collectives working against violent radicalization are sustained by both individual and collective dynamics.

The project uses a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative analysis — factorial survey studies and data collected from judicial and professional documents — with qualitative research interviews and narrative methods. Data is drawn from actors across the penal chain, civil society organizations, families, and collectives, as well as from the trajectories of individuals concerned.

Funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR PRC CE39 — Global Security and Cybersecurity) and co-funded by the Secrétariat Général de la Défense et de la Sécurité Nationale (SGDSN), the project brings together four research teams led by Nicolas Amadio (DynamE, Université de Strasbourg), Massil Benbouriche (PSITEC, Université de Lille), Bruno Domingo (FMSH, Université de Toulouse) and Rachel Sarg (2L2S, Université de Lorraine).

Emergence(s) “Ennemis” project (2022-2023)

I was a postdoctoral researcher from 01/09/2022 to 31/08/2023 within the Enemy project, led by Alexandre Rios-Bordes.

In 2022, the research project received the support of the Émergence(s) program of the city of Paris. It is directed by the historian Alexandre Rios-Bordes. It brings together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and jurists. This project aims at studying and comparing contemporary situations in which the identification by a State of an “internal enemy” undermines the distinction between two orders of violence that are a priori irreducible: the external order of war and the internal order of crime.

The team works on a set of international cases, systematically analyzed and compared according to three axes of analysis:

1. the process of enemisation , i.e. the social and political radicalization of adversity;
2. the transformations engendered in political institutions and in the dominant definition of codes of conduct;
3. the long-term processes that led to the internalization of threats within nation-states.

Since November 2020, I have participated in the development of the research project, the collective implementation of the main lines of research as well as data collection and the organization of scientific events (two study days, an international symposium, several annual workshops).

I brought to this project my own expertise on the case of Northern Ireland. In particular, I investigated the evolution of State knowledge regarding paramilitaries and their mandate in disadvantaged urban areas. I also conducted a systematic data collection of legislation and jurisprudence relating to “Enemy law”. The establishment of this database consists in listing, collecting, analyzing and classifying the legal standards (legislation, regulations, case law) enacted with the specific intention of facing “internal enemies”. I also handled the implementation of a website aimed at highlighting this collective research, as well as that of its team of researchers.

PhD Thesis

Thesis defended on November 26, 2021, entitled “The Communities of Moderns. A sociology of political ambivalence in Northern Ireland”.

summary

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland ended a conflict between the Unionist Protestant and Nationalist Catholic communities in Belfast. Since then, the city has faced unexpected difficulties, such as the rise in juvenile suicides and the resumption of street clashes. The origin of these difficulties is often attributed to the desire of the inhabitants to continue the war or to a lack of support from the British State for them. But as the state pays increasing attention to the situation and members of both communities take part in pacification initiatives, how is it that these difficulties cannot be overcome?

Based on an immersive ethnographic fieldwork of more than two years, semi-structured interviews and examination of local archives, this thesis analyzes moments of the daily life of the Protestant and Catholic communities of North Belfast, as well as the management of local political issues. She argues that the difficulties faced by the people of North Belfast stem not from a dynamic of conflict reproduction or social exclusion, but from the hampered politicization of their interdependencies and its contradictory effects.

In the first part, we show, from the study of local controversies on the increase in juvenile suicides and the emancipation of women from their communities, the importance of developing an approach centered on the concept of political ambivalence. This notion makes it possible to positively understand a double aspiration, shared by the two communities, to community attachment and detachment. Thus, the tendency to reduce existing tensions to forms of ‘resistance’ amounts to ignoring the fact that these actors already take into account the local solidarities in which they are increasingly involved, while seeking to emancipate themselves from their Catholic or Protestant community.

In a second part, we show that some actors are already trying to politicize, and even to regulate the political ambivalence that such a situation provokes for them. For this, we start from the study of the management of street sociability and sports relations. The secondary distancing that some residents collectively demonstrate to claim, publicize and regulate this political ambivalence in integration devices favorable to its expression, highlights its most contradictory effects. This politicization nevertheless finds its fulcrum in the reproaches of hypocrisy, naivety or manipulation, addressed by local actors and external commentators in these debates. Consideration of community interdependencies is reduced to a return to the past, and collective emancipation to a denial of differences in political interests.

In a final chapter, we show that the situation in North Belfast is only understandable in view of the growing chains of interdependencies that have taken shape between Protestant and Catholic communities within the British Isles since the beginning of the 19th century. On the one hand, the industrial revolution and the changes in professional relations went with a greater integration of communities between them, on the other, they led to a greater awareness of their differences, precipitating the emergence of Unionist and Nationalist ideals. The first dynamic renders the politicization of this double aspiration increasingly desirable, the second makes the supports for this politicization more and more conflictual. The local difficulties of the peace process become explicable because of the double bind to which these concomitant evolutions lead. The British state struggles to support a greater distancing from the way in which this double aspiration already marks the participation of these communities in political modernity.

Thesis co-supervised by Yannick Barthe (CNRS, LIER-FYT), Dominique Linhardt (CNRS, LIER-FYT) and Colin Coulter (Maynooth University, Ireland).

Contractual doctoral student at EHESS-PSL (2017-2020) and John and Pat Hume Scholarship at Maynooth University, Ireland (2017-2021).