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Paul Grassin

CNRS Junior Professor

Center for International Studies (CERI)

Mobile: 0672266582

Research Interest(s): Police, justice, environmental conflicts, crime reporting, illegalism, capitalism

Discipline(s): Political Science

Subdiscipline(s): Comparative Politics

Research Group(s): Global economy, capitalism, extraction; Environmental risks and planetary limits; Security, defence, nuclear weapons; Violence, war and peace

Geographical Area(s): Southern Africa, Western Europe

Country(ies): Malawi, France

Biography

I am a political sociologist whose research focuses on the "work of order" : that is, the activities through which deviance and illegalisms are detected, classified, and repressed, whether by state or non-state actors. I examine policing and justice practices, their organization, their forms of remuneration, and the situations in which they take shape, as well as the multiple ways in which those who engage in these activities perceive them, justify their involvement, and make it publicly visible. The overarching question running through my research is how these activities contribute to the production of specific social, economic, and political orders, approaching the making of order as the outcome of organized and observable operations.

Trained in political science at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and later specializing in African studies following a period of study at Columbia University, I spent ten years conducting research in Malawi, in anglophone Southern Africa. My early work examined the making and maintenance of a political order grounded in the control of tobacco production and marketing. I then devoted my doctoral dissertation, defended in 2022, to the study of the division of policing and judicial labor between state and non-state actors since the colonial period, and to the contribution of this work to the production of social and economic hierarchies in the outskirts of Blantyre, the country’s economic capital.

Seeking to relocate my empirical objects without losing the thread of my research orientations, since 2023 I have been testing some of the theoretical and methodological avenues developed in Malawi against the French case and environmental issues. As a Research Fellow of the Belgian FNRS affiliated with the University of Mons, I opened two fieldwork sites in France that I now continue to develop as a Research Fellow at the CNRS. The first examines the contribution of non-state economic actors to the repression of environmental activism and, more broadly, the ways in which industrial capitalism adapts to the ecological crisis. This first set of field sites is part of a research project funded by the French National Research Agency on the worlds of vigilantism in France. The second focuses on the chain of detection and repression of environmental illegalisms through the study of a reporting mechanism for environmental harm.

My research trajectory has also led me to develop an epistemological reflection on the challenges of comparison, particularly on how realities studied in the Global South can inform the analysis of the French case.

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