A Sociology of Policing, from Malawi to France: Observing the North from the South, and Vice Versa.

Interview with Paul Grassin

Paul Grassin joined Sciences Po’s Centre for International Studies (CERI) as a political scientist and CNRS research fellow on 1 February 2026. Trained in political science and African studies, Paul studied policing in Malawi for many years before shifting his research to a comparative perspective on the contribution of non-State economic actors to the repression of environmental activism and, more broadly, on the adaptations of industrial capitalism to the ecological crisis. In this interview, he talks about his career and research.

You have just joined Sciences Po’s Centre for International Research (CERI) as a CNRS research fellow. Could you tell us a little about your academic background?

After completing a preparatory class in humanities and social sciences in Bordeaux, where I was first introduced to the social sciences, I was trained in political science at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. I then specialised in African studies at the postgraduate level. I spent a semester at Columbia University in New York, followed by a period back at University Paris 1. Seeking to shift focus away from well-studied French-speaking African countries—and to explore new research sites, I spent ten years conducting research in Malawi, an English-speaking country in southern Africa. My 2014 master’s thesis was part of a movement to revisit the material issues and challenges related to production as a factor in the political process in Africa. It focused primarily on the creation and maintenance of a political order based on control of tobacco production and trade.

I then devoted my doctoral thesis, defended in 2022, to the study of policing and its contribution to the construction of social hierarchies on the outskirts of the country’s economic capital.

In Malawi, I developed a strong taste for in-depth investigation and an attention to detail and small things from which to “craft” sociological knowledge. I also became convinced that social science research takes time and and relies on fieldwork practice that necessarily involves unexpected encounters. My training in area studies led me to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to politics early on, combining the contributions of history, anthropology, and political sociology. Consequently, I incorporate both archival work and contemporary ethnography into my research to consider the historicity of the configurations I study.

Between late 2023 and my recruitment to the CNRS in early 2026, I held a postdoctoral position funded by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. Initially, my research focused on the “mega-basins” conflict in western France and anti-environmentalist counter-mobilisations in France. Beyond this local conflict, the postdoctoral position enabled me to explore various avenues of research into the environmental order in France.

Let’s come back to your change of research focus. You worked on policing in Malawi for a long time before shifting your research focus to environmental conflict in France. Can you explain when this change occurred, and how it nevertheless forms a continuum within your career path?

After ten years of research in Malawi, I did indeed feel the need to relocate my fieldwork to France, which allows me to contribute to public debate in my own country. This shift does not represent a complete break, however. It rather aims to test the research avenues I forged from my work in Malawi, combining questions about production and policing, against the French context and the theme of the environment.

It also involves pursuing the comparative approach that has always inspired my research, while reversing it geographically: not only confronting classic concepts of political sociology with African contexts, but also questioning how what I studied in Malawi sheds new light on States and societies from the North, including France.

Observing the North from the South(s)? Could you further elaborate on that?

To understand this, I think it is important to revisit two central aspects of my research in Malawi.

Like many other African countries, Malawi has historically experienced a low level of state control over policing and the administration of justice. The policing and justice configurations that I studied in the working-class neighbourhoods of the country’s economic capital bring together a wide variety of State and non-State actors. My research thus focused on the power relations at the heart of the division of labour between these actors in policing and justice. More specifically, I am pursuing a fundamental reflection on what I and others refer to as “participation in order”, i.e. the more or less official involvement of private actors not only in everyday policing activities but also in less ordinary forms of political repression. Belonging to a generation of Africanist scholars keen to put the focus on the making and hierarchisation of social groups,⁽¹⁾ I examined how these policing and judicial activities have contributed to the reproduction of social and political hierarchies in neighbourhoods since the end of the nineteenth century. To problematise this, I take up and extend the notion of policing, considering the construction of social order as the result of organised and observable operations to detect, classify, and repress deviance and illegality.⁽²⁾

When in 2022 I considered relocating my research topics to France, the issue of environmental conflict quickly emerged as a fertile ground for furthering my research questions on policing, following two quasi-symmetrical lines of investigation. On the one hand, the fight against environmental illegalities is weakly monopolised by the State. It has historically been delegated to private and non-governmental organisations. Consequently, environmental policing involves significant citizen participation which is not limited to the detection of such illegalities but also contributes more directly to their classification, and sometimes their sanctioning.

On the other hand, several conflicts that have arisen around major development projects—the Sivens dam (in the French Midi-Pyrénées region) in 2014, the “mega-basins”, and more recently the route of the A69 motorway—have seen the emergence of repressive configurations of “twilight policing”,⁽³⁾ involving a myriad of private actors—farmers, private security companies, and other entrepreneurs of violence. We then see forms of public-private division of policing comparable to those I studied in Malawi.

In a country historically marked by State centralisation of policing, I am therefore investigating the hypothesis that contemporary environmental conflicts, by putting pressure on social and economic orders that stabilised throughout the twentieth century, constitute fertile ground for the emergence of police and judicial mobilisations on the fringes of the State.

More generally, drawing on the environmental justice literature, I attempt to problematise the conflictual construction of what could be described as an environmental order,⁽⁴⁾ i.e. the stabilisation of norms regulating the legitimate use of nature and their role on the (re)production of socio-environmental inequalities.

How does your research fit into CERI’s scientific endeavour, and what projects are you currently working on—at CERI and/or elsewhere?

Given my research background, I am committed to stimulate collective reflection on the political and epistemological challenges of comparativism today, particularly what might be described as reverse comparativism, which consists of shedding light on certain aspects of politics and society in France and more broadly in the “North” in the light of realities studied in the “South”.

Moreover, my research on the involvement of non-State actors in the repression of environmental struggles is part of a research project supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) since August 2025, focusing on rough justice and security mobilisation in France (FRANJU) led by Gilles Favarel Garrigues and Laurent Gayer at CERI.

My work on policing naturally led me to join the seminar team “Travail de l’ordre, Polices et Organisations Repressives” (“Law Enforcement, Policing and Repressive Organisations”), where I hope to bring a new perspective on environmental policing.

My other focus, on the detection and repression of environmental illegalities, is a personal research project that I am developing in collaboration with the association France Nature Environnement and its platform Sentinelles de la Nature, which is dedicated to reporting environmental violations. This part of my work will also provide an opportunity to develop collaborations with several CERI researchers specialising in the environment, on issues of security, surveillance, and environmental justice, which we will initiate during a dedicated session at the CERI’s biennial conference next June.

That said, I haven’t finished writing about Malawi, as I still need to promote my doctoral thesis through publications. Nor am I ruling out the possibility of  studying environmental policing in this country in the future. In fact, although my current fieldwork is in France, I am also joining the team of Africanists at CERI and the Africa programme at Sciences Po.

Finally, for the past two years, I have been organising, with historian Yael Gagnepain, a research seminar at the École Normale Supérieure on environmental conflicts, in which I would be keen to involve the CERI, as well as students from Sciences Po. 

Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.