Laurent Fourchard, historian and political scientist, is a Research Professor at the National Foundation for Political Science. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Paris 7 and a Habilitation (HDR) in political science from Sciences Po.

Laurent Fourchard works at the intersection of history, political sociology and comparative urban studies. He focuses on policing, state at work, criminal organizations, trade unions, the political uses of public space. In his last book (Wiley, 2021), he articulates historical and ethnographic methods to retrace the genealogy of exclusion, classification and policing in popular neighborhoods in Nigeria and South Africa. He has explored the uses of autochthony and xenophobia in bureaucratic relations. He is currently working on a book on a transport organization - considered as a "mafia” - the larger trade union in Nigeria, a central player in electoral politics and the main organization in transport regulation. Attentive to history as a cause, he is coordinating a research group with Greg Mann (Columbia University) on subaltern historicities in Africa.

Laurent Fourchard was Director of the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) in Nigeria (2000-2003) and visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town (2008-2009), University of Turin (2021), Columbia (2022) and Oxford (2023). Member of section 40 of the CNRS (2016-2019), he is or has been a member of the editorial boards of the following journals: Africa, Journal of African History, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Politique africaine and Sources.