Michaël Bourdon

Michaël Bourdon has been a doctoral candidate in Political Science at CERI since September 2023, following prior training in History and in Social and Political Sciences at the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Supervised by Richard Banégas and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, his research examines the Recompositions of the State and of the Development world associated with the promotion of start-up entrepreneurship in West Africa, through a comparative study of Togo and Ghana.

He also works on the imaginaries of digital developmentalism in Africa within the framework of the seminar “Desirable Futures & Digital Technologies in Africa”, which he co-founded with Anna K. Osterlow (CHSP), with the support of the Programme Afrique and CERI. Since 2023, he has been an associate member of the project “African Trust Infrastructures”, led by Keith Breckenridge (WISER, Wits University) in Johannesburg.

He is doctoral representative at CERI since April 2025 and an elected member of the Scientific Committee of Sciences Po’s Africa Program since September 2024.

Teaching

• Member of the Evaluation & Admission Committee of Sciences Po’s Collège Universitaire (since February 2026)
   
• Sciences Po Paris (France). Teaching Assistant to Prof. Richard Banégas and Research Tutor, as part of the Graduate course “Citizenship, Violence and Politics in Africa”, (Fall 2025)
   
• Ashesi University (Ghana). Lecturer. Undergraduate Course, “Public Policy”, January-April 2025. 
   
• Sciences Po Paris (France). Lecturer, Bachelor Course, “Comparative Politics”, Collège Universitaire (Fall 2024)
   
• Sciences Po Paris (France). Teaching Assistant to Prof. Richard Banégas and Research Tutor, as part of the Graduate course “Citizenship, Violence and Politics in Africa”, (Fall 2024)

Fellowships and grants

• Doctoral Mobility Grant - Alliance Program, Columbia University, May 2025
   
• Grant from the Chair on Major Contemporary Strategic Issues – Fondation Pierre Ledoux – Jeunesse Internationale, April 2025

Publications and Academic Talks

Publication

BOURDON Michaël, "Entrepreneurship for Development? Renewing delegation within policies of start-ups promotion in Togo" dans MNAILI Youssef & PHILIPS Laura (dir.) Competence, Loyalty, and Control: Indirect Governance of Violence, Economy, and Religion in Africa, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press (Forthcoming).

"Les institutions de l'Etat social à l'épreuve de la pandémie", co-authored with Baptiste Bailly and Guillaume Louvet, in the Second Report of the Conseil National des politiques de lutte contre la pauvreté et l'exclusion sociale (National Council for Policies against Poverty and Social Exclusion), submitted to the French Prime Minister in June 2022.

Book Review 

Review of Armelle Choplin's work, Matière grise de l’urbain : la vie du ciment en Afrique, Geneva, MétisPresses, 2020, 256 pages, L’information géographique, 2021/3 (vol. 85), pp. 122-134.

Academic Talks

"FinTech Everywhere and Nowhere: Financial Inclusion from Above and Below in Ghana", as part of the Nkabom Project, Sciences Po, Paris, les 22 et 23 janvier 2026.

"Everything I Wish I Had Known Before Starting My Fieldwork", as part of the CERI Doctoral Seminar, Sciences Po, October 22th 2025.

With Caroline King (WISER, Wits University), "FinTech Everywhere and Nowhere: Financial Inclusion from Above and Below in Ghana", as part of the Nkabom Workshop, at the Department of Geography, University of Ghana, Accra, October 12th-13th 2025.

"The Re-enchantment of Work: Professional Ethos and Emerging Figures of Success in a Togolese Start-up", as part of the international conference "Ethnographies of Work in Africa", at Columbia University, New York, March 27th-28th 2025.

"Returning from West-African Tech", as part of the Seminar Returning from Fieldwork, Sciences Po, October 20th 2024.

"New research, new voices in Africa Studies", with Gabriel André, Jules Villa, Maëlle Gélin as part of the inauguration of the Africa Program, at Sciences Po, Paris, September 20th 2024.

"Entrepreneurship for Development? Renewing delegation within policies of start-ups promotion in Togo", as part of the Workshop "Competence, Loyalty, and Control: Indirect Governance of Violence, Economy, and Religion in Africa" at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), Wits University, Johannesburg, July 24th & 25th 2024. 

"Incarnations of Modernity at Work: Professional Ethos and the Re-enchantment of Work within a Togolese Start-up" within the panel "What Work Models are Promoted by Development Policies in Africa?" convened by Constance Perrin-Joly and Etienne Bourel, at the International Conference of the Association for the Anthropology of Social Change and Development (APAD), Liège, 22-24 May 2024.

"The Market Under Siege: Algorithmic Control" as part of the Seminar The Sociology of markets, convened by Olivier Pilmis (CSO/Sciences Po) & Timur Ergen (Max Planck Institute), Sciences Po, Paris, 12 January 2024.

"Investigating the Digital Economy and the Ethics of AI", Research Seminar of the Maison Française, University of Oxford, March 7th 2023.

"Start-ups as the new entrepreneurship of development in Africa", as part of the seminar "Entrepreneurship through the prism of the social sciences" led by Marion Flécher, Manon Piazza, Sanja Beronja, Maud Hetzel and Xavier Monnier, at the EHESS, Paris, on 16 January 2023.

"Who testifies for the Lubartowien-ne-s: the Yad Vashem Institute's testimonial sheets as material for the history of the Shoah", as part of the study day closing the collective research workshop "Investigating migration and persecution: history, quantification, ethnography", led by Anton Perdoncin and Claire Zalc, at the Centre de Recherches Historiques (CRH), Paris, on 1 June 2022, as part of the project Lubartworld (ERC).

Panel moderation

"Quelle est l’Afrique des études africaines", June 3rd 2021, online moderation of the conference "Modernités africaines" with Johanna Siméant-Germanos (Ecole Normale Supérieure), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University) and François-Xavier Fauvelle (Collège de France).

Un nouvel entrepreneuriat du développement ? Les start-ups, l'Etat et la recomposition du capitalisme en Afrique de l'Ouest, sous la direction de Richard Banégas