Young Researchers to Watch: Publications for Q1 2026

From January to March 2026, Sciences Po’s PhD students and early stage researchers took their part in shaping contemporary debates through many publications. This first-quarter selection showcases their innovative work, reflecting the vitality of Sciences Po’s research community and its ongoing contribution to scholarly conversations and public understanding worldwide.

Dive into a productive season of intellectual exploration and discovery, curated by Sciences Po's School of Research.

Articles, chapters, and notes

Cold War Ecology. Socialist Environmental Reflexivities from the ‘Club of Moscow’ to Harich’s ‘Degrowth Communism’ in the GDR

Article by Marius Bickhardt, PhD student at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), published in Capitalism Nature Socialism, January 2026.

Waning U.S. hegemony and China’s rise as a superpower in green technologies have given climate politics a new geoeconomic dimension. Yet, given its emergence in the context of the Cold War, environmentalism has long been shaped by systemic rivalry. It was within this contentious Cold War ecology that the East German philosopher Wolfgang Harich developed his provocative theory of “communism without growth.” Published in 1975 and marking its fiftieth anniversary in 2025, Harich’s book articulated a distinctive ecosocialist critique of growth, mediating between Western environmentalism and its Marxist-Leninist dismissal. Revisiting Harich’s concept of homeostatic communism in the age of climate catastrophe, this article traces his shift from authoritarian ecological despotism toward an ecological class analysis centered on eco-social conflicts.

Political Trust in Crisis: Can Social Protection Make a Difference?

An article by Charlotte Boucher, PhD student at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), published in Political Studies.

How do economic crises harm political trust? And can their impact be mitigated? Using data from Eurofound’s Living, working, and COVID-19 survey conducted across the EU during the COVID-19 pandemic, I find that economic performance and social protection are strongly correlated with political trust in such contexts, however independently from each other. While deteriorating economic conditions severely harm trust, social protection can subsequently temper this negative impact. More specifically, in the case of the COVID-19 crisis, the deferral of debt and taxes, followed by support from public services and wage support mitigated the most the negative impact of the crisis on political trust. However, I find this mitigating effect to be only moderate as trust attitudes are likely to be affected by a negativity bias. In other words, the positive effect of receiving state support on political trust is systematically inferior to the negative effect of the crisis. Because of this bias, governments are more likely to be punished by citizens for what the crisis has done to them than to be rewarded for what they have done for them.

Brazil: Collusion and gender - Boys’ club cartels in Brazil?

Article by Paulo Burnier da Silveira and Gabriela Berbert-Born, PhD student at the Law School Research Centre, published in Concurrences, No. 3-2026.

This article explores the intersection between gender dynamics and collusive behavior in Brazil, offering a novel empirical analysis of all cartel cases sanctioned by the Brazilian Competition Authority (CADE) from 1999 to 2024. Using a dataset covering 135 cartel cases and 1,129 individuals, the study examines the gender composition and professional roles of convicted participants.

Où sont passés les conservateurs ?

Article by Thomas Charrayre, PhD student at CEVIPOF, published in La Vie des Idées, 20 January 2026.

The global rise of the far right is now plain to see. Despite surprising developments such as Donald Trump’s election in 2016, this rise is the result of a long-standing trend that has been well documented by political science. The rise to power of the far right has brought to light changes within the intellectual landscape of the right that previously went unnoticed. In particular, the cultural and political hegemony of the United States has turned the spotlight on the network of reactionary intellectuals and influencers gravitating around Trumpism. On the left, there has been much speculation about the reasons for the far right’s success, and much of this speculation has turned inwards towards the left itself. What did the left get wrong? Was social liberalism a dead end? Have we neglected the working classes? What has been asked less is: what went wrong on the right? Why has the conservative right, with which a change of government was conceivable, proved incapable of resisting the rise of reactionary ideas?

Beyond the Living: Death Care and the Boundaries of Social Reproduction

Article by Camille Collin, Associate Research Fellow at CEVIPOF, published in Ethics and Social Welfare, 2026.

What does it mean to care for the dead? This article argues that the handling of dead bodies – washing, dressing, transporting, burying – is a form of reproductive labor that deserves recognition within both care ethics and social reproduction theory. Despite its social necessity, death care remains largely invisible in frameworks that link care to life, productivity, and reciprocity. Yet, like other forms of care work, death care is unequally distributed. This article identifies a ‘biocentric’ bias that renders posthumous care morally suspect and politically illegitimate. Exploring how death labor is caught between commodification and moralisation, it argues that recognising this labor as care challenges existing boundaries around who counts as a care providers, and whose needs are worth organising around. Such recognition is necessary to question how death care is currently being distributed and organised.

Casting doubts on the growth machine? Doughnut economics, an ambiguous innovation in Amsterdam governance

Article by Hugo D'ASSENZA-DAVID, PhD student at the Centre for International Studies (CERI) and the Centre for the Sociology of Organisations (CSO, published in Territory, Politics, Governance.

The institutional uptake of Doughnut economics in Amsterdam in 2020 marks a notable departure from growth-centred governance. Drawing on qualitative research, this paper mobilises the instrument constituency and multiple streams frameworks to trace the policy process behind the Amsterdam City Doughnut (ACD). It shows how an ambiguous and supply-driven policy innovation gained traction through coalition-building and strategic coupling of policy, problem, and political streams. While non-binding, the ACD’s adoption politicised growth as a collective goal, signalling a subtle yet significant shift in urban governance, and casting doubts on the enduring validity of the urban growth machine thesis.

When Political Pivots Shift Behaviors but Not Beliefs: Evidence from Trump’s Position Reversal over Facemasks during the COVID-19 Crisis

Article by Bartholomew Konechni, early stage researcher at the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities (CRIS), published in the American Sociological Review.

In the pandemic, a number of high-status politicians, notably leaders of populist parties, were seen to diminish compliance with institutional recommendations by casting doubt on COVID guidelines. But what happens when such leaders change position and endorse previously discouraged behaviors? Using longitudinal data from the Understanding Coronavirus in America panel with fixed-effects modeling, this article examines how Trump’s unexpected endorsement of facemasks in July 2020 affected individuals’ likelihood of wearing a facemask and belief in masks’ efficacy. The results have important theoretical implications for understanding how pivots can shape behaviors during crises, the validity of existing models in public health, pandemic populism’s causes, and directions of future research.

Germany and the South China Sea: Shaping the Maritime environment through limited means

A chapter by Maximilian Reinold, PhD student at the Centre for International Studies (CERI), published in the edited volume External Stakeholders in the South China Sea.

Maximilian Reinold discusses Germany’s perspective on the South China Sea. He finds that although Germany has no clearly articulated assessment of potential escalation scenarios in the region, it nonetheless monitors the South China Sea closely due to its heavy reliance on maritime trade traversing the area. He argues that Germany’s increased diplomatic and military engagement in the region reflects Berlin’s commitment to averting escalation in the South China Sea disputes.

Symbiotic rivals? Writing state sovereignty through its contestation in the struggle between Australia and the digital giants

Article by Éric Repetto, PhD student at the Centre for International Studies (CERI), published in the European Journal of International Relations.

Usual discussions of discursive sovereignty focus on public actors and their role in reproducing or changing the meaning of sovereignty. Meanwhile the role of non-state actors remains understudied, and non-state challenges to state authority, together with the sovereign claims that public actors make in response, are seen as signs of a weakening sovereignty. This paper challenges this portrayal through the study of Google and Facebook’s resistance to Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code. The results show that private actors do contribute to the reinscription of discursive sovereignty even as they resist state policies. Furthermore, they show that the contestation of sovereignty by private actors is endogenous to the discourse of sovereignty. Therefore, I argue that contestation is symbiotic to sovereignty, and sovereignty claims are not the symptom of its weakness, but rather an inescapable phase of its constant reinscription.

More than Symbols: The Effect of Symbolic Policies on Climate Policy Support

Article by Théodore Tallent, Malo Jan, and Luis Sattelmayer, PhD students at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), published in the American Political Science Review.

As climate change effects become increasingly salient, the need for stringent climate policies becomes more pressing. The implementation of such policies is often met with resistance from the public due to their perceived costs and distributional implications. This article goes beyond the existing literature by showing how what we term symbolic policies can enhance support for costlier policies. We define symbolic policies as policies sending meaningful messages to the public but having low material impacts. We argue that without changing the material costs that climate policies impose, symbolic policies increase public support by altering the message that costly policies convey. We demonstrate our argument using survey experiments and qualitative interviews conducted in France, showing that symbolic policies can significantly increase support for costly climate policies and increase perceptions of fairness, elite behavior, and government credibility.

L’écologie n’est plus une priorité pour les électeurs – mais peut le redevenir

Note by Théodore Tallent, PhD students at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), published by the Fondation Jean Jaurès, March 2026.

Floods, storms, abnormally high temperatures…: France has just experienced a winter marked by climate change, yet environmental issues have been largely absent from the electoral debate in the run-up to the local elections on 15 and 22 March. How can this paradox be explained? Théodore Tallent analyses the underlying causes and suggests ways forward: no longer defending the environment as a constraint, but as a project for collective protection and sustainable prosperity. For whilst the environment is no longer an electoral priority today, it could well once again become the political solution that our era is lacking.

Books

La preuve dans le procès constitutionnel. Perspective comparatiste (Editions LGDJ)

The published PhD thesis of Nefeli Lefkopoulou, early stage researcher at the Law School research Centre.

Whilst a large number of studies have been devoted to the subject in ordinary and supranational courts, the issue of evidence has, to date, not received sufficient attention from constitutional scholars. Drawing on a wide-ranging comparative analysis, this thesis fills this gap by refuting two traditional arguments: the absence of facts in constitutional proceedings and the inapplicability of the issue of evidence to legal norms. Drawing on a variety of methodological perspectives, the research succeeds in offering a fresh perspective on constitutional justice, shifts the focus significantly, and provides numerous useful insights for lecturers and researchers in law and political science, for practitioners of constitutional litigation, as well as for judicial actors.

Les Lumières sombres. Comprendre la pensée néoréactionnaire (Gallimard/Le Grand Continent)

A book by Arnaud Miranda, Associate Research Fellow at CEVIPOF.

A year after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Trumpism appears to be more ideologically structured than it was during his first term. In his book, Arnaud Miranda analyses this realignment through the lens of a defining intellectual current: neo-reaction. Emerging from the internet and tech culture, this anti-democratic ideology now provides the ideological framework for Trumpism. Read his interview.