Mainstream adaptation to the imperatives of sustainable development remains largely technological. In a period in which governance promotes citizen participation, insurgent planning experiences multiply, as do urban co-production practices uniting civil society, universities, professionals and sometimes allies within public authorities. These initiatives carry fundamental social innovations for transitions-to-sustainability, especially in deprived areas. Rather than the greening of technologies, CoPolis insists on the importance of cooperation tools in adaptations to sustainable development. As societies increasingly claim the need to debate and the power to influence governance systems, collaborative practices can overcome some of the remaining gaps between civil society, professionals and, to a certain extent, government. They are poles of social and democratic innovation that explore concrete alternatives for reduced socio-spatial inequalities and for inclusion. France and Brazil are two countries which have a long history of cooperation and collective and community involvement in urban and professional sectors, including in the areas where the most discriminated of populations live. This project explores the potential of co-production in the adaptation to sustainability imperatives: reducing social and environmental vulnerabilities, building more democratic governance, empowering vulnerable populations and the cognitive effects of knowledge co-production. Departing from the tensions between cooperative practices and the “collaborative cul-de-sac” (Laurent, 2018), we will critically assess the impacts of these approaches on civil society, the third sector and the production of a “solidary transition urbanism”. These aspects are analysed through the mens of social and spatial justice. The project tackles three main research questions: on the origins and development conditions of these collaborations; on the relationship between political and institutional contexts and the organisational configurations of collaborative practices; and on the organisation and the circulation of knowledge within each collaboration and the role played by different types of intermediary actors. To do so, CoPolis will implement mixed methods, including qualitative research and participatory action-research protocols. We will investigate nine French and Brazilian case studies with different urban issues at stake: metropolitan megaprojects in working class neighbourhoods; large-scale urban renewal projects; and collective initiatives in housing and transition urbanisms. Moreover, the project will tackle long-lasting collaborative practices in working-class neighbourhoods and their circulation. Regarding action-research, the team will implement a survey with partners among local intermediary actors and residents. We will implement protocols to co-construct objectives, identify means for action and implementation. It will be one of the ways of observing collaborative practices. Thus, CoPolis is a comparative and participatory project, anchored in partnerships with intermediary actors and civil society organisations. In doing so, CoPolis will also assess the tangible gains due to the collaborative practices implemented during the project, in relation to the political and institutional contexts which influence organised civil society’s action possibilities. That is why the project will shed light on the conditions encouraging the emergence and consolidation of collaborative practices. At the same time, results on organisational configurations and cooperative tools will be produced. These two types of results will feed an intense effort of dissemination.

If international operations are not supposed to last over time, their withdrawal, whether in Afghanistan in 2021 or Mali in 2022, often leads to great improvisation and sometimes chaos. While the end of military interventions has received considerable media and academic attention, the issue of the exit of international organizations (IOs) with a diplomatic mission from post-war situations is little discussed and that of IOs with a sectoral vocation, such as UN agencies, even less so. Yet, this is not only of scientific interest, but also a crucial matter at practical and political levels. When UN agencies decide to downsize or even close an office, they not only limit the scope of public action in terms of funding and human resources, but they also change priorities and affect power and state-society relations. How are policymaking processes, state authority, and legitimacy shaped by the withdrawal of UN agencies? This is the central question asked by the POLEXA Project. More broadly, we consider IO’s exit in this region as a valuable perspective on the dilemmas met by UN agencies on the ground in their will to pacify, democratize and develop post-war societies. We will seek to understand how UN agencies prioritize operations in a context of reduced funds, anticipate the future, and manage the risks of their intervention. Ultimately, we will assess the ways they attempt to pass the baton to local institutions and how local actors receive, reinterpret or contest UN norms and practices. We will address these questions through comparative research using two cases (Côte d’Ivoire and Central African Republic), in addition to a study of UN agencies and transnational networks at the regional scale of West and central Africa. This will require an innovative research design, from the perspective of the Political sociology of international relations, and rigorous qualitative methods, supported by a complementary research team.

SOMBRERO aims at studying the biographical consequences of participation into social movements. It is from the angle of how trajectories are formed that we propose to broach this question and to determine what involvement leads to rather than, more conventionally, what produces involvement. Thus, it is a matter of understanding how participation is likely to have a continual influence, through redefining or modifying individual behavior and perceptions. Beyond the explicit learning dispensed by activist organizations, or the socializing effects of exposure to political events, it is a matter of studying the ways in which political commitment affects all individual behavior and perceptions, in other words of considering that all participation, however sustained or intense, has secondary socializing effects. For this, we have recourse to a process and multi level approach of activist trajectories, based on an interactionist and configurational approach of life-course, what we call a sociology of « Activist careers.» We start by identifying individuals who were activists in the 1970s (from immediately after 1968 up to 1981) in three “movement families” (the feminist movement, workers’ unions and extreme-leftist organizations) and in five urban locations (Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Rennes, Nantes). On one hand, we produce a mapping of the 1970’s multi organizational fields in each city under study; on the other hand we conduct 500 life-histories, associated to a “sequence analysis” of life calendars. Such a research design will allow us to reconstruct these people’s life course in order to articulate micro (idiosyncrasies) meso (secondary socialization through commitment) and macro (local and national contexts) levels of analysis in order to make sense of individual trajectories.

During the next Olympic Games in Paris 2024, France will face a major security challenge because of a series of sports events, relayed around the World, involving personalities and the public. The history of the Games and sports has unfortunately already left traces of painful events, which we have the responsibility not to allow to reproduce here. On the basis of a sociological study of these risks, and in order to answer this challenge, the GIRAFE project proposes to develop algorithmic crowd control solutions based on video streams covering all or part of the public areas. These algorithms will in particular be able to alert the authorities of areas where crowds can become of concern, to monitor the flow of crowds and to anticipate possible phenomena of congestion; but also to identify abnormal cases occurring within such crowds, such as suspicious strolling of an individual, a chase or the transport and abandonment of a baggage, and to track their perpetrators to a possible interpellation. The tools created by the project will be in the spirit of facilitating the intervention of law enforcement and optimizing the use of security personnel, whose resources are limited and critical for an event of this magnitude. The human operator will remain the sole decision-maker of the actions to be taken during a warning. The legal and societal aspects associated with these video treatments will be studied and taken into account, to ensure the respect of the French legal framework, the GDPR, and keep the festive spirit of the Games. The project's various innovative algorithms use complementary approaches to detect abnormal events and manage the movement of crowds, so as to ensure maximum detection of risk situations and to trace alerts as quickly as possible. The research of the project will be based on three main pillars: - the movements of crowds, to manage the flow and the abnormal behaviors within a very dense crowd (specific approach in very dense zone); - the detection of abnormal behaviors, of which the learning of scenes given in JOP 2024 will make it possible to identify cases out of the ordinary (generic approach); - detection of pedestrians and baggage, transverse to the two previous axes, since in addition to the case of abandoned parcels (specific approach in sparsely populated area) this axis will ensure the identification and monitoring of the suspect individual to his arrest by the police The algorithms resulting from these thematic axes will be integrated into a demonstrator that optimizes the real-time processing of these algorithms, ergonomic for the end users, and prioritizes the flow of video surveillance cameras classified at risk or as unusual. The demonstrator will also be connected to a "Command and Control" in order to present to the operator, in a clear and global way, the cases of crowd movements to manage. The whole will be tested under pre-operational conditions and will reach a sufficient level of maturity, TRL6, to allow its deployment and its evaluation on various Olympic sites or in various places of the city of Paris at the end of the project.

The concept of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) emerged in Europe about a decade ago. Although numerous competing definitions exist (Von Schonberg, 2011 ou Stilgoe, Owen, Macnaghten, 2013), they all agree that it aims at bridging the gap between science and society. Society becomes an active player in different scientific domains. Especially, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are increasingly playing a vital role in research. In the context of the EU policy agenda on responsible research and innovation (RRI) and its focus on public engagement, this role is likely to continue to grow in the future. E.g., there is currently a strong call for and promotion of public participation in research, notably through the EU’s research funding programme Horizon 2020. At present however, CSO participation remains limited. Within the previous Framework 7 funding programme in 2012 only 21% of collaborative research projects reported involving at least one civil society organization (Legris Revel, 2013). Against this background, it is astonishing that there is no systematic research about the different forms of co-producing knowledge by combining variables of social interaction as well as ones of knowledge production. Current research is mainly focused on single cases (e.g. Escobar 2014) and only a few studies offer insights with regard to systematic differences in the research activities (e.g. Frickel et al. 2010). But such insights are of principal interest, if one would like to enhance the options for CSO inclusion in research. Therefore, the aims of the planned EU-project are twofold: Firstly, to analyze thoroughly the interaction for knowledge-production between researchers and CSOs and citizens as co-research and to classify this in different types. Secondly, to build up networks of co-researching by offering web-tools and concrete support for co-research. The originality of the planed European project rests on a dichotomy of the objectives: on one hand theoretical (basic research and applied, knowledge production, data analysis) and, on the other hand experimental, through a co-developed analysis of on-going participatory research projects (citizen sciences and participatory action research). The various methods available to involve the citizens will be listed. The remaining obstacles will be studied in order to go beyond "good intentions" to question "implementable regulation". The consortium will organize many experiments and give CSOs, inhabitants, women, students or lay citizens a chance to get support when they take the initiative of raising scientific concerns or of leading research projects. A web collaborative tool will be produced, including training sessions and train the trainers sessions, and tested within some of our partners activities. A set of participatory tools will be tested and disseminated addressing participatory data analysis ie : empower citizens in order for them to become able to contribute to data analysis (and not only data collection) in different scientific disciplines. Starting from the collect and analysis of existing tools and of their strengths and weaknesses for participatory research, some of the project partners would co produce and test new collaborative tools dedicated to collective data analysis. One key challenge for the planned EU-project is to foster an international network of skilled scholars and non-academics able to promote and manage participative research. The success of the planned EU-project will fundamentally depend on the success to build up such a network in advance. Therefore, the central goal of the proposed MRSEI project here is to set up such an international network while defining the research agenda. This is a challenging process because scientific as well as practical needs are to be considered and the overall cooperation structure has to cover a huge number of partners and to build up a consortium for the EU-proposal.