The CORTEM project will study the disputed treatment of dead bodies which are now at the center of numerous controversies, both at the national and international level: they may be the bodies of victims of mass murders or of natural disasters, those of migrants who died in the process of their migration, or of inmates who were executed in violent conditions. These bodies are controversial because no state agrees to deal with them, while they are on the contrary studied and qualified by experts and representatives of infra-state organisations (NGOs, international courts, United Nations agencies or churches). Will analyse this tension over controversial human remains by assembling four studies in a cross-disciplinary perspective (connecting anthropology, sociology and political science), and working on international fields: our research will deal on corpses of the victims of mass killings in West Africa or in South Korea, on those of immigrants found dead on Mediterranean shores, and finally on the controversial bodies of executed inmates in the USA. These studies deal with two main issues. First, they analyse contemporary shifts in the general government of dead bodies, and thus question the current limits of the state monopoly over legitimate violence. The controversial bodies we study indeed belong to the category of “infamous” bodies: those whose death is irrelevant for state authorities (in the case of immigrants), or is directly inflicted by them (in the case of mass murders or capital punishment) – but they nowadays focus the attention of actors located outside or above states. The second issue of this research is then to describe the rise of transnational controversies over the study and treatment of these human remains, and the original combination they operate between expert knowledge that is delivered by public or private actors who may for example be scientists, advocates, or lawyers. On what scenes, in what transnational organizations (advocacy forums, think tanks, international courts of justice) do these actors meet, and to what extent de they travel between them? How do these experts work together to make the bodies “talk”, and how do they collectively label those bodies – that is, how do they come to call them “victims”, while pointing to those responsible for their death? And how do they “translate” expert knowledge from one field (medicine or law for example) to another? These are a few of the questions CORTEM will answer. The final goal of this project is then to describe the new “hybrid” collective groups, and the new realms of debate, that are currently being built around these controversies over dead bodies. It will bring scientific by analysing sociologically an issue rarely addressed – corpses and their disputed treatment – connecting them to some major evolutions of contemporary societies: namely, the globalization of political struggles, and the growing dissent over the use of state violence. In terms of methodology, it is the occasion to connect the sociologies of science and of public controversies, taking into account the materiality of dead bodies and its impact on expert activities. Finally the project will contribute to professionals, by helping the diffusion of “best practices” in the treatment of dead bodies.

The CrimScapes project explores the expanding application of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality as both responses to, and producers of, the politics of threat and uncertainty that are currently expanding across the European region. Given the inherent tensions between democratic processes and ever-expanding legal regulations, the project investigates this growing reliance on criminal technologies and institutions as a challenge to the participatory nature of democratic societies, and as possible symptoms and causes of the general sense of turbulence that has come to dominate much of economic, social and political life. It works to analytically grasp the motivations behind, and challenges and broader implications of, criminalisation for the variety of actors and practices that shape and reshape entangled crimscapes - i.e. landscapes of criminalisation. With the support of secondary literature, archival research and interviews, project members will develop genealogies of seven intentionally selected European crimscapes (of migration, hate speech, sex work, surrogacy, the prison context, drug use and LGBT identities and relations). Additional interviews and ethnographic fieldwork will help to identify and conceptualise the strategies, relations and citizenship dynamics of the implicated actors as they negotiate democratic participation and freedoms with legal regulation and measures of control under conditions of criminalisation. Extracting from this empirical data, researchers will then conceptualise, for a variety of publics, the ways in which these actors’ subjectivities, lived realities, rights-claims and desired futures could be better accounted for in processes of democratic governance across the region.

The overall aim of the proposed project is to develop a comprehensive approach to prevent and counter violent radicalisation and extremism. The PERICLES (Policy recommendation and im-proved communication tools for law enforcement and security agencies preventing violent radicali-sation) project is especially dedicated to transitional processes of radicalisation. To meet its aims, PERICLES will consider violent left-wing and right-wing as well as religious ideologies. A special focus will be set on the risks connected with digital violent propaganda. The PERICLES project will deliver advanced and validated counter-propaganda techniques that are target-group-specific. Furthermore, the cooperation between relevant authorities who have due regard against violent rad-icalisation or support the process of de-radicalisation will be enhanced through the use of the project outputs. The comprehensive PERICLES prevention strategy will therefore largely address law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and security agencies; but will also find use by prisons and social workers, teachers and even relatives of affected people.

Is the ‘social question’ re-emerging in the guise of an urban question of risk? To this interrogation, the project intends to respond by analysing, in a large metropolis, the spatial inscriptions of insecurity accord-ing to the socio-professional distribution in urban spaces and to political positions. Three databases will be mobilised, at the IRIS (small areas akin to census tracts, averaging 3 000 inhabit-ants) level, to reach a fine-grained level of territorial analysis. Relying on victimisation and insecurity sur-veys in the Paris metropolitan region, it will study how crime and victimisation combine in a variety of patterns and will determine their specific spatial distribution. These findings (from the CESDIP) will be cross-analysed with data on the social division of the Paris metropolitan region and the trends thereof (OSC) and with data on political behaviour based on the election results released by the Ministry of the Interior. A comparison of the trends in insecurity, socio-professional distribution and political behaviour across the Paris metropolis over more than15 years (1998-2015) will also be achieved with these databases. The merging of the data will be completed by their allocation to the IRISes on a mapping database. The next step will be a typological analysis of the data bases thus constituted. Advanced geometric data analysis (Multiple Factor Analysis, Multiple co-Inertia Analysis, STATIS) will be mobilised to circumvent the pitfalls of ecological fallacy occurring in traditional modelling approaches. The use of sophisticated clustering methods (Kernel Regularized Least Square), however, will formalise relations between the ob-served variables. The databases assembled as part of this project as well as the maps matching the polling stations with the IRISes will constitute a perennial output to be disseminated to the scientific community, thus offering many opportunities for future secondary analysis or comparisons at the regional French and at the international levels. Dissemination of this steadied database will be facilitated by the recently created Observatoire scientifique du crime et de la justice (OSCJ http://oscj.cesdip.fr/), an academically based monitor of crime and justice based at CESDIP within the framework of ISIS (Interactions Between Science, Innovation and Society), a Paris-Saclay programme.