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.

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.

The VIORAMIL project addresses the issues of the “violent radicalization of individuals or groups of individuals” that constitutes one of the elements of the first of our main areas of focus : “Security of the citizens, crime and terrorism prevention” of the Challenge 9 “Freedom and security of Europe, its citizens and its residents”. It intends to explore the violence and the militant radicalisation in France from the eighties until today, through an innovative multidisciplinary analysis combining the views of historians, political analysts, sociologists, media specialists and lawyers. This cross-disciplinary study also addresses representations of this radical violence in the opinion and the media. Finally it considers the evolution of their management, upstream as well as downstream (prevention campaigns, police treatment, legal follow-up) by public authorities that have to combine efficiency targets with respect for the relevant legal framework. Within SHS, the set of themes of radicalism lends itself to the combined approach. The paragraph introducing Challenge 9 moreover emphasises the necessary interdisciplinary nature of any reflection concerning global security and calls for an “increased participation from the main players in SHS research”. The VIORAMIL project answers this call. In the spirit of our first focus of the Challenge 9, the project wishes to participate in the strengthening “of the security and of the fight against terrorism” in “identifying and preventing the risks and threats” posed by “the violent radicalization of individual and groups of individuals”. Faced with the risk of the militant violence emanating from different players (small extremists groups, pro-independence groups, religious extremist movements etc.) at various levels (from the overflowing of demonstrations to the planning of attacks), the State must identify these threats and develop strategies of prevention and response. The VIORAMIL project answers this expectation by mobilising, in an original multidisciplinary approach and in a logical collaboration with public authorities, the scientific expertise available through SHS academics specialising in political violence. The final production (unpublished material on militant violence expressed in the form of statistical boards/graphs/maps, analysis of the concerned organizations and of the determiners of the violence in a socio-economic context, political configuration, historical inheritances, media games, gender codes, subtle study of the evolution of the police control and of the legal framework over thirty years) would allow to improve the techniques of detection and management of violent radicalization. It would also allow the definition of models allowing a retreat from violence and militant radicalization that could inspire the social players and the political decision-makers. In accordance with the introductory charter of the Challenge 9, the VIORAMIL project associates “academics partners and end users”, here the public. We have secured the partnership of the National Institute of the High Studies of the Security and Justice (INHESJ), a national public administrative body operating under the supervisions of the Prime Minister that intervenes in the areas of training, studies, strategic monitoring and analysis regarding internal security and justice.