Citizen alternatives have emerged in the Middle East over the last decade in situations of overt or latent conflict, of crisis characterized by various forms of violence. In such circumstance states are either absent or contested because they are viewed as failing, corrupt or too authoritarian. IMAGIN-E hypothesizes that these contexts generate engagements that are more radical political, economic, and ecological grassroot social innovations – partially recalling solidarity economy, degrowth and social ecology perspectives. These initiatives show how political, economic and environmental necessities are closely linked. Hence, these situations are particularly heuristic for our understanding of alternative engagements and prefigurative practices, that have been mainly analyzed in Europe and in North and South America. Citizens are not addressing their demands primarily to the institutional political arena, in contrast to mobilizations and social movements that have been studied so far in the Middle East. They mobilize in a pragmatic way, through productive and entrepreneurial practices, often seeking autonomy. They focus on the restoration of localized forms of sovereignty and on the development of horizontal, peer-to-peer solidarity and citizen networks, here and now. Following a multi-sited ethnography methodology, IMAGIN-E offers an original approach to develop common perspectives on alternative mobilizations that are quietly, though radically, transforming the paradigm of protest in the region. They are inventing other citizenships. Strongly rooted in the history of places, these citizen initiatives combine inventions and reinventions of traditions, historical models and modes of production, innovative glocal inspirations and translocal practices, between memory, social creativity and utopias. Firstly, IMAGIN-E will trace their mixed genealogies and analyze the life cycles of such alternative projects. It will focus on the circulation of people (refugees, activists, citizens), ideas, models and know-how, products and seeds within the Middle Eastern and the Mediterranean area. It aims to delineate the contours of a hybrid, yet emic, babel of alter-citizenships and alter-resistances in the Middle East. Secondly, the team will study their interactions with state policies and institutional actors. We will deal with the effects of these initiatives on the organization of power, the transformations or reproductions of dominant spaces and relations, of social and gender inequalities and racialization processes. Lastly, IMAGIN-E will focus on the trajectories of the actors: it will highlight biographical bifurcations, moments of individual and collective ruptures and the sensitive experiences that are shaping these new political subjectivities. These alternative engagements do have a sensitive, memorial and existential dimension, and deep ecological concern. Elaborating on the notions of belonging and sensitive citizenship, we will reflect on their reclaims, and on their counter-hegemonic values and practices. Hence, IMAGIN-E considers these emerging alter-citizenships in their holistic dimension, as much in their materiality as in their affects and imaginaries. In line with its approach, IMAGIN-E offers an original methodology combining several social science disciplines with sensitive and participatory means of production and dissemination of knowledge.

Based on work on the emergence of "free zones" (Mercier, 1997, 2017) from industrial-commercial “grey zones” (Azaïs, 2014), we hypothesise that the storage function plays a crucial role the organisation of what some economists call the "warehouse economy" (Porter M., 1947; Gereffy G. and Korzeniewicz M., 1994). As they combine the rational management of stocks, the flexibility of employment and the multiscalarity of circuits, these zones are privileged space-times for understanding the ongoing changes in transnational economies. The purpose of this project is to show the major strategic role of the warehouse as a reference space and centrality of production systems. We want to conduct this research: 1) At strategic industrial or commercial locations that this economy reactivates or reinvents 2) From commercial channels, which particularly illustrate the complexity and mode of deployment 3) Lastly, we want to focus on the networks of actors who find there a particular identity and the labour organisation modes that they value. 4) In these networks of actors, we want to pay more particular attention to those who, coming from the popular cultures, contribute to this warehouse economy at the end of the chain by bringing "rejects" and surpluses to dedicated markets.

Small states are often taken to be rule-takers rather than rule-makers in international affairs. Yet, small states can punch above their weight, notably when working through coalitions. While coalitions are key to understanding multilateral negotiations such as those on climate change, they mask important differences within coalitions, where we see similar power dynamics and negotiation asymmetries as in overall negotiations. Who then drives coalition engagement and success, and why are some states more involved than others? Under which conditions are these states, in the coalition and the overall negotiations, successful? The proposed project – BeCoSS Climate – examines these questions with a focus on small states in the UN climate negotiations. While small states often work through coalitions to overcome their size limitations, we argue that we need to look beyond coalitions to understand influence and power dynamics in multilateral negotiations. Coalitions are a key, but understudied, meso-level of negotiations. Member states are typically extremely diverse, and vary strongly in their negotiation capacity, visibility, and active participation. In the end, it is individual states, if not individual negotiators, that drive coalitions’ activities and success. We break down influence into four consecutive elements, and hypothesise that being present at multilateral negotiations is a precondition for active participation, which in turn may lead to influence over the negotiation process, and eventually influence over outcomes. Accordingly, we pose three overarching research questions: 1. How present and engaged are different states in multilateral diplomacy? 2. Why do we see this variation in presence and participation? 3. Under which circumstances do presence and participation lead to influence? We address these questions by analysing UN climate talks, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. First, we use negotiation documents and descriptive statistics to map variation and change in presence and participation across all states, over time and across agenda items. We devise new ways of measuring presence and participation, beyond the existing literature. This provides us with a fine-grained overview of states that are consistently strongly represented or actively engaged, or states that are only active at certain points in time or on certain issues (Question 1). We then draw on inferential statistics to explain these differences in presence and participation through specific country and issue-level characteristics (Question 2). Finally, we trace ‘moments of influence’ through comparative case studies of small state success in three issue areas: loss and damage, the 1.5° goal, and climate finance, based on ethnographic and interpretive methods, notably collaborative event ethnography, interviews, and process tracing. For these case studies, we specifically focus on small island states, as they collectively had influence in the selected areas in climate negotiations, but how that influence came about, why it varied, and which individual islands drove it, is unknown. The case studies contextualise the explanations found in steps 1 and 2, and help us understand under which circumstances presence and participation translate into influence over process and/or outcomes (Question 3). We thus systematically evaluate the conditions under which states are present, engaged, and influential in multilateral negotiations. With our focus on small states (especially from the Global South) and our diverse methods, we contribute to debates on the role of small states in global politics, new methods (big data, ethnography) in IR and negotiation research, as well as on practices of negotiations, bridging research in diplomacy studies, negotiation research, and fairness and justice in negotiations.

What is the impact of the ‘agency of data’ – defined as the social practices of data collection and analysis in quantitative conflict studies – on practitioners’ perceptions and interpretations of armed conflict? DATAWAR is the first collaborative project to address this research question using a holistic, mixed-methods approach - combining Sciences Po’s expertise in the sociological analysis of International Relations, Ecole polytechnique’s expertise in the use of quantitative approaches to understand social phenomena, and Sciences Po Lille’s expertise in bridging the worlds of academic research, journalism, NGOs, and military officials. Practitioners involved in the coverage, analysis, and management of armed conflict rely more and more on the scientific output from quantitative scholars of conflict to analyse and predict change in contemporary conflict. Furthermore, NGOs and international organizations integrate findings from quantitative scholarship to develop indicators for conflict warning systems. However, there has been few little systematic research regarding the underlying scientific practices of the collection, coding, mathematical analysis and publication of quantitative conflict data – and even less scholarship on the quantitative and qualitative impact of these practices on practitioners’ interpretations of armed conflict and resulting normative conclusions. We argue that these practices tend to exclude dynamics that are more difficult to measure quantitatively, and thus do not reflect the theoretical evolution in the study of conflict of the recent years. Thus, quantitative studies of armed conflict may lead to biased perceptions of war, and perhaps even contribute to linear, deterministic assumptions about the causes of violence among practitioners. To address this lack of research, DATAWAR will analyse the full ‘lifecycle’ of quantitative data on armed conflict. Using a combination of interviews and corpus-based qualitative content analysis, the project will investigate practices of data collection, coding, scholarly analysis, and the discursive transformation of scientific output by government and military officials, NGOs, and journalists. The project will be structured into three main work packages: WP1 (led by Thomas Lindemann) will focus on the ‘production’ of knowledge based on quantitative conflict studies. Contents of the two most renowned scientific journals in quantitative conflict analysis will be sampled and analysed. This analysis will inform interviews with database managers and authors of the most influential research articles to find out about ‘hidden’, informal practices in scientific production. WP2 (led by Frédéric Ramel) analysing the dissemination and reception of this academe knowledge in the media and among private and public actors. In a first step, a corpus of media content will be constructed in order to find out how results from quantitative conflict analysis are communicated in the media, and to what extent these results participate in the dissemination of specific analytical frames and normative agendas. These results will inform research interviews with practitioners (officials of government agencies and international organizations, NGO analysts, private risk advisors, journalists) to find about how they perceive and actively use output from quantitative conflict analysis, including established or new conflict databases. WP3 (led by Eric Sangar) will organize the links with practitioners by collecting their needs and inputs, and assuming responsibility for the entire dissemination process, focusing on the continuous involvement of practitioners throughout the project duration. Beyond ‘traditional’ academic output, this dissemination strategy includes the creation of a web-based interactive tool, the Conflict Database Compass, and a course offering guidance for a more aware use of conflict data by officials, journalists, and NGO staff.

Ruling on Nature. Animals and the Environment before the Court - RULNAT Objectives The aim of this project is to study how nature-related issues are brought before law courts; how the environment and animal protection are handled at judicial level by lawyers, activists, and the state; how nature is ‘judicialised’ and ‘governed’ through the judiciary in different countries, and how the global debate on acknowledging some kind of rights to nature and animals is implemented in actual litigations. There are important intellectual and political stakes in understanding these processes, and the project is based on the theoretical assumption that a study of judiciary cases in all their multifaceted complexity provides a pertinent and original angle from which to understand how human relationships to animals or to the environment are shaped – or not – by legal action. Context The animal and nature protection debate has begun to intensify across the world, and animal welfare and ecological issues are repeatedly brought before courts. These issues are now considered a complex and delicate matter involving animals' or nature’s own interests, particularly (for animals) their right to be spared useless suffering and to live in suitable conditions according to their individual and specific needs. Should we then rethink our legal relationship to animals and to nature? Animals are ‘things’, ‘goods’, ‘property’, legally speaking, though they may be granted various types of protection; they are not legal persons. Should they be conferred legal rights (and not simply the ‘right’ to be protected)? If so, how are we to articulate these rights with human ones? Christopher Stone’s idea of attributing a legal standing to nature has become a juridical tool that, despite being the object of much criticism, carries considerable weight all over the world; and some legislatures or courts have granted legal personhood to various natural resources. A similar move concerning animals has been initiated, questioning the boundary between humans and animals. Methodology The project is based on the idea that the close association of juridical and anthropological studies can bring a new, more comprehensive understanding of the issues at stake. We shall therefore pay full attention to the complex, long-term judicial story of lawsuits, by conducting case studies in different countries, associating traditional ethnographic methods and legal analysis. The project is structured around five broad questions: - Animals and natural resources as holders of ‘rights’ - Attributing ‘legal personhood’ to animals and natural resources - Conflicts between humans and animals - The role of experts in court cases - Legal precedents and the global debate Originality The specific and distinctive focus of the project, differentiating it from other work on the environment or on human-animal relationships, is the analysis of real litigations within a comparative perspective, and the close combination of legal and anthropological approaches. Participants A consortium of three French research centres and one Belgian scientific partner has been created. The team comprises social anthropologists with experience of pertinent fieldwork, legal scholars with a particular interest in comparative law on the relevant issues, and environmental lawyers (six French researchers, in collaboration with seven foreign researchers); support for three young researchers is requested (one PhD and two postdoctoral fellowships). Outcome Some fifteen papers will be edited in international-level publications, and ethnographic videos will be produced. A book will compile contributions from a final symposium organized in the last year of the project. We plan to hold regular meetings (open workshops or seminars with invited researchers). A blog will be dedicated to the project, providing additional visibility to the project.