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.