PhD and post-doc advising

Doctoral Supervision

Professor Bigo is prepared to consider PhD supervision in the following areas only:

  • Mobility, Conflict, Security, Fundamental Rightssocietal security-see SOURCE –
  • Intelligence, surveillance and obedience: see UTIC

PHD students will be inserted into international research with senior and junior staffs. My strategy is to insert them into a « collective intellectual » in terms of spirit of equality and convergence of diverse individual researches around the same kind of topics. Among them, you may think about

  • Internal security in the European Union: analyse of the different institutions and agencies, relation between public and private actors, forms of policing at a distance : policing, hegemony and empire at the transnational level.
  • Research on Europol, EU-LISA, FRONTEX, EDPS-FRA, Eurodac, EASO and the way they frame the threats and do not « adapt » to them. This way of thinking is based on critical approaches of security and more especially by the Political Anthropological Research on International Sociology (Paris) school. The topics are related to death in mediterannée but also the people who are blocked before travelling, the violent attacks called terrorist », but also all the people put under surveillance as « suspects » of terrorism.
  • These subjects goes beyond European internal security institutions, it is central to have PHD students analysing  the relations between the (external dimension) of an area of freedom, security and justice, with defense and diplomacy as well as freedom of movement. Students who know Multi Correspondance Analysis or techniques for quali-quantitative analysis are welcome if they are ready to help on the builing of tools of visualisation-mapping of the different actors (and actants)
  • Professionals of politics and emergence of transnational expert networks: what are the dynamics of power opposing the professional of politics and the expert networks, be they policemen, intelligence services, or international bankers, private firms of digital surveillance software, technologies of smart borders
  • Who are the groups excluded, marginalised by these policies and the ones who are normalised  (ban-opticon)
  • International Political Sociology of (in)security. Politics of terror, fear, unease, risk
  • Epistemology of International Relations, Bourdieu, Foucault and other European theorists and their impact on International Relations
  • Surveillance studies : relation between liberty, mobility, traceability, technology prevention and security

Past Doctoral Students : First ones

  • Emmanuel Pierre Guittet (2006)
    ‘La genèse de la coopération antiterroriste en Europe et l’implication de l’Espagne dans la (re)définition de l’identité européenne : De la raison d’Etat à la raison de la gouvernementalité européenne?’ Now lecturer at Manchester U
  • Amandine Scherrer (2007)
    ‘La production normative du G8 face à la « criminalité transnationale organisée » (1989 – 2005) : La force du discours, le poids de l’expertise.’ Now at C&CLS.
  • Philippe Bonditti (2008)
    ‘L’antiterrorisme aux Etats-Unis (1947-2007). Une analyse foucaldienne de la transformation de l’exercice de la souveraineté et de l’art de gouverner.’ NowLecturer at PUC Rio
  • Christian Olsson (2009)
    ‘Conquérir « les coeurs et les esprits » ? Usages et enjeux de légitimation locale de la force dans les missions de pacification extérieures (Bosnie, Kosovo)
  • Among my 11 previous PHD students, 8 have find academic jobs in less than 6 month after they have finished their PHD. 7 of them are senior lecturers or lecturers, 1 has a post doc. The other 3 have chosen a different path. 2 are in the top staff of important NGOs, 1 is in a top European Institution. Their topics were : antiterrorist policies; role of G8 Lyon group on internal security norms, US homeland security and networkcentric warfare, civil resistance in the war on terror, counterinsurgency and peacemaking, European borders and neighbourhood policy, governmentality of diaspora, the EU norms on freezing of assets, the making of list of terrorists, the border controls in central asia and the EU collaboration, the Macedonian diaspora, the notions of failed and fragiles states and their international consequences, the Swedish Righteousness and Its ‘Decent Citizen’: An Alternative Approach to Securitization. They all contribute at a different degree to International Political Sociology, and for the francophone to the journal Cultures et Conflits.
    4 doctoral students are presently under my supervision : 2 doctoral students at KCL, 1 doctoral student at Sciences Po- 1 doctoral student at Paris Ouest Nanterre : topics : Europeanisation of the british intelligence service? The securitization of humanitarian life.The notion of societal security in the Nordic countries. German intelligence at the interface between policing and defense