Research Interests
Professor Bigo’s main research interests focus on mobility, conflict, security and fundamental rights. Other research agendas include:
- Epistemology of International Relations, International Political Sociology as a project of restructuring the bodies of knowledge concerning the “international” and the “global”, by a networking of researchers coming from sociology, anthropology, comparative politics, criminology and IR specialists. Discussion about IR writing and fieldwork. Comparative analysis of the constitution of professional fields of transnational actors and approach of the limits and boundaries between global, international and national.
- International Political Sociology of (in)security. Critical approaches to security in Europe : Analyses of the mobility of people, of the relations between flow and political order, of the (in)securitization process and the role of field of the professionals of (in)security in the management of unease, of the Ban-opticon as a form of governmentality.
- Analysis of the claims concerning the emergence of a state of exception, or emergency and derogation in different spaces (international, European, national) through a sociological approach and their relations to freedom of movement.
- Internal security in the European Union : analysis 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.
- European security institutions, analysis of the relations between the third pillar (area of freedom, security and justice), second pillar and first pillar, mapping of the different internal security agencies and analysis of the Europeanization enlargement process as a form of (de)securitization.
- Sociology of clandestine organisations and of the process of radicalisation of violence, in relation to escalation theories and relational approach. Discussion about the relation between crime and war, internal and external security.
- Sociology of policing and surveillance. Relations between IR approach to security and sociology of surveillance. analysis of the politics of prevention, and of the technology of profiling and simulation.
- Discussion concerning the illiberal practices of the liberal regimes, reflections on liberty, equality and democracy in a transnational age.