Didier Bigo

Didier Bigo
  • Professor
  • Professor (Full) at University of Liverpool

About

238
Publications
60,194
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Introduction
I am Emeritus Professor of Sociologie Politique Internationale and part time professor at university of Liverpool School of law and social justice. Director of the Centre d' Etudes sur les Conflits, la Liberté, la Sécurité CECLS-(cecls.eu) Co-editor of Cultures et Conflits- L’Harmattan-CECLS. Co-editor of Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS):
Current institution
University of Liverpool
Current position
  • Professor (Full)
Additional affiliations
September 2023 - December 2027
Sciences Po Paris
Position
  • Professor Emeritus

Publications

Publications (238)
Chapter
This chapter transects and articulates different disciplines and lines of thought in order to understand the redefinitions of the boundaries of political power in times of COVID-19, and the practices which may outlive the potential normalisation of the crisis when an efficient vaccine is discovered. We claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is an origina...
Article
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This article discusses the current legacy of Michel Foucault in relation to the current political situation. It is articulated in three parts. The first insists on the fact that Michel Foucault has been and still is significant for discussions concerning political sciences and international relations by the way he has discussed them and by his own...
Chapter
This book draws on case studies from across the world, including the UK, Turkey, Brazil and the US, to provide thought-provoking and practical insights into how fear and related emotions can shape politics under extraordinary and ordinary circumstances.
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This article analyses the collaboration between the French external services and the Egyptian government of President Sissi. In a first part, it recounts the revelations of the Disclose journalists in 2021 and their interview with an anonymous source, as well as the follow-up investigation in 2023 by the European Consortium of Independent Journalis...
Chapter
Political sociology is a field of inquiry at the crossroads of sociology and political science. Long dominated by the latter, political sociology is interested in the trajectories of politics in all its occurrences and questions a certain number of assumptions about the state, democracy, the mechanisms of power relations and their relationship to t...
Chapter
This collection of essays explores the growing use of the private sector and private actors in border control and its implications for our understanding of state sovereignty and citizenship. In so doing, the book makes a sustained empirical and conceptual contribution to the interdisciplinary body of scholarship on border control, with a particular...
Article
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Le 21 novembre 2021, le magazine Web d’investigation Disclose publiait un dossier sur l’opération « Sirli », une coopération opérationnelle secrète entre la direction du renseignement militaire (DRM) français et les services de sécurité égyptiens du maréchal Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi. Ces révélations reposent sur des centaines de documents classés « co...
Article
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La guerre contre le « terrorisme » ne fait pas que détruire ; elle crée aussi des liens de réciprocité entre les acteurs du conflit : réciprocité des sentiments moraux, des identités et surtout des pratiques concrètes. L’argument développé dans cet article est que la théorie de la rivalité mimétique de René Girard permet de saisir ces dynamiques qu...
Article
Full-text available
This article transects and articulates different disciplines and lines of thought in order to understand the redefinitions of the boundaries of political power in times of COVID-19, and the practices which may outlive the potential normalisation of the crisis when an efficient vaccine is discovered. We claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is an origina...
Article
En clôture du colloque qui est à l’origine de ce dossier, nous avions demandé à des chercheurs d’horizons disciplinaires et de générations différentes de revenir sur leur rencontre avec les travaux d’Yves Dezalay et d’évoquer dans le cadre d’un échange retranscrit ci-dessous, la manière dont chacun d’entre eux avait pu mobiliser, prolonger, nuancer...
Book
This handbook comprehensively defines and shapes the field of Critical European Union Studies, sets the research agenda and highlights emerging areas of study. Bringing together critical analyses of European Union politics, policies and processes with an expert range of contributors, it overcomes disciplinary borders and paradigms and addresses fou...
Book
This paper is concerned with the changes occurring into what has been called the field of European Union (EU) internal security (Anderson, den Boer 1994; Bigo 1996; Sheptycki 1998). The notion of field is used to avoid that a vision of the multiple different practices of the actors who gather and compete to define security and insecurity, being red...
Article
Through a critical engagement with substantive and stylistic guidelines dictated by dominant journals in the social sciences, this article enquires on what it means to write like a social scientist in the twenty-first century. Academic production and diffusion now regularly take place beyond and across national borders, with English often standing...
Article
This interview with Yves Dezalay focuses on his research strategy and the link between a Bourdieusian approach and a multi-sited ethnography. Yves Dezalay explains his strategy of doing interviews with the lawyers who are part of their “state nobilities”, in what order to interview them, with whom to begin and for what reasons. He warned about the...
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Este artículo tiene como objetivo discutir las premisas en las que descansa una cierta visión de la inseguridad global, que, ante todo, la considera una consecuencia «natural» de los ataques que afectaron a los Estados Unidos, Australia, Turquía, España y, recientemente, el Reino Unido. Y que, además plantea que la mundialización de los profesional...
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Smart borders, intelligent systems of filtering travelers by detecting suspects of crime andterrorism through interoperable national data bases and regional agreements areproliferating. In the European Union it began with the Schengen Information System. SIS-VISEURODAC,EES, ETIAS, ECRIS are acronyms for different realizations and projects of Entry...
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This article aims to discuss the interoperability controversy in the EU that followed the 2015 Paris attacks. Supported by visual methods, it analyses the historical developments of the databases that aim at facilitating migration and crime control in the Area of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). In so doing, it seeks to trace the paradox on freedom,...
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Digital information has undeniably become a central issue and object in the work of intelligence services. Most agencies have now integrated the collection and analysis of personal data on multiple elements of an individual’s social life and relationships into their daily work routines. However, how this is done varies and depends very much on one’...
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This article examines how international law in form of treaties deals with the intersection of the three concepts. Our hypothesis is that international law, in the form of treaties, has been reluctant to engage with national security when dealing with migration, leaving this to national law. Instead, the intersection of national security—most commo...
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The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly professio...
Article
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Comme l’a montré le numéro précédent, l’état d’urgence est un dispositif spécifique qui ne se réduit ni à une mesure technique d’un état de droit en train de subir une crise grave et temporaire, ni à un dispositif qui accompagne la justification d’un autoritarisme de l’exécutif se caractérisant par un régime d’exception qui se pérennise dans le tem...
Book
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Since Edward Snowden disclosures on NSA’s practices, many articles have been written about the relationship between digital data and Intelligence Services (IS), although few of them have investigated the use of these data by IS’ in their everyday practices. Presenting the first results of a three years research including interviews with practitione...
Article
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This article examines the notion of shared secrets and the procedures by which secrecy is not the opposite of exchange of information, but the restriction of it to a certain ‘circle’ of people and the maintenance of others in ignorance. It creates corridors depending on the objectives of secret information, the persons having access, and the knowle...
Chapter
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Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Aimed at academics and postgraduate students inter...
Book
Full-text available
Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible.Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not...
Book
In the first section of this chapter, I analyze the current transformations of the definition, organization, and modalities of acquisition by which national security is delimited in different countries, and I argue that national security is no longer national as such, nor does it correspond to a traditional understanding of security as protection f...
Article
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La proclamation de l’état d’urgence, dans les heures qui ont suivi les attentats de Paris et Saint-Denis du 13 novembre 2015, et ses prorogations successives jusqu’au 1er novembre 2017 représentent des événements d’importance pour quiconque s’intéresse aux questions de sécurité, de justice et de libertés publiques. Ce régime juridique – forgé duran...
Book
The US led programme of extraordinary rendition created profound challenges for the international system of human rights protection and rule of law. This book examines the efforts of authorities in Europe and the US to re-establish rule of law and respect for human rights through the investigation of the program and its outcomes.The contributions t...
Chapter
Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS) Editors-in-Chief: Didier Bigo , Emma Mc Cluskey , Ákos Kopper , and Ivan Manokha Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS) encourages transversal social inquiries. The journal seeks to transcend disciplinary, linguistic and cultural...
Book
This Oxford Handbook is the definitive volume on the state of international security and the academic field of security studies. It provides a tour of the most innovative and exciting news areas of research as well as major developments in established lines of inquiry. It presents a comprehensive portrait of an exciting field, with a distinctively...
Chapter
The practices of “torture at a distance” – that is, the combination of extraordinary renditions to other services abroad in order for them to extract information from the bodies of the suspects and the outsourcing of enhanced interrogation techniques to get results – have only been possible because of the obedience of a large number of secret servi...
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The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part...
Article
International flows have been the focus of many research questions. Every school of thought on international relations covers them. However, the importance attributed to international flows concerning the international as an order, system, specific location and its changes is, in itself, subject to variation. One must be familiar with these positio...
Article
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This Policy Insight examines the main implications and challenges of the recent Executive Orders or ‘travel bans’issued by US President Donald Trump. It argues that one of the key ulterior motives behind these orders is tomanoeuvre the US into an advantageous position for harvesting personal data on individuals from around theworld, including EU ci...
Chapter
Historically, political science and International Relations have been differentiated through the study of “domestic” government and “international” government, respectively. Yet, Foucault never took part or was even really interested in this division; this chapter contends that he has been a “politist” and an “internationalist,” of a different kind...
Book
This book addresses the possibilities of analyzing the modern international through the thought of Michel Foucault. The broad range of authors brought together in this volume question four of the most self-evident characteristics of our contemporary world-'international', 'neoliberal', 'biopolitical' and 'global'- and thus fill significant gaps in...
Article
This article seeks to discuss the emergence of transnational groups coming from the core of state bureaucracies and what has sometimes been called the “deep” or “right hand” of the state. In doing so, the article aims to explore the groups’ degree of autonomy in terms of elaboration of politics and their place within the different fields of power t...
Book
Depuis le début des années 1990, un débat a lieu que l'on pourrait qualifier de querelle des Anciens et des Modernes sur le thème de la sécurité. Initié avec la fin de la bipolarité et la disparition de la menace soviétique, il a pris une autre ampleur avec les attentats du 11 septembre 2001 et les suivants. Ce débat touche à la question de la défi...
Book
This book presents an overview and evaluation of contemporary research in international political sociology (IPS). Bringing together leading scholars from many disciplines and diverse geographical backgrounds, it provides unprecedented coverage of the key concepts and research through which IPS has opened up new ways of thinking about international...
Book
Speaking about the international, identifying its specificity, has commonly depended on multiple fragmentations: levels of analysis to distinguish the internal from the international, and particular individuals from both; disciplinary boundaries that differentiate international relations from anthropology (confined to localized peoples of marginal int...
Book
The first section examines some influences that led to the formation of the project of IPS and how it has opened up avenues of research beyond the limits of an international relations discipline shaped within political science.
Article
This article aims to introduce an in-depth conversation between International Relations (IR) and criminology about security practices and security studies. Too often each discipline has ignored the possibility of a dialogue, or has just borrowed ideas from the other discipline, unreflexively. This has created even more difficulties. But, it is poss...
Presentation
Full-text available
List of my publications 205-2016 available at http://didierbigo.com with a link to publisher when covered by copyrights- some preliminary versions are available on this website
Article
Full-text available
L'Union européenne s’est constituée en entité politique à partir du moment où l’ensemble des dirigeants européens ont admis qu’elle devait être plus qu’un « marché commun ». Le traité de Maastricht signé le 7 février 1992 et entré en vigueur le 1er novembre 1993 a été crucial pour mettre en place une politique de libre circulation des personnes (et...
Article
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A partir de los artículos de Richard Hofstadter, sabemos que un estilo defensivo y hasta paranoico ha impregnado de vez en cuando a la política norteamericana. Murray Edelman y Michael Rogin han desplazado la postura psicológica de esta terminología hacia una de tono político, enfocándose en cómo la noción de la construcción de un espectáculo polít...
Book
This contribution sets out one of the most critical approaches to studying EU internal security cooperation, which has been coined the ‘PARIS’ school related to International Political Sociology. It draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s drive to rethink security in terms of practice rather than norms, values or interest, and specifically looks at the relation...
Article
Full-text available
A partir de los artículos de Richard Hofstadter, sabemos que un estilo defensivo y hasta paranoico ha impregnado de vez en cuando a la política norteamericana. Murray Edelman y Michael Rogin han desplazado la postura psicológica de esta terminología hacia una de tono político, enfocándose en cómo la noción de la construcción de un espectáculo polít...
Article
Entretien avec Yves Dezalay ; propos recueillis par Didier Bigo et Antonin Cohen pour le numéro spécial "Élites transnationales".
Article
Ce numéro de Cultures & Conflits est issu d’une table ronde organisée dans le cadre du 12ème congrès de l’Association Française de Science Politique (AFSP) en juillet 2013. Cette rencontre visait à réunir des chercheur(e)s se réclamant d’une sociologie politique de l’international au sein de laquelle la sociologie critique, puisant ses racines dans...
Book
Ce numéro de Cultures & Conflits est issu d’une table ronde organisée dans le cadre du 12ème congrès de l’Association Française de Science Politique, en juillet 2013, et porte sur la sociologie politique des « élites transnationales ». Loin d’accepter l’idée d’une méritocratie émergeant de la diversité sociale, ou d’une oligarchie se reproduisant à...
Article
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Revelações recentes sobre o PRISM, programa secreto da Agência de Segurança Nacional dos EstadosUnidos (NSA), confirmaram a vigilância em larga escala de mensagens eletrônicas e telecomunicaçõesde governos, empresas e cidadãos, inclusive de aliados próximos aos EUA na Europae na América Latina. As ramificações transnacionais da vigilância pedem a r...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This paper examines the EU's counter-terrorism policies responding to the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015. It argues that these events call for a rethink of the current information-sharing and preventive-justice model guiding the EU's counter-terrorism tools, along with security agencies such as Europol and Eurojust. Priority should be given to i...
Article
Current revelations about the secret US-NSA program, PRISM, have confirmed the large-scale mass surveillance of the telecommunication and electronic messages of governments, companies, and citizens, including the United States’ closest allies in Europe and Latin America. The transnational ramifications of surveillance call for a re-evaluation of co...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This paper examines the EU counterterrorism policy responses to the attacks in Paris, 7-9 January 2015. It provides an overview of the main EU-level initiatives that have been put forward in the weeks following the events and that will be discussed in the informal European Council meeting of 12 February 2015. The paper argues that a majority of the...
Article
Entretien de Howard S. Becker avec Didier Bigo, Laurent Bonelli et Fabienne Brion (1er octobre 2012)
Book
Selon les pays, l’existence ou non de la criminologie comme discipline, de même que le sens qui y est donné dépendent de trajectoires historiques singulières dont il faut à chaque fois retracer les étapes et les modalités. Les batailles pour l’existence disciplinaire de la criminologie demeurent inséparables d’une promotion plus large de modes de q...
Article
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Pour le sociologue ou le politiste français, l’expression même de « criminologie » sonne au premier abord comme un peu étrange et un peu ridicule. Pourquoi séparer des comportements – criminels en l’occurrence – de l’ensemble des relations sociales dans lesquelles ils sont encastrés et en faire un champ d’étude spécifique ? Si la criminologie se fo...
Article
Full-text available
Pour le sociologue ou le politiste français, l’expression même de « criminologie » sonne au premier abord comme un peu étrange et un peu ridicule. Pourquoi séparer des comportements – criminels en l’occurrence – de l’ensemble des relations sociales dans lesquelles ils sont encastrés et en faire un champ d’étude spécifique ? Si la criminologie se fo...
Article
What practices of (in) securitization involve the notions of border and border control in the European Union? How do these practices operate? How are they assembled? In the resulting assemblage, is the notion of borders - understood as state borders - still relevant for the control of individuals and populations moving across the frontiers of the E...
Article
Current revelations about the secret US-NSA program, PRISM, have confirmed the large-scale mass surveillance of the telecommunication and electronic messages of governments, companies, and citizens, including the United States' closest allies in Europe and Latin America. The transnational ramifications of surveillance call for a re-evaluation of co...
Book
Résumé de l'ouvrage : Instrument indispensable à toute gouvernance, forgé sur le modèle des pratiques des agences de notation financière, l’évaluation a étendu son empire à tous les domaines, tous les métiers, tous les instants, tout, vraiment tout, de la naissance à la mort. Et elle n’a cessé de prouver, de toutes les manières possibles, son inopé...
Technical Report
Full-text available
In the wake of the disclosures surrounding PRISM and other US surveillance programmes, this paper assesses the large-scale surveillance practices by a selection of EU member states: the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Given the large-scale nature of these practices, which represent a reconfiguration of traditional intelligence gath...
Article
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Este artículo muestra cómo el trabajo de Pierre Bourdieu ofrece una manera provechosa de desarrollar la investigación en relaciones internacionales. Explora, particularmente, las alternativas abiertas por Bourdieu, en términos de una lógica de la práctica y del sentido práctico, que rechazan la oposición entre teoría general e investigación empíric...
Article
Full-text available
This paper analyses an approach of International Political Sociology (IPS) inspired by a relational and processual methodology, questioning the assumptions of International Relations concerning the boundaries of the international, the vision of politics at the core of political sciences, and the methodological nationalism concerning society. In ord...

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