Research
RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS AND PEER RECOGNITION
Research achievements
I have published 6 books, edited 16 edited volumes, 104 refereed articles and 80 chapters in edited volumes. They are mostly in English and French, but some have been translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic. They cover a critical approach to terrorism and counterterrorism, policing, intelligence, war, conflict, border security, migration, refugees, human rights, democracy monitoring. My main sources of inspiration are related to relational sociology, among which I draw on Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Ulrich Beck as well as Michel Foucault. I have tried to reshape the field of international relations, dominated by narrow visions of geopolitics and American political science inherited from the 1970s, by opening it up to political sociology, political theory, critical literature, and anthropological methodologies.
I had the opportunity to be read and cited in different disciplines. This has driven my efforts towards collaborative research and publication. Even though I don't believe too much in ranking as a way to distinguish the most relevant publications, it is a way to connect with different audiences.
The total number of my citations in the google scholar ranking is 21785 and 10504 after 2016, the H index is 56 and the i10 is 177. ADscientific index 2023 ranked me for political science, 1st for KCL, 8 out of 447 for the UK,28 out of 1,862 for Europe, and 81 out of 5,789 in the world.
1. Among the most cited publications, my paper “Security and immigration: towards a critique of the governmentality of unease” has been cited in 3287 papers (16683 views and download from 2016-Altmetric).
2. My book with Anastasia Tsoukala Terror, insecurity and liberty has an Altmetric of 434 and totalizes over 1000 citations (English- and French editions combined). I co-authored with Jef Huysmans an article bringing together 23 academics "Critical approaches to security in Europe, a networked manifesto", a landmark in critical security studies.
3. From there, I have developed a conceptual framework around the notions of 'transversal fields of professionals of (in)security and the existence of transnational guilds' (2016 International Political Sociology 10, no. 4: 398-416), and in particular the relationship between their positions in terms of power and the symbolic power of their claims regarding knowledge on prevention and prediction. Very often these professionals of risks come from diverse milieu but have shared know-how developed in security matters where forecasting of plural futures are often mistaking with avoidance of the worst case scenario and where individual and collective (algorithmic) suspicion are the core data for elaboration of intelligence and surveillance forecasts whose actors are willing to act on the future by categorising 'deviant' or 'at-risk' human behaviour.
This framework shows how prevention and prediction destabilize criminal justice, evidence based research, and favour logics of suspicion and exception in the name of worst case scenarios Among this general frame shared by many authors among which Mick Dillon, Lucia Zedner, Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Jef Huysmans, Claudia Aradau, Valsamis Mitsilegas, Elspeth Guild, Fabienne Brion, Bernard Harcourt, have been crucial for establishing a critique of preventative dispositions and their danger for human rights and democracy.
4. I have more particularly emphasised the negative consequences of the intensive use of large-scale digital intrusive techniques in terms of privacy, the errors of false positives, and the collective impact on democratic practices See for example the collective article of Zygmunt Bauman, Didier Bigo, Paulo Esteves, Elspeth Guild, Vivienne Jabri, David Lyon, and R. B. J. Walker. (2014): ‘After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance’. International Political Sociology 8, no. 2 121–44). It has engaged me to analyse the discourses and pratices following the war on terror and the violence which has happened in the name of extracting information (from bodies or computers) in the name of prevention.
5. The book I have co-edited with Elspeth Guild & Mark Gibney, (eds) (2018): Extraordinary Rendition: Addressing the Challenges of Accountability, 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 326p has been one of the first where these questions of prediction, total awareness information, and torture at distance have push me on the direction of this idea of controlling the future as if it was a “past future” where uncertainty is tamed by belief in science. The report done for the European parliament on large scale surveillance and its consequences has later allowed a more ground based approach concerning the role of the digital as a form of disruption of politics. (Briefing Paper by the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs: “National Programmes of Mass Surveillance of Personal Data in the EU Member States and their Compatibility with EU Law”) and a lot of contacts with the members of the libe committee inside the European Parliament. (reproduced by CEPS Report number: Liberty and Security in Europe Papers, No 62).
6. After five years of intensive research on the relations between the different professionals of intelligence, security, profilers, private companies of surveillance and “algocrats”) we have set up a collective book co-edited by Evelyne Ruppert, Engin Isin and myself.: Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights. Studies (2019) International Political Sociology. Oxon and New York. Routledge (Altmetrics 87), This was an intense pluridisciplinary research and strong links between the different authors. For me it was the key book for this approach which frames our research project on the risk producers. It was a turning point in my research and the subject of numerous conference presentations. In short, it addresses the following issues. Data has become a social and political issue because of its ability to reconfigure relations between states, subjects and citizens. The book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its use are possible, both in theory and in practice. Data and politics are now inextricably linked: data shapes not only our social relations, preferences and life chances, but also our democracies themselves. International experts examine the political issues surrounding data and how it encourages subjects to govern themselves by claiming rights. We have brought together authors from a wide range of disciplines to work in a coordinated way on this book: Paul Edwards, David Berry, David Lyon, Ronald J. Deibert and Louis W. Pauly, Tommaso Venturini, Félix Tréguer, Lina Dencik, Arne Hintz and Jonathan Cable, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, Giovanni Ziccardi, Elspeth Guild, Jennifer Gabrys. Inside this book, in which I published a key article with Bonelli Laurent entitled "Digital data and the transnational intelligence space", I focused my research on the role of the coalitions of intelligence services at the international level and their use of data, as well as their pretence to detect the future behaviour of criminals and would-be terrorists, and their discourses and tools of prediction. Among the various publications which follow and are relevant for this ERC, the most relevant are:
7. Bigo D (2019): "Shared secrecy in a digital age and a transnational world", Intelligence and National Security 34, no 3 379 94 in which I analyse the role of national secrecy and the development of coalitions of secret services as well as the private companies playing a role on surveillance tools as well as algorithmic predictions.
8. In a more theoretical tone, I have presented the intellectual framework for analysing these practices in Bigo, D (2020). "Adapting a Bourdieusian approach to the study of transnational fields" in Schmidt-Wellenburg, Christian, and Stefan Bernhard. Mapping Transnational Fields: Methods for a Political Sociology of Knowledge. Routledge. and
9. Bigo, D. (2022) "Violence Performed in Secret by State Agents: Towards an alternative problematisation of intelligence studies". In Problematising Intelligence Studies Towards A New Research Agenda, Routledge, 276. Routledge New Intelligence Studies. London.
10. The results of the latest research grant GUARDINT insist on the possibility of monitoring these practices and to impose limits to these policies by mechanisms fighting against impunity and lack of responsibility at the transnational scale. Bigo D, Mc Cluskey E, Treguer F (forthcoming 2024, open access) Transnational oversight in times of emergency, who watches the watchers? Routledge.
I would like to continue in this direction, working with my two colleagues Jutta Weldes and Benoît Pelopidas, who perfectly complement my research with their profound knowledge of social imaginaries of danger, climate change and nuclear weapons.