This research project involves the international comparison of different capital cities to study the place and role of political power and global urban governance in the creation, making and development of capital cities as well as the impacts of grassroots claims and demands about urban and environmental design on these political processes. The following questions will constitute the core of our interrogation: how are the national imaginaries of capital cities forged by the spatial configuration of political symbols? What are the conflictual and/or consensual relationships between different political actors in the conception of capital cities? To what extent could the nature of the political regime have an important impact on this conception with regard to the highly competitive context of planetary urbanization? What are the specific socio-political and economic flows among these countries and how do they in turn influence capital city building? Finally, how is it possible to tackle the interactions between urban design policies and multiple societal and environmental advocacy programs, considering the growing importance of urban democracy in many countries and international agendas? Our main objective is to study, in a comparative manner, the production of capital cities according to three different but interconnected research themes: 1- The spatial imagination and conception of capital cities by national political power, as a symbolic struggle of different political visions. 2- The influence of global urban networks and the circulation of international models in urban development and urban space. 3- The reciprocal impact between urbanisation policies in capital cities and various demands and protests from divergent actors concerning urban spaces and the environment. In order to study these questions, we propose the cases of Ankara, Moscow, Tehran, Abu Dhabi, Nur-Sultan and Cairo. Our choice to focus on these capitals comes from the fact that the countries in which they are located are often present in the studies of international relations in terms of geopolitics, state and diplomatic relations but less in urban studies. The cities of the project are deliberately chosen as being situated in states perceived among an international community as relatively illiberal and non-democratic. We are interested in analysing how authoritarian governments express themselves spatially in the city. The existing scientific literature on this topic has focused primarily on the fixed staging of illiberal political power in political geography and geopolitics, and less has been said on the dynamics between the political regime and city design as well as the lived and perceived spaces in these cities. The main contribution of the project will be the realisation of an international comparison of cities including their diversity, particularities, and also their shared strategies. What interests us is to observe if they are affected by similar political and symbolic processes among various actors, have similar strategies of integration in global urbanism and use similar tools in urban space in order to reflect an image of a strong state at the international level despite their diverse histories, settings and cultures. The major ambition of the project is to delve into unexplored fields/areas of urban studies. We will link our research themes through multiple threads that will follow state actors at both national and local levels, inhabitants in their lived and conceived spaces, urban activist networks and civil society. We will focus on political decision-making places of urbanism as well as on the historical and symbolic development of cities. We will bring together different methods and tools and will use especially filmmaking and photography for each stage of the work, not only as a research method but also as a storytelling medium.

SUBLIME investigates the recent shift affecting the cornerstone of the Welfare States in the MENA : the universal subsidies on food and energy. The two waves of uprisings in the region – 2011 and 2019 – have made social justice a central issue. In this context, international donors and new regimes called for the renewal of ‘social contracts’ and pushed for the removal of subsidies and their replacement with targeted cash transfer programs. However, the lift of subsidies is a crucial political-economic dilemma, as it causes price increases on basic commodities and raises the risk of new revolts. In the eyes of policy-makers, but also of many scholars, subsidies appear as an instrument of political subordination that produces consent among citizens who would resign themselves to an authoritarian but protective order – and symmetrically would be likely to rebel if prices were to soar. Our project reverses this argument, and hypothesizes, rather, that the lift of subsidies produces political subjectivation not because it supposedly triggers food or fuel riots, but because it unveils the political struggles and relations that shape the complex socio-economic and bureaucratic supply-chains forming the subsidy systems. The lift of subsidies brings about multiple modifications in those chains that generate ambivalent political debates, sectorial mobilizations and new imbricated layers of welfare in which citizens are caught. Our project provides the first systematic, empirically grounded and comparative political sociology of subsidies in four post-uprising societies where this reform is on-going (Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Lebanon). Mixing complementary methods (archival research, mapping, quantitative dataset, qualitative surveys, ethnographic fieldworks), and gathering experienced field researchers and 3 PhD/Post-doc, the project excavates the social embeddedness of subsidies and the transformations of state-citizens relationships caused by their lift.

Revisiting Saint-Simonianism as an Innovative Utopia Summary The SAINT-SIMONISME 18-21 project is a multidisciplinary rediscovery of the largest utopian thought of the 19th century, designed and developed in its practical form between 1810 and 1880. It generated intellectual and practical innovations to deal with the uncertainties and risks of a changing world. Saint-Simonianism is examined through two different but interconnected ways. The first way is by retrospectively reinterpreting, back and forth across centuries (18th-21st), the great questions that Saint-Simonian thought confronted: new methods of organization and production, social justice, family and gender equality, the end of ideology and religious revival, the rejection of an independent economic discipline... The second way is by examining afresh the original writings — which are often hard to get through – with a modern gaze. With multi-version critical editions, it reanalyzes these texts and brings out potential for present-day application.

PredicMo considers preaching as a common element of the three Abrahamic religions. Preaching has, however, been understudied in a connected perspective. This project aims to establish a common "grammar" of preaching, understood as a set of principles, rules, strategies and models, together with their variations. While Judaism refutes its universal vocation, Islam and Christianity have placed preaching at the heart of their doctrine. As the driving force of 'making people believe', preaching is understood as a device (dispositif Foucault) embodied by the presence of an individual or a group in a territory in order to constitute or consolidate a community of believers. Adopting a Weberian perspective, the programme focuses on preaching, whose objective is to convince and which develops in a context of religious crisis, and not only on the cure of souls. Preaching as an internal and external constitutive device of faith experiences has been constantly reshaped since the end of the 19th century. PredicMo focuses on its contemporary reinventions and redefinitions. PredicMo will renew the study of preaching through original transversal hypotheses. In order to do so, it has chosen the Middle East as a privileged observatory, a space of elaboration and circulation, constantly connected with international dynamics. The seven territories concerned by our survey (Egypt, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq) have all experienced this large-scale phenomenon with varying temporalities, actors and dynamics. The project first argues that preaching is a common matrix for the three Abrahamic religions. By analysing preaching in the light of its lexicon (S1), its cartography (S2) and its staging (S3), the programme's first objective is to propose a common ‘grammar’ of preaching. Its second objective is to elaborate a solid and innovative reflexive methodology allowing a religious, temporal and geographical decompartmentalization (A1). Not limiting itself by focusing on a specific country, PredicMo will analyse influences, emulations, competition in preaching discourses and spatial strategies using several case studies. Finally, preachers have played a decisive role in the (re)configuration of the religious and political environments of the Middle East since the late 19th century, but no archival corpus is devoted to them. Our third objective is therefore to build a catalogue and a corpus of indexed preaching archives (A2). Supported by IREMAM, Ifpo and EFR, PredicMo will gather an international and interdisciplinary team to cross-analyse new visual, sound and written sources, developing digital tools to make them accessible to a large public. The team consists of specialists of Islam, Judaism and Christianity with a long experience in Middle Eastern fieldwork, as well as various actors of preaching. The people in charge of the three institutions, and the scientific subprojects will guarantee the good governance of the programme (A5). In partnership with the Mucem, a data collection-survey will focus on the material conditions of preaching. Besides its theoretical contributions, publications and scientific promotion (A4), PredicMo will deliver an online dictionary of the vocabulary of preaching (A1), an indexed catalogue of the sources of preaching and a mapping of the trajectories of preachers (A2). The collaboration with the Mucem will make possible the integration of some of the items of the survey-collection into the museum collection and the creation of an itinerant exhibition (A3). Reflecting the team’s approach, two web-documentaries as well as several video and audio clips will be produced and made accessible to a large audience: academics, students, and the general public.