The CAHD team (Aquitaine Centre for Law History) has long focused on the history of legal thinking, but has since expanded its remit to encompass the history of legal knowledge in the modern and contemporary eras. The history of legal knowledge incorporates the history of legal thinking, traditionally the preserve of legal scholars, but is not limited to this learned domain. Indeed, legal knowledge can originate from a much broader variety of sources than professional jurists (legal practitioners and professors of law) and the traditional legal literature (treatises, handbooks etc.). This approach acknowledges the ubiquity and diffraction of legal knowledge throughout the social sphere.

In addition to professional jurists, there are any number of players who lay claim to the right to speak about the law, to make effective use of it, or even to circumvent it; in short, to have a say in it, for better or worse. The legal knowledge this entails takes a broad variety of forms, far exceeding the boundaries of traditional legal/judicial learning. Alternative forms of legal knowledge may be found in sources as varied as novels, pamphlets, architectural treatises, songs, newspaper articles, sociological texts or even philosophical works. There are any number of stakeholders endowed with different forms of legal knowledge and/or practice: workers, journalists, suffragettes, anthropologists, publicists, experts etc. All figures who, in the course of their professional work, charitable activities or activism, demonstrate a certain legal-know how.

In parallel to the history of legal thinking stricto sensu, there thus exists another history, correlated to the latter without being entirely dependent upon it. This history encompasses different forms of legal knowledge, differing from the canonical history of legal thinking in that the latter is fundamentally informed by the tenets of legal science (analyzing the discourse and ideas of legal scholars). The history of legal knowledges, plural, thus embraces the multiplicity of spaces and manners in which legal discourse is constructed, utilized, contested and practiced within the context of activities generating legal objects.

This new history of legal knowledges encompasses their production and development, but also their transmission, dissemination and circulation.

The team thus continues to conduct research into the history of legal thinking considered as a form of legal knowledge specific to legal scholars, albeit enhanced by a new perspective: the material history of law (studies focusing on legal libraries and publishing, history of legal books, history of legal translation etc.). This work also includes a particular focus on studies of networks of legal scholars, both institutional and intellectual (international conferences, exchanges, translations, bibliometric research etc.).

Our vision of the history of legal knowledges is also attentive to the professional and disciplinary boundaries of law, including research into the use of law by non-lawyers, and the relationship between law and other fields of knowledge (economics, anthropology, sociology, literature etc.).

The CAHD team (Aquitaine Centre for Law History) now includes researchers and lecturers from the political sciences, building upon the political heritage of the IRM and enriching that tradition with a sociological approach to contemporary changes. Under the banner “Applying social sciences to the political and social changes of the post-modern era,” their work encompasses two broad themes: on the one hand, theoretical approaches to the changes in a contemporary society beset by the crisis of the paradigm of modernity; on the other hand, the concrete processes of change accessible to empirical studies, remaining attentive to the ways in which different forms of social mobilization are translated into the legal domain.

The social sciences first emerged in the 19th century, analyzing the dynamics underlying social change and giving political authorities the insight and information they needed to offset the attendant risks. In the canonical works of Comte, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, change is the matrix within which all issues play out. Ever since, the paradigm of modernity has been accepted as a heuristic explanation of the processes of change which have reshaped Western societies since the 18th century. In the 20th century, the paradigm of modernity, in its various guises, provided a heuristic device supposedly capable of explaining the deployment of these various processes, but since the 1980s the deconstruction of these historical foundations has eroded its conceptual authority. Modernity is now viewed not so much as a pertinent interpretation of the dynamics at work in contemporary society, but more as a sort of academic commonplace symptomatic of those dynamics.

This gradual loss of faith in modernity has been accompanied by an undermining of the processes which previously defined it: questioning of the dominance of the State over society; the return of religious movements championing a heteronomous vision of the political order; the re-examination of women’s liberation as the perpetuation of a gendered order which serves to marginalize minority sexualities and entrench gender norms; critiques of the alienation born of the ascent of individualism; denunciation of the insoluble dilemmas posed by the subordination of nature to culture, leading to widespread indifference to the environmental conditions which nonetheless determine the existence of society; recognition of the unprecedented threats to the future of humanity thrown up by technological progress; the growing sense of inurement to social emergencies and the declining legitimacy of representative systems. The very idea of progress, central to so many readings of contemporary history, has been eroded by a pervasive sense of disenchantment and skepticism regarding the future.

In this context, the marginalization of the paradigm of modernity has been accompanied by a fragmentation of ideas on the subject of change in the social sciences. Each discipline tends to approach change with its own frame of reference and research agenda, overlooking their cumulative compatibility and compromising the social and political relevance and accessibility of the social sciences. And yet, as Bruno Latour reminds us, this situation of “non-modernity” provides an opportunity to rethink the fundamental aims of the social sciences, transcending the boundaries imposed by modernist thinking. This might include, for example, incorporating non-human entities into our analyses of social configurations.

The aim of this research strand is to adopt a comparative approach to analyzing post-modern political and social change. Change is thus approached with particular attention to the specifics of the connections between the political and social orders. Our goal is to reflect upon the way in which social developments shape the redefinition of political activities and, by the same token, how political developments can reshape social groups. This requires us to approach politics not as a specialist, self-contained field of activity, but instead to strive to define the processes which inform the social institution of legitimate political subjects, and the political institution of legitimate social subjects; in short, to think about social change with reference to the dynamics of politicization, and the resistance encountered in the process. As defined by Jacques Lagroye, politicization is a process of negotiation or contestation of the accepted definitions of the boundaries of political activity. A process of politicization can be observed whenever identities, capacities, subjects and issues are invoked to justify the appropriation of political authority, to lay claim to new rights or to justify state intervention.

Paying special attention to the processes of politicization allows us to obtain a very broad understanding of the dynamics of change and the obstacles they face: the evolution of legal knowledge; intellectual or artistic constructs; representations of society and politics; experimentation with participatory mechanisms bringing new players and new legitimacy to political decision-making; religious, ecological and gender activism; scientific expertise and whistleblowers; the construction of gender, race and national identities; the transformation and territorialization of administrations; the dissemination of digital techniques and resources… In order to better define the conditions of these changes, we prioritize comparative approaches and do not limit our investigations to any specific period or geographical zone.

The CMRP team (Montesquieu Centre for Political Research) has historically specialized in comparative politics, understood as the comparative analysis of both political ideas and political regimes.

First of all, this involves the comparative analysis of political ideas and the analysis of academic discourse on power, its nature, its mechanisms and its effects. This implies a comparative analysis of political ideas and theories, i.e. the ideological corpuses and systems of thought (clearly-defined, vague, deliberate or unintentional) through which individuals and groups construct, understand or depict the political world they live in or that which they strive to create, invoked as the motivation for their political actions. This gets to the very heart of political science, and its historical foundations.

This approach is central to the identity of the CMRP team, one of the few academic institutions in France to engage with these issues. The team’s methods are not primarily quantitative in nature, with priority afforded to qualitative methods including content analysis and conceptual analysis, the genealogical exploration of the origins and conditions from which specific ideas and theories emerge, functional methods (considering the roles, goals and capacity for action of these ideas) and comparative methods (looking for conceptual connections between corpuses of ideas). Comparative analysis of political ideas may span everything from classic texts to innovative or contemporary theoretical output (extreme ideas, degrowth, different forms of populism etc.).

Comparative analysis of political regimes, meanwhile, consists of analyzing the architecture of political institutions and the organization of political power: presidencies, parliaments, governments, relations between power blocs, electoral systems, political parties, new forms of political activism etc. This applies as much to democratic systems as it does to the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes which still exist in the modern world; also, and more specifically, it is applicable to multicultural political societies. In terms of geographical scope, our analysis spans the Western world (with a particular focus on the Nordic countries and Central and Eastern Europe), Africa, the Middle East (Turkey), Latin America and the Caribbean. Special attention is devoted to analyzing the political regimes of emerging global powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China).

In France, such questions were previously at the heart of constitutional and political studies (public law and political science), but have been largely abandoned by political scientists since the 1980s. The CMRP is thus one of the few French institutions of political science to afford such central importance to these issues. In doing so we aim to assure the continuation of the intellectual tradition known as the “Bordeaux School,” historically associated with the city’s faculty of law and political science under the founding figure of Dean Léon Duguit. The scientific originality of this tradition resides in its determination to combine institutional analysis and sociological analysis, formal analysis and analysis of concrete realities, legal analysis and political analysis.

The CMRP team (Montesquieu Centre for Political Research) has developed particular expertise in the field of security studies. True to the IRM’s research philosophy, our work in this field does not seek to isolate and dislocate the internal and external dimensions of security. Although this territorial and legal division remains valid in the eyes of many of the main players in the security field, their practices in fact render the distinction increasingly unstable. By eschewing the categories imposed by those stakeholders, we are able to focus instead on the unifying dimension of security practices, namely the coercive capacity of States. Security studies, encompassing the actions of states within their national territory and international relations, can be divided into a number of interconnected topics.

First among these is public defense and security policy, which enables us to study the use of different forms of coercion with reference to their design and implementation.

Studying governments’ understanding and management of risk and uncertainty is a research topic inextricably linked to that detailed above, concerned as it is with the construction of specific forms of knowledge intended to counteract security risks. Within this context, special attention is devoted to the study of analyses, forecasts and forward planning.

We also aim to contribute to the development of critical security studies, an indispensable adjunct to the two topics detailed above.

Finally, research into aggression and conflict allows us to study the phenomena of insecurity themselves, ensuring that studies of security policies are not detached from the realities to which these policies are supposed to provide responses or solutions. Particular attention is devoted to the evolution of forms of conflict in response to two phenomena: on the one hand, the extension of the field of battle to englobe new domains and environments (lawfare and normative confrontation, information warfare, cyber and digital warfare etc.); on the other hand, the accelerating expansion of new military technologies and applications (hypervelocity and maneuverability, the militarization of space, missile defense systems, digital weapons etc.). The approach adopted combines analysis of the potential uses of these new instruments of war, the consequences and risks of their use, and the steps taken to regulate or even outlaw them. At the same time, a more conceptual reflection is required on the potential erosion of the traditional war-peace dichotomy (particularly with regard to the notions of duration, legal regulations etc.) and the pertinence of such concepts when discussing developments in contemporary warfare.