Call 2024 Joint Projects
A Thriving Economy Amid Armed Violence
This project explores the paradox of Mexico’s economic growth alongside high levels of violence, highlighting how criminal groups influence both legal and illegal sectors—from mining and agriculture to oil and tourism. While studies typically emphasize drug trafficking and smuggling, this research examines the deeper impact of these groups on mainstream industries. By blending illegal operations with key economic activities, armed actors create a complex web that challenges the clear distinction between legal and illegal business in Mexico. Mexico stands as a global economic power, attracting significant foreign investment and ranking highly in sectors such as tourism, electronics, and automotive production. However, since 2006, confrontations between criminal groups and militarized law enforcement have resulted in over 400,000 deaths, 100,000 disappeared and massive displacement, generating a unique landscape where prosperous industries coexist with profound instability. This paradox—the coexistence of economic growth with pervasive violence—raises critical questions about the role of state institutions as they balance regulation, welfare, and militarized interventions. To address these issues, this international project will convene two major conferences in 2025 and 2026 in New York and Mexico City. The first will examine how criminal groups operate within regional economic sectors, focusing on how these illicit activities influence and sustain local economies. The second will study the “islands of rule of law” that manage to function in informal, violent environments, exploring how companies establish the stability needed for investment despite surrounding challenges. This collaborative research project brings together US, French, and Mexican scholars to deepen our understanding of Mexico’s economic and social realities, combining an ethnographic approach with the distinct methodological and epistemological perspectives of field-based Political Science. In the longer term, this project aims to build a broader collaboration, extending the comparative analysis of thriving economies in contexts of violence beyond Mexico, notably through an application to Columbia University’s President’s Global Innovation Fund (Columbia World Projects).
Exiled Memory, Memories of Exile: Cambodian, Loatian, and Vietnamese Refugees in France and the US 1975-2025
50 years after the exiles from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, what are the destinies of the refugees and their descendants? How much do their experiences in France - the former colonial power - and in the United States - the former protagonist in the Vietnam War – are different? How much do they contribute to the writing of their history and the construction of their memory?
In order to shed light on these questions, the project proposes a transatlantic comparison based on a twin-conference and a publication gathering academics, activists and artists from both countries.
The Lives of Early Modern Librarians: Actions, Networks, and Emotions (1400-1800)
Between the towering bookshelves of libraries and the development of information societies, the biographical study of librarians offers new avenues to explore social practices and emotions intrinsically related to premodern cultures of knowledge. Building on the history of the book, information systems, and the history of knowledge, The Lives of Early Modern Librarians workshop is conceived as an invitation for scholars and librarians of today to think about the social practices, ambitions, and emotions of men and women who dealt with all-thing bibliographically related between the late 1400s and the early 1800s. By departing from groundbreaking research in fields such as early modern Orientalism and Biblio-politics, and with cases studies ranging from Ottoman, Iberian, Atlantic, North African, Central/Eastern European and Mediterranean cultures of knowledge, this workshop will combine into one scholarly conversation a set of reflections on the points of collision and intersection between the biographical and the bibliographical turns in the study of the lives of librarians. These two turns have transformed the way social scientists and humanists write about the social history of ideas. What can be learn from the material lives of the day-to-day management of sites of knowledge and by reading about the frustrations, sicknesses, achievements and hopes of information management professionals? What do we know about their trajectories, their families, the personnel they worked with, and the displacements that affected their interactions with one another and others who gravitated around the spaces that librarians were supposed to guard and inhabit? The Lives of Early Modern Librarians interrogates how the human, the biographical and the emotional allow to better analyze the emic categories that librarians and their relatives relied on when building, interacting, and projecting themselves within an interconnected world of early modern libraries and archives.
1945-2025. War and Post-War(s): Contemporary Perspectives on the Post WWII World
2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. This latest commemoration takes place at a moment of profound historical transition—one that requires a reassessment of the legacy of the war in light of the ongoing transformations in the world today. To address these issues, we propose a series of three international conferences, entitled "1945-2025. War and Post-War(s): Contemporary Perspectives on the Post-WWII World." The approach is transnational and comparative, both in its thematic structure and geographical scope. The conferences are designed to foster dialogue among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in three key cities — Berlin, Paris, and New York, – with the goal of offering nuanced and action-oriented reflections on the legacies of the war and postwar and ways to address the uncertain future we face.
Although the full series includes events in Berlin, Paris, and New York, here we are seeking support for the two conferences in June in Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and in October at Columbia University in New York.
SiNERGI: Sustainable Cities Network of Education andResearch for Social Good with AI
Cities are not well prepared to cope with increasingly frequent occurrences of crises, arising from climate change and other disasters, causing devastating consequences to society. With faltering infrastructure, limited energy resources, but rapidly growing populations, it could be infeasible and prohibitively costly to resolve these challenges in the short- and medium-term. With a growing amount of data available in cities, how could emerging technology and AI help build smart and sustainable cities at lower cost? Future cities must be warranted a paradigm shift with access to efficient, clean, safe, and affordable mobility for all. This requires constant interdisciplinary dialogues among researchers, educators, agencies, and industry partners, spanning diverse domains in engineering, economics, data science, and social science.
This project aims to foster cross-institute collaboration and promote sustainable relationships between Columbia and Ecole Polytechnique (L’X), with an overarching goal to establish a synergistic education and research networking program at the intersection of smart cities and climate policy for social good. Based in two metropolises, a joint program unifying the emerging topics of smart cities and climate policy will help researchers in both the US and Europe to identify common challenges, learn from each other, and harness the strengths of both institutes to tackle these challenges.
To foster such a collaboration, we propose a series of events, including lectures and workshops at the intersection of AI and climate policies. Through these activities, we aim to identify needs and gaps, assess the effectiveness of solutions, and ultimately come up with solutions in both education and research harnessing the strengths of both institutes. To further strengthen the collaboration, we will leverage Columbia’s platforms and resources, as well as the L'X master program on Economics for Smart Cities and Climate Policy.