The Paris School is a strand of critical security studies associated primarily with Didier Bigo and scholars connected to the journal Cultures & Conflits and the Centre d'études sur les conflits at Sciences Po. It emerged in the 1990s and 2000s as a sociologically grounded alternative to the Copenhagen School's focus on securitisation as a discursive speech act (Buzan, Wæver, de Wilde).
Drawing heavily on Pierre Bourdieu (field theory, habitus, symbolic capital) and Michel Foucault (governmentality, dispositif, biopolitics), the Paris School treats security less as something declared by political elites and more as something produced through the routine practices of security professionals: police, border guards, intelligence agencies, private security firms, risk analysts, and database managers. Its central concept is often rendered as (in)securitisation — the idea that security and insecurity are co-produced by the same bureaucratic field, which has an interest in expanding the range of threats it manages.
Key analytical moves include:
- Studying the "field of security professionals" competing over the authority to define threats.
- Emphasising technologies and data — biometrics, watchlists, risk profiling, Schengen Information System, PNR data — as sites where security is enacted.
- Blurring the internal/external security divide, particularly through the convergence of policing, migration control, and counterterrorism in the EU.
- Critiquing the "ban-opticon" (Bigo), a dispositif that profiles and excludes mobile populations deemed risky.
Representative works include Bigo's Polices en réseaux (1996) and his article "Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease" (Alternatives, 2002). The school overlaps with the Aberystwyth (Welsh) School and Copenhagen School under the broader umbrella of critical security studies, but is distinguished by its empirical, ethnographic attention to everyday security bureaucracies rather than grand discursive moves.
Example
In analysing the EU's post-2015 migration response, Paris School scholars examined how Frontex officers, biometric databases, and risk-analysis units jointly produced asylum seekers as a security problem.
Frequently asked questions
The Copenhagen School analyses security as a speech act by political elites; the Paris School focuses on the everyday practices, bureaucracies, and technologies of security professionals that produce (in)security regardless of overt political declarations.
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