Laurent Fourchard, historian and political scientist, is a research professor at the National Foundation for Political Science. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Paris 7 and holds an Habilitation (HDR) in political science from Sciences Po. He was Director of the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) in Nigeria from 2000 to 2003 and visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town in 2008 and 2009. Before joining CERI in 2016 he was a research fellow at the research institute, Les Afrique dans le monde at Sciences Po Bordeaux.

Member of the section 40 of the CNRS (2016-2019), he is or has been a member of the editorial boards of the following journals: Africa, Journal of African History, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Politique africaine.

Laurent Fourchard’s research is located at the crossroads of history, political sociology and comparative urban studies, focuses on daily security practices, criminal threats, the uses of public space and the role of street level bureaucrats and political patrons in the metropolises of Nigeria and South Africa. In articulating historical and ethnographic methods, Laurent Fourchard explores the everyday dispositifs of exclusion, classification and policing of populations in working class areas during colonial and post-colonial periods. He was co-director of the international project on "the politics of xenophobic exclusion in Africa" (2011-2015) and is a member of the research project on “the social life of identity papers in Africa” (2016-2020).
At CERI, he co-hosts the seminar "Africa: citizenship, violence and politics" and the "research group on order and society" and at Sciences Po Bordeaux the seminar on "urban political issues".

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