Police and the 'bureaucratisation of misfortune'. Interview with Jérémie Gauthier

Jérémie Gauthier is a sociologist and lecturer at the University of Strasbourg, specialising in police and security issues, with a particular interest in what he calls the "bureaucratisation of misfortune". Jérémie is on a one-year secondment to the Center for International Research (CERI Sciences Po/CNRS), during which time he plans to participate in a number of collaborative projects. In a short interview, Jérémie answers our questions about his background and plans.

You are joining CERI on a one year secondment. Could you tell us about your main research areas?

I'm interested in the way in which societies organise the institutionalised control of deviance, particularly through police action and the way in which the police interact with the public. My starting point is that the analysis of police action, both from the point of view of the police and from that of the governed, is an excellent way of studying, more broadly, relations of domination, the ability of states to exercise authority (or not) over those they govern, the sources of legitimacy granted (or not) to the latter, and the nature of political regimes. I'm currently interested in the socially differentiated relationships that the governed have with the police, particularly when it comes to making requests: requests for information or intervention, filing of reports, filing of complaints, and so on. This police function of responding to social demand, which I call the “bureaucratisation of misfortune”, will be of particular interest to me in the coming months.

You are interested in the police, particularly in France. Do you plan to take advantage of your time at the Centre de recherches internationales to enrich your work with a comparative perspective?

Like many academics of my generation, my career has been marked by a high degree of mobility. I did a PhD under Franco-German joint supervision at the Centre de recherche sur le droit et les institutions pénales (CESDIP) and at the Max Planck Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology in Freiburg im Breisgau. I then took part in a number of research projects in France and Germany. I am also a research associate at the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin. In 2018, I was recruited as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg and a researcher at the Laboratoire interdisciplinaire en études culturelles (LinCS).

My career has therefore been characterised by a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between France and Germany. At CERI, I want to broaden my research horizons by collaborating with colleagues working on related themes outside France, in order to gain a better understanding of what the imposition of state domination owes to the activities of the police, based on surveys conducted in foreign countries within political regimes that are close to or far removed from the French case. I therefore see my stay at CERI as an excellent opportunity to erode a number of boundaries, particularly those relating to fields of investigation, epistemologies, and disciplines.

What is your research methodology?

I have carried out a number of ethnographic surveys in the French and German police forces, observing and comparing the activities of the emergency police, the judicial police, the intelligence services, the maintenance of law and order, and the reception of the public. I also conduct interview surveys with the governed, observing their interactions with the police over time.

I also use quantitative methods. This involves using criminal justice archives, as I did, for example, during research into people convicted of “homosexuality” in France between 1942 and 1981. In addition, I carry out questionnaire-based surveys of representative samples of the French population, designed to gauge the representations and actual experiences that the governed have of the forces of law and order.

Photo & interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.