Most incidents of urban unrest in recent decades – including the riots in France, Britain and other Western countries – have followed lethal interactions between the youth and the police. Usually these take place in disadvantaged neighborhoods composed of working-class families of immigrant origin or belonging to ethnic minorities. These tragic events have received a great deal of media coverage, but we know very little about the everyday activities of urban policing that lie behind them. Over the course of 15 months, at the time of the 2005 riots, Didier Fassin carried out an ethnographic study in one of the largest precincts in the Paris region, sharing the life of a police station and cruising with the patrols, in particular the dreaded anti-crime squads. Describing the invisible manifestations of violence and unrecognized forms of discrimination against minority youngsters, undocumented immigrants and Roma people, this unique account of contemporary urban policing shows that, instead of enforcing the law, the police are engaged in the task of enforcing an unequal social order in the name of public security.

Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and a sociologist. Initially trained as a physician at Paris University Pierre et Marie Curie, he practiced internal medicine and taught public health, before turning to the social sciences. Having completed a Master’s degree at La Sorbonne and a PhD at EHESS, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, he became Professor at the University of Paris North and Director of Studies at EHESS. At CNRS, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he created Iris, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences, of which he was the Director. He was appointed at the Institute for Advanced Study as the James D. Wolfensohn Professor in 2009.

At the crossroads of two disciplines, he conducted studies in the field of medical anthropology, focusing on issues of power and inequalities, successively in Senegal, Ecuador and France. His research on the politics and experiences of AIDS in South Africa led him to develop the conceptual framework of the embodiment of history to account for the reproduction of social disparities and the production of heterodox interpretations in the context of the epidemic.

His interest in humanitarianism, and his involvement in the organization Médecins Sans Frontières, gave birth to a scientific program on the new forms of global interventionism, thus expanding his previous work on the politics of life. Attentive to lexical changes, their meaning for our apprehension of the world and their consequences for policies, he analyzed the reformulation of injustice as suffering, violence as trauma, and resistance as resilience through empirical studies realized in various international contexts of conflicts and disasters.

Supported by the program Ideas of the European Research Council, Didier Fassin’s most recent project explores how immigrants, refugees, and minorities are treated in France. Taking institutions such as the police, justice and prison, as sites of articulation between public policies and discourses and agents’ everyday practices, he proposes a political and moral anthropology of the state and reflects on the contribution of ethnography to democracy.