Rethinking the nexus between legality and violence in (il)liberal democracies

Shoshana Fine is Associate Professor of Political Science at the European School of Social and Political Sciences at Lille Catholic University and a Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations. She is co-author, with Thomas Lindemann, of  La Violence au nom de la loi  (Presses de Sciences Po, 2026) and author of  Borders and Mobility in Turkey  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her work on migration, borders, and the politics of law has appeared in  Security Dialogue ,  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies ,  American Behavioral Scientist ,  Cultures & Conflits , and  Politique Européenne .

Sara Dezalay is Professor of International Law and International Relations at ESPOL (Université catholique de Lille). Her research explores the entanglements between law, violence, and global capitalism. She is the author of  Lawyering Imperial Encounters: Negotiating Africa’s Relationship with the World Economy  (Cambridge University Press, 2024/2025), which traces the role of law in shaping Africa’s position in global capitalism. Her recent work also investigates asylum justice and the everyday production of legal violence, building on her experience as an adjunct judge at the French National Court of Asylum (CNDA) and on an ethnographic research project on asylum adjudication funded by the Institut Robert Badinter.

Thomas Lindemann , Agrégé in Political Science, is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin and at École Polytechnique. He has published numerous books and articles on political violence and recognition in journals such as  Political Psychology , Review of International Studies,  International Political Sociology ,  International Theory ,  International Relations , as well as  Culture et Conflits  and  Revue Française de science politique . He is currently conducting research on the algotithmic mindset as a source of international violence.