TRANSCORP aims to advance our understanding of the changing interface between business and society by analyzing the judicialisation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) – a phenomenon that is increasingly observed in the European Union, and notably in France, where the recent adoption of the ‘duty of vigilance’ law has opened the prospect that transnational corporations could be sued by third-parties for not taking sufficiently into account the risks generated by industrial activities across their production chains. While CSR had long been considered a matter of voluntary issue for private businesses, the on-going hardening of soft law remains an under-researched topic. This project aims to address this gap, by exploring how the agencies of a variety of state and non-state actors – such as transnational corporations (TNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), supranational institutions (EU, OECD) – intersect at different levels in the production of transnational legal cases that encapsulate competing claims for justice. The main contribution of TRANSCORP will be to investigate this ‘judicialisation turn’ as mirroring the overarching institutional significance that TNCs have acquired in a world power system that has become increasingly fragmented. This will help us to develop a fine-grained description of how the ‘hybrid sovereignty’ that these private entities had consolidated for themselves in a few decades of globalization has become more and more contested as human societies are faced with both an explosion of social inequality and a worrying disruption of planetary equilibriums.

The 1970s are widely considered in historiography as a turning point in European and international history. Amid major social and cultural shifts, the decade witnessed the crisis of the post-World War II patterns of ‘embedded liberalism’, economic growth and state interventionism, and set the stage for the emergence of a new globalisation process that would redefine the concept of national sovereignty. This project investigates these processes from the point of view of the European social democratic movement. A leading political force in many European countries for most of the decade, the social democrats were especially hard hit by the emerging new conditions, which called them to revise their programmes and approaches. The research focuses on three main aspects of their response to the crisis of the postwar ‘Keynesian compromises’: A) Social democracy as a transnational political force: the exchange of ideas and the transfer of policy strategies, the learning processes and the ideological conflicts that took place within the social democratic networks. B) The European Left as a variable of the transformation of the Cold War order: the alteration of the ideological, political and economic relations between the two blocs and within each one of them, the evolution of social democracy’s transatlantic partnership, the impact of globalisation. C) Social democracy and European integration: the new debates on (and contributions to) the development of the European Community that emerged during these years in connection with the economic crisis, globalisation and the difficulties of national reformism. This analysis will be crucially supported by a broad multi-archival research, to be carried out in five European countries and in the US. As a final result, this project aims at providing a highly innovative transnational narrative of the social democratic response to the challenges of the 1970s, consistent with the most recent trends in international political history.

John Hume and the Creation of the European Dimension in Ireland will investigate how John Hume helped to create the conditions for a diverse constituency in Northern Ireland to reimagine its political and cultural identity in Europe. The kernel of JHCEDI is a research question that has not been adequately addressed in the literature on Hume, or on Ireland in Europe: How did Hume’s reconceptualisation of Ireland in Europe facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland? This project could hardly be more timely: a thorough public awareness of the history of Northern Ireland in Europe through the lens of its key political actor, Hume, over the past half-century could provide a vital contribution to public discourse and attitudes towards the future. Today three pillars of considerable geopolitical significance – the threat to the Good Friday Agreement, the disruptions of Brexit, and the ongoing controversies that surround the Northern Ireland Protocol – give urgency to JHCEDI. No work yet exists that fully transcends the paradigms in which Hume has been framed by situating Hume’s project in the paradigm of nation formation in a European tradition as well as in ethnic studies. This is the gap in the literature that JHCEDI will address. The vision he shared with t of a Europe of regions and of shared sovereignty was at once a transnational priority for Hume and a strategy to resolve Ireland’s internal dilemmas. The objective of JHCEDI is to investigate how Hume helped to create the conditions for a diverse constituency in Northern Ireland to reimagine their political inheritance. The outputs of JHCEDI will be the articles and the public dissemination of my findings, being essential actions to lay the groundwork for my monograph in this subject.

We wish to quantify discrimination mechanisms in France, in focussing our research to local and urban aspects. We first measure discrimination in access to housing with testing methods. We then want to test mechanisms leading to the exclusion of economically deprived persons to the periphery of cities, with an empirical and theoretical analysis of spatial mismatch phenomenons. The analysis of networks, which has revealed extremely important understanding the determinants of access to jobs, allows for an identification of key factors (nodes) which lead long-term unemployment or crime. Access to credit is notably one of the key factors which penalizes individuals in a invisible way, and restrict their choice sets: combined to discriminations in access to housing, individuals have no choice but to live in places less favorable to human development and that of their children. Since the seminal work by Roland Bénabou (1993), economists have realized the importance of externalities and peer effects in education and skill accumulation. The last part attempt to measure the efficiency of affirmative action when it is based on territories, on the effort level of high-school students in impoverished suburbs.