Against the backdrop of increased powers and resources attributed to police agencies for combating terrorism and other newly perceived threats in many mature democracies, the POLACS project compares levels of empowerment for citizens through accountability mechanism (independent oversight bodies, police complaints procedures and similar schemes). Additional police powers, technologies and transnational police networks add to the already far-reaching powers that police agencies have, granting the police new and powerful ways of monitoring and interfering in citizens’ lives and thus their fundamental rights. Yet, it often proved very difficult to get reform of police complaints procedures onto the political agenda. Today, with audio-video recording equipment becoming ubiquitous and with conflictual encounters between police and members of the public disseminated instantly via the internet, the issue has moved from the fringes to the mainstream as a live political issue. Researchers from Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and Japan will be cooperating in the POLACS project. The research also covers other countries with well-established police oversight bodies, e.g. Australia, the US and the Netherlands. In the light of persistent public concerns in many democratic countries about effective police accountability, particularly in cases of death or serious injury to members of the public, there is an urgent need to improve the empirical basis for comparison of police accountability schemes and to develop international standards for ‘good practice’. The project also includes the accountability of transnational policing within institutional frameworks such as Interpol or the European Union’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, and in transnational police networks. For transnational policing, mostly situated outside national parliamentary oversight and access to justice, accountability can be perceived as particularly deficient. The academic investigators involved in the POLACS project, with their theoretical and empirical expertise on police accountability will revise and adapt current accountability theories and standards to the empirical reality that has been in rapid development since the 1990s. The methodological approach is comparative as the most effective way to contextualise performance of national and sub-national schemes and a necessary basis for developing international standards for ‘good practice’. Currently policy-makers, practitioners, and activists involved in reforming police accountability mechanisms face great difficulties in contextualising current schemes with other schemes, past and present, as the available qualitative insights and quantitative data are often not comparable. Only by bringing existing data and knowledge together will it be possible to contextualise existing national and sub-national police accountability schemes and identify what data and insights are currently missing. This again will inform the empirical research undertaken by this project and subsequent research.

The Haspear (Social Fragmentations: HAte SPEech And Resistances) project is based on the observation that European societies are facing various forms of social fragmentation, resulting in oppositions between ideological groups, a breach of trust between citizens and politics, and a rising of radicalities and hatred. Haspear aims to analyze these social fragmentations to propose ways for remediation. The project is based on the study of hate speech, regarded as visible and analyzable marks of fragmentations, both products and producing these fragmentations. The project proposes 1) to identify places of social struggles and, within these places, to analyze the circulation of hate speech, 2) to collect and analyze the resistance strategies that respond to hate speech and to the processes of social domination, 3) to measure the performativity of these strategies and to develop alternative discourses, 4) to initiate prevention and awareness-raising measures once informed, by the previous stages, of the conditions of effectiveness of these strategies, and 5) to initiate work to widely disseminate our solutions. Haspear is targeting one of the future AAPs of the Horizon Europe program, and more specifically, the topic "The impact of inequalities on democracy" of the call "Protecting and nurturing democracies" of cluster 2 "Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Society". Supported by Julien Longhi (Professor of Universities, CY Cergy Paris University). Haspear is backed by the international research group Draine (“Hatred and social breakdown: discourse and performativity”), which, for 3 years, have been analyzing hate speech from the point of view of Language Sciences, Information and Communication Sciences, and Education Sciences. Draine is already used to work in European consortia (H2020 Practicies), with partners from civil society. In addition, some of its members have already led European projects. However, to respond to the work approach outlined above, we need to develop in other disciplines: economics, politics, civilization, sociology. We also need to integrate more broadly the actors of civil society from the European countries of our partners. The ANR MRSEI would allow us to bring together, online and face-to-face, the partners envisaged to refine our lines of work, and collectively write the future work package proposals of the Horizon Europe project. The ANR MRSEI would also allow us to organize a study day to expand the network to other potential partners from the scientific community, and to call upon, if necessary, a consulting firm for the final drafting of the Horizon Europe project.