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Over the last fifteen years, many scientific articles have attempted to explain the jihadist radicalization in France. One of the main difficulties encountered when trying to elaborate such explanations remains gaining access to the necessary sources. This article uses a very important set of documents – the assessment files of more than 350 “Islamist terrorists” placed under penitentiary evaluation (in so-called quartiers d'évaluation de la radicalisation, or areas for the evaluation of radicalization, within the Department of Prisons) – with a view to conducting a prosopographic analysis of this population. More than a hundred assessment criteria are used, ranging from socio-biographic data concerning age, nationality, domicile, education and income levels, and family background, to procedural data regarding romantic relationships, modalities of violent socialization, religious affiliation and intensity, perceptions of victimhood, etc., to ultimately elaborate seven types of Jihadist individuals.

The “Initiatives of Excellence” (Idex) are one of the latest reforms in higher education. These initiatives are calls for projects that concentrate additional resources on a dozen university sites, with a view to developing French institutions capable of competing with the best universities in the world. In this article, we study the progressive strengthening of a university board of directors that developed, supported, and administered a successful Idex project. More precisely, this project turned out to be a configuration comparable to winner-take-all policies, in so far as the site and the actors in question systematically emerged strengthened by the alignment between their program and the reforms deployed in higher education during the 2000s.

This article focuses on how the Linky smart meter was developed in France. In order to identify the social and political issues that bind this meter to the definition of a public policy instrument, this paper will shed light on the main consultations that shaped its operating methods. After following how divergent belief systems arose around the Linky instrument, this article will highlight their confrontation and question the logic of change driven by the meter's deployment. The latter was based less on a clear and explicit consensus than on negotiated incremental shifts, as well as on ambiguities voluntarily maintained during the various consultations.

This article proposes a new perspective for understanding electoral maps, using computational social science to study the criteria which shape how electoral districts are drawn up in France. Defining the boundaries of legislative constituencies is a complex task, given its technical dimension and the various demographic, geographic, and legal criteria that must be respected. Looking at demographic and geographic territorial data and the whole of the admissible redistrictings, we evaluate the criteria-based constraints on the empirical possibilities of the electoral map and, more broadly, we highlight the value of using computer for the map making of the electoral constituencies redistricting.