Sarah PERRET

sarah.perret [at] kcl.ac.uk

Sarah Perret is a Researcher in International politics and political science at the Chair and is the principal collaborator in the ANR-PrAIrie project entitled ‘AI at the border’. The project aims to study the imaginaries at work in the European agency eu-LISA (the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice)as a socio-technical ‘interface’ site. 

Before joining the École normale supérieure, she has been Research Associate at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where she has collaborated to the ERC project called ‘SECURITY FLOWS‘. She contributed to Security flows project by carrying out theoretical, methodological and empirical research on datafication at the EU’s borders. She has also conducted postdoctoral research at the ENS (2017-2019) focused on the re-conceptualisation of ‘risk’ and the sharing knowledge on societal security. She has received her PhD in Political science and International relations from University of Paris-Saclay (in November 2015), in which she compared the security implementation (‘securitization’) of legislative changes on naturalisation in Germany, the United States, and France.

Sarah Perret has been a visiting researcher at Georgetown University’s BMW Centre for German and European Studies during her doctoral studies, and has taught at University of Paris-Saclay, Paris 2 Assas University, Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis University, Georgetown University, Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Sciences Po and University of Trento.

She also is ‘chercheuse associée’ at King’s College London and at the LabToP-CRESPPA/CNRS in Paris, and a founded Member of the multidisciplinary network on Terrorism Studies called OCTAV (Observatoire collaboratif sur le terrorisme, l’antiterrorisme et les violences).

In parallel of her academic curriculum, she has been parliamentary advisor at the French ‘Assemblée nationale’, and consultant at the World Bank on Governance and Public policies in West Africa. She also has been ministerial advisor on equality and social diversity for the former French Minister of National Education, Higher Education and Research.

Research interests:

  • Naturalized citizens, Migrants, Policy makers in the EU
  • International relations and International Political Sociology
  • Sociological approaches to Critical Security Studies 
  • ‘Symbolic Violence’ of Citizenship and in(security) in border policies and devices
  • Counterterrorism and counter-radicalization law-making
  • Datafication and digital devices