Camille Popineau has a PhD in political science from the Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne (2024 African Studies GIS thesis prize, ENS Editions, to be published) and is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex (UK).
She was a member of the ERC Social Dynamics of Civil Wars from 2016 to 2021 and coordinator of the AFSP group Conflicts, Crisis et Social Disruption (2022-2024). She is currently a member of the ORA Project “The Great Green Wall and Sahelian Environmental Imaginaries: Green Fix and the Persistence of a Policy Idea” (IDS), and of the ANR PARLAf (Deputies in Africa: comparative analysis of a political profession) (University of Lille, FR).
Her thesis focuses on the effects of war on the state in Côte d’Ivoire and examined the evolution of elite balances during and after the war. Since completing her thesis, her research has focused more broadly on the post-conflict state and the interactions between political and administrative elites in a context of strong economic liberalisation and political centralisation. She is currently working on the effects on the state of putting the deforestation crisis in Côte d’Ivoire on the political agenda. She is analysing the effects of the deployment of green development aid projects on state institutions, ruling elites and public policies.
His research focuses on the evolution of relations of domination over time and on the drivers of social change. Taking a variety of subjects (war, the introduction of a policy), she seeks to identify moments of rupture in the social order, using them as a tool for analysing the evolution of social stratification. These ruptures act as revealing indicators that enable us to assess the evolution of the social structure from a historical perspective, and to question the mechanisms by which the social order is maintained and inequalities reproduced. She approaches these questions by analysing the dominant social groups and the internal conflicts that run through them. From a Bourdieusian perspective, the state is at the centre of her thinking, as the central organiser of the value of capital (and therefore of hierarchies) but also as the central space for the concentration of resources (economic and symbolic).
She works from an interdisciplinary social science base, conducts long-term surveys, and works on the basis of semi-directive or non-directive individual interviews, observations and archive collection.