Dr. Hugo Micheron

Hugo Micheron earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris in 2019. Between September 2020 and September 2022, Dr. Micheron joined Princeton University as a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Transregional Studies. He is currently working on a history of European Jihadism.

Dr. Micheron’s Ph.D. dissertation, titled “The Lands of Jihad: neighborhoods, prisons, and the Levant. A Political Sociology of West European Jihadism (1989–2019),” is the result of in-depth sociological surveys in French and Belgian neighborhoods affected by jihadist recruitment.  For this research, he also conducted 80 interviews with convicted “returnees” from ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Syria) who are incarcerated in French prisons. He engaged in discussions with jihadist leaders and foot soldiers both through one-on-one and collective interviews. The fieldwork in Europe was complemented by interviews in Iraq, north Lebanon and Turkey with local jihadists and their families as well as with Kurdish fighters and Syrian dissidents. Dr. Micheron’s doctoral research constitutes the largest qualitative and quantitative social science study on French-speaking jihadism. A revised version of the dissertation was published by Gallimard press in 2020 under the title Le jihadisme français, and an English translation and publication is presently underway with Oxford University Press. Dr. Micheron has taught at Princeton University, Sciences Po and the ENS (Paris).