Le poteau, le traitre et la balance. La vie morale des cités

At the foot of the blocks of flats in Montrimond, some of the working-class youth have got into the habit of ‘hanging out’ in the lobbies and public spaces. In this suburb on the inner outskirts of Paris, these young people see themselves as ‘guys from the housing estate’. There are the “Belvédère lads” and the “Val lads”, territorial self-designations that overlap with the map of “sensitive” neighbourhoods.

Kamel Boukir is a sociologist and senior lecturer at EHESS. His work focuses on youth and deviance from the perspective of moral sociology, exploring the conflicts of loyalty that arise when childhood friendships turn into criminal complicity.

His publications include: “‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Complicity between greed, hatred and betrayal’ (Terrain, no. 72, 2022) and ‘“We’re lads from the estates!” The ecological genesis of moral experience: the sense of community among youth gangs in the Parisian suburbs’ (Daniel Cefaï et al. (eds.), Human Ecology: A Social Science of Living Environments, Créaphis, 2024).

At the same time, his passion for the mountains has brought him into contact with tales of exploration. He introduced and translated Matthew A. Henson’s *Diary of a Black Explorer at the North Pole* (Zones sensibles, 2020).

Since the late 1980s, Sylvain Bourmeau has been involved in launching three enduring media successes: the political science journal *Politix*, the weekly magazine *Les Inrockuptibles* (where he served as deputy editor-in-chief between 1994 and 2008) and the online daily *Mediapart* (where he was part of the small group of founding journalists between 2008 and 2011). He was also deputy editor-in-chief of *Libération* and an associate professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.

He is the author of *Bâtonnage*, a collection of poetry published in 2017 by Stock, and the author and director of a series of around thirty documentary films, ‘Les Intellectuels du XXIe siècle’, produced by Les Films d’Ici for France Télévisions, and *Ils ne sont pas l’extrême droite, ils font l’extrême droite*, due to be published by Éditions de la Découverte in September.

As editor-in-chief of the opinion daily *AOC*, Sylvain Bourmeau has also been the producer of the programme *La Suite dans les idées* on France Culture and an associate professor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.