Alexander Bikbov (born in 1974) is an international scholar based in France known for his work in the fields of sociology and political science. He is the author of The Grammar of Order: Historical Sociology of Concepts That Change Our Reality, which has been recognised by the Public Thought Award (Obshestvennaya Mysl) in Russia and highly commended by international scholars. His research, public engagement, and writing encompass social movements and civic resistance, social and political theory, the sociology of knowledge, and the social and conceptual history of the 20th century. His methodology is marked by a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the political sociology and cultural history of the 20th century with a consistent exploration of "hot" data for research on civic activism.
Education and academic career Born in Russia, Alexander Bikbov studied at Moscow State University, where he majored in political sociology. In 1997, he graduated from Collège universitaire français de Moscou and the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (a joint degree with the University of Manchester). He then defended his PhD thesis in 2003 on the institutional framework of scientific policy and its reform in Russia during the 1990s.
Subsequently, Bikbov's academic career was split between Russia and Western Europe, mainly France, from 1998 to 2003 at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he researched scientific policy in Russian and French context and dedicated his time to translations of global social and political theories into Russian,Качанов, Ю. Л. (2000). Пространство и время в современной социологической теории. Федеральное государственное бюджетное учреждение науки Институт социологии Российской академии наук. including those of Bourdieu and Foucault. He was then a professor at the Smolny Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences in St. Petersburg from 2004 to 2006, where his teaching and research focused on French social and political theory, social inequalities, and practices of cultural consumption. He further built on this work as an associate researcher at the Maurice Halbwachs Centre in Paris (2007–2016), where he investigated perceptions of social inequalities and legitimate hierarchies in France, Italy, and Russia.
From 2009 to 2017, Bikbov acted as Deputy Director of the Centre for Contemporary Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. During this period, he organised and supervised the Research Initiative on Protests (abbreviated in Russian as NII Mitingov), which aimed to study civic protests and led to numerous articles and publications.
In 2018, Bikbov settled in Western Europe, where he assumed the posts of visiting professorships at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris; 2018–2021) and in 2023–2024 at the Yuri Lotman Institute at Ruhr University (Bochum, Germany). There, he also researched and taught on sociology, the history of protest culture, and late Soviet governmentality. Since 2021, Bikbov has been an associate fellow at the Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies in Paris.
Bikbov has coordinated several large public conferences in collaboration with Paris universities focused on the roles of the social sciences and civic action in the 1960s–1970s and the 2000s–2010s, while contributing to initiatives supporting researchers and academics in exile.
His other roles have included a visiting professorship at the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in Bordeaux in 2011 and an associate professorship at the Higher School of Economics (2013–2014).
Editorial work and translation From the 1990s onwards, Bikbov has acted as a professional translator and editor of French sociological literature, including classic works by Maurice Halbwachs (Social Classes and Morphology), Pierre Bourdieu (The Logic of Practice, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, and several articles), and Michel Foucault, as well as works by L. Pinto, Ch. Soulié, and J.-L. Fabiani. As an editor, Bikbov has worked for the interdisciplinary review journal Logos (Moscow; 2002–2019), the bilingual review of social research journal Laboratorium (2008–2012), and the annual open-access review journal Sociologie (Italy; 2020–present).
Research Bikbov's work combines research on political sociology, the sociology of knowledge, and the social and cultural history of post-war Europe and the USSR. Since the 2000s, he has conducted comparative studies on activist practices, individual perceptions of social inequalities, and the intersection of science and state reforms. Bikbov regularly appears in international media, where he provides analyses of large-scale changes in political regimes, including worldwide reforms of educational institutions and public administrations, civic protest and grassroots self-organisation, and the international revival of nationalism and racism.
The critical analysis tools Bikbov developed in his work have been recognised as foundational for further developments in the fields extending beyond conceptual history. Examples include a study of the decolonial history of utopian architecture, a representation of the "well-rounded individual" in late Soviet films, and a study that unveiled the roots of neoliberal subjectivity in the late Soviet era. Others focused on the analysis of Russian contemporary politics through the lens of Karl Wittfogel's concept "despotism".
Social inequalities and civic protest
Civic and social movements Bikbov's studies of civic movements and protest mobilisations have primarily focussed on first-time participants who lack prior political or associative affiliations, using data collected through "on-the-spot" interviews during public rallies, including the "White Ribbon" mobilisation in 2011–2017, the truck drivers' protest in 2015–2017 in Russia, and the "Yellow vests" uprising in 2018–2020 in France. Bikbov elaborates that this setup provides a double methodological advantage in accessing an otherwise inaccessible assembly of participants and enabling the collection of "hot" contentious narratives as opposed to the commonly gathered "cold" data, which is often normalised through overlapping media interpretations.
He explains that this mobilisation is based on the conjunction of the participants' cultural preferences and a desire for a knowledgeable self that is distant from collective representation, which underpins their communicative strategies and repertoire of protest actions. Following the hardening repression of public movements in Russia since 2022, Bikbov put forward the idea that protest is not disappearing, contrary to mainstream interpretations that often portray the Russian population as completely subjugated to the Kremlin's narratives. Protest takes on altered forms of everyday resistance, without direct political demands or expressions, by instead speaking the language of professional autonomy (e.g. in secondary education), social justice (e.g. in manifestations against deficient social security), and cultural creativity (e.g. artistic and academic production).
Perceived social and professional inequalitiesIn his seminal study on the diversity in perceptions of social and professional inequalities,Бикбов А. Социальные неравенства и справедливость: реальность воображаемого (рисунки современного общества в России и Франции)// Логос, No. 5, 2007 http://intelros.ru/pdf/logos_05_2007/bikbov.pdf Bikbov uses individual mental maps of social space, which partly draw on the projective techniques of Stanley Milgram and sociological ideas underlying the pioneering analysis of professional classifications by Boltanski and Thévenot. He cross-references projective data with objective indicators of inequalities (i.e. the particular economic and cultural resources the informants utilise) to clearly reveal the associations between these individuals' social positions and visions of social hierarchies. Bikbov combines the study of civic movements with an analysis of perceived inequalities to illustrate how urban protesters from higher social classes practise social censorship and exclusion towards more vulnerable groups (e.g. via exclusion when protesting homeless people in the name of hygiene and neatness.
Study of sociohistorical transformations
Scientific expertise in post-war governmentality In a separate stream of work that explores the crucial role assigned to scientific expertise by the 20th-century Soviet political regime, Bikbov highlights the role of scientific rationality in the population's centralised consumption, leisure, and education. He exposes the isomorphism between science and public administration. This discovery is based on grey literature, archival materials, semi-structured interviews, and statistical data. For instance, Bikbov examines the institutionalisation of Soviet sociology, philosophy, and applied psychology to uncover a late Soviet version of governmentality that partly relies on European and American state administration and expert knowledge in political management.
Further, Bikbov explores the institutional and conceptual history of science in the 1950s and 1970s to reveal the silent replacement of the Communist mission with a drive towards scientific progress, collectively mobilised through manageable individuals.Бикбов, А. Т. (2014). Грамматика порядка: Историческая социология понятий, которые меняют нашу реальность(pp. 432-432). Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования" Национальный исследовательский университет" Высшая школа экономики". He also explores similar shifts in post-war France, referring to the history of atypical expert institutions in the 1950s–1970s (e.g. Maison des Sciences de l'Homme) and the larger institutional role of the social sciences in the formation of post-war political decision making. He critically scrutinises the elimination of scientific expertise from state agencies, which was subsequently replaced in the 1990s with a nationalist and pseudo-scientific agenda that led to the emergence of the new political regime both in Russia and worldwide.Bikbov A. (2024), "Neo-Mercantilist Trauma and the Challenges of a New Culture," in: Plotnikov N. (ed.), Facing the Catastrophe: Voices of Russian Intellectuals, LIT Verlag.
Historical sociology of political concepts In his major work The Grammar of Order: Historical Sociology of Concepts That Change Our Reality (2014), which the Public Thought Award recognised, Bikbov proposes a sociohistorical analysis of the emergence and usage of key concepts in Russian public and expert vocabulary, including the "middle class", "socialist humanism", the "well-rounded individual", and "scientific and technological progress". He traces how originally narrow concepts are captured by political discourse and are subsequently altered in their meanings as they enter the fields of science, education, and culture. By exploring an extensive corpus of European, Soviet, and post-Soviet texts, Bikbov's methodology draws on both Reinhart Koselleck's conceptual history and Pierre Bourdieu's sociogenetic approach to reconstitute the meaning of key concepts that create new forms of political order through interpositional struggles and institutionalising practices that involve both expert and political groups.
"Using Foucault's formula for criticizing the traditional history of ideas, we can say that for Bikbov, concepts are not a "document" reflecting the structure of some extra-discursive reality, but a "monument", i.e., a discursive factor that structures social reality"( trans. from Russian).