Antoine is a postdoctoral scholar at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, working on the “Communication Technology and Contentious Politics” research theme. He obtained his PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2025, where he was working on the normative implications of the use of social media in contemporary democracies. His dissertation – which received the Lisa Smirl prize – sought to rethink the democratic potential of social media through original fieldwork conducted in France.
Before coming to Cambridge for his MPhil (obtained with distinction in 2020), Antoine studied at SciencesPo and Columbia University, from which he graduated summa cum laude with a dual B.A. in 2016. In his spare time, Antoine runs an NGO seeking to transform the Petite Ceinture — an abandoned railway line circling Paris — into a public park.
Research Interests
Antoine is a political theorist researching the way artefacts shape the possibility for democratic politics. His research interests include radical-democratic thought, the political theory of technology, critical media studies, empirical methods in political theory, and the history of 20th century political thought. At CGHR, Antoine uses a historicised approach to the relationship between communication technology and politics to interrogate how authority, power and political contestation are changing in a digital age. The research project on ‘Communication Technology and Contentious Politics,’ on which he collaborates with Professor Sharath Srinivasan, seeks to understand how, from the invention of writing to generative AI, domination and resistance have been articulated through and with communication technologies, with an emphasis on popular politics. Motivating these enquiries is a strong normative purpose: learning from the past, how can we radically rethink civic action and democratic popular sovereignty in our technological present and future?
Key publications:
- (2025) “Social Media, Democracy, and the Popular Public Sphere”, Constellations 32(2).
- (2022) “Control, Extract, Legitimate: COVID-19 and Digital Techno-opportunism across Africa”, Development & Change 53(6) (with Josh Platzky Miller and Sharath Srinivasan).
