France

This course is an examination of the Western Balkans' path to the European Union, with an emphasis on the post-1989 developments. It looks at the course content through political, economic, historical, and international perspectives. Over the semester the focus is on the ever-developing relationship between the EU and the Western Balkans, EU approaches towards integration, conditionality mechanisms, and individual paths of the seven new republics created after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Topics include: Balkans in Europe; the Dissolution of Yugoslavia and its Consequences; EU conditionality and the accession mechanisms; state-building, democratization, Europeanisation, and transformation of the Balkans.

This course considers the main components of American soft power, the ability of the United States to influence through non-coercive behavior, and how they have evolved over time. Also covered are the current challenges, limitations, and constraints to American soft power. Students consider how the public perceives US leadership and the soft power initiative and actions meant to secure it, and the potential consequences of the Trump presidency on America's soft power capital.

This course explores cultures of the French-speaking countries of the south (Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa), in their plural identities and their universes of reference, in order to better understand them. It studies literary texts and the analysis of films and audiovisual documentaries. Writers from these French-speaking countries accompany readers in discovering the other through literary strategies that prepare for the reception of difference. The course offers readings that will be like intercultural adventures in which the literary technique of the child narrator-character is decisive.

This course is transdisciplinary in its framing and combines various approaches and scholarship from critical security studies, surveillance studies, sociology of technology, data sciences, human rights, and international law. The course develops a reflexive understanding of the main categories at work when using geopolitics, security and securitization, mass surveillance, and privacy rights, by joining different experiences too often fragmented by disciplinary knowledge. It analyzes the scripts they produce in order to build a transdisciplinary understanding reflecting the debates (or lack thereof) concerning digital spaces.

This course explores the concepts of nation and identity in modern France via its cultural, political, and intellectual history. It examines key ideas developed by some of the most influential modern French thinkers. Each week students consider a handful of central ideas, contained in short slogans or quotations, which is then developed more fully in accompanying texts. Students discuss the ideas developed in these texts, relating them to broader course questions and to their own experience in contemporary Paris.