FRANCE

This course introduces arbitration as a procedural alternative to litigation. Different types of arbitration coexist for the settlement of a wide array of disputes in the transnational realm. Four types are studied in this course: commercial, investment, sports, and public international arbitration. Notwithstanding their evident distinctive features (e.g. involved parties, applicable law etc.), this course—on the procedural level—highlights common features and the challenges which they all face. Solutions to these challenges are nowadays no longer sought only in isolated reform and policy initiatives focusing on only one of these types of arbitration. Rather, global solutions and trends emerge for instance as regards the fight for corruption or the increasing demand for accountability and transparency of arbitral decision-making. Students identify and study the legal steps of the arbitral process from the signing of the arbitration agreement to the enforcement of the final award. While the course centers on procedural aspects, the provided materials and class discussions evidently offer insight into the substantive side of these disputes. Each session first provides an overview to foster a holistic understanding of the key procedural principles and dynamics at play. Subsequently, class discussion delves into a curated selection of materials encompassing all of the studied types of arbitration. Concurrently, students engage in a practical arbitration moot exercise, focusing on a range of procedural issues within a simulated arbitration framework. Working collaboratively in teams, students develop written arguments and present them before a fictitious Arbitral Tribunal during the final session of the course.

This course examines the main aspects of intra-European mobility, whether legal, political, socio-economic, or cultural. It introduces the paradigm shift in intra-community migration and living together that goes hand in hand with this specific way of conceiving the cohesion of the European Union and its relationship with its neighborhood, making Europe at the beginning of the 21st century a laboratory for experimenting with a post-national citizenship. Analysis of reference texts and figures is supplemented by discussion time to help students reflect on their own experience as mobile citizens or, comparatively, on their experience of migration outside Europe and interculturality. Several case studies illustrate the analysis and highlight the diversity of situations that intra-European mobility can involve.

Being useful appears like a value per se: it would be an absolute, an ideal giving meaning to a life, a job, a public policy, a political project. Usefulness has been defined as a good in itself, and its negative, uselessness, as a criticism that devalues any object, especially any object in the political sphere. In contemporary times, the dividing line between useful and useless has come to be seen as a division between good and evil. But is this axis of division neutral? On what conceptual history does it rest? This course identifies the sources that have fueled the way in which, in a neoliberal context, public interest has become the equivalent of the Public Good, and the useless as the parasite that must be reduced, hunted down, and annihilated. An analysis of the notions of liberalism, neoliberalism and new public management are required for that.

This course considers and explains why and how the international system is characterized by the return of a tough competition among states. That is what we call power politics. This dynamic is reflected in the return of inter-state conflicts (Russia/Ukraine, Iran/Israel) and the risk of their spreading to other regions (Taiwan, South China Sea). The central question addressed in this course from both a conceptual and empirical perspective is why we moved within a decade from a world of economic interdependence based on the decline of interstate wars to a world where states are on the forefront of global competition including through the weaponization of economic interdependence. This course is by definition transversal and trans regional since the competition affects all regions of the world. It focuses on three types of actors: the drivers of this new competition who are setting the new rules of the game (United States and China), the contenders who have global ambitions while facing obstacles on their way (Russia, India, and the European Union) and the Hedgers who are middle income countries who are trying to leverage this new global dynamic for their own benefit (Brazil, South Africa, UAE, Indonesia, and Vietnam among others).

Receiving an adequate level of education can be seen as a fundamental social right. Yet, the extent and ways in which education is provided vary substantially across countries, social groups, and over-time. This course is designed to introduce students to the study of educational inequality and education policy. The course begins by reviewing the main goals, achievements, and outstanding challenges in education policy in the early 21st century. Specifically, it takes a historical perspective to review the significant progress made with respect to providing education to large parts of the world's population and with respect to reducing gender inequality in educational attainment. The course then turns to one key policy challenge of the early 21st century—reducing the inequalities in educational attainment between individuals from different socio-economic backgrounds. It discusses normative arguments for why we may care to understand and address inequality of educational opportunity. Moreover, the course examines the social mechanisms that account for educational inequalities between individuals from different social backgrounds and discusses whether and how policies and social interventions can reduce these educational inequalities. The structure of the course follows the early life-course and educational trajectory of individuals to critically examine educational policies on early childhood education, the notion of "social investment", ability tracking at the secondary level, the function of school autonomy, the effectiveness of education policy to equalize access to elite institutions, the role of large crises — such as the COVID-19 pandemic — in exacerbating existing inequalities, and how education policy can protect children's learning in the face of such crises. The course fosters students' ability to think like a social scientist and to critically approach and examine major issues of educational inequality. It develops the conceptual tools and substantive knowledge to address current questions on educational inequality.

This course is based on a so-called “bottom-up” field approach in order to measure the social and societal effects of public policies in a different way. To illustrate this method, it draws on various visible situations related to migration: resurgence of shantytowns, increase in unaccompanied minors wandering around, etc., in order to analyze the sociological mechanisms at work within migrant groups, host societies, and countries of origin. This method uses social science research tools to be able to evaluate and then propose improvements to the policies and measures put in place. It is an introduction to action research based on a shared field diagnosis facilitating the acceptance of change and social innovation.

This course covers number theory. Topics include integers on a ring: completely closed rings, quadratic bodies, norm, trace, discriminant in the case of extensions of bodies. Example of cyclotomic bodies of degree p-1; Dedekind rings: Noetherian property; application to integer elements, fractional ideals, fraction rings, localization, group of fractional ideals, norm of an ideal, multiplicativity; decomposition of ideals in an extension: prime ideal, discriminant and ramification, quadratic and cyclotomic bodies of degree p-1, quadratic reciprocity law; class group and unit theorem: networks, canonical folding, statement and proof of the finiteness of the class group, statement of the unit theorem, illustration in the case of quadratic bodies, Fermat cases (or other Diophantine equations); analytical opening (Riemann zeta function, Dirichlet L-functions, Dedekind zeta functions, link to counting prime numbers and ideals).
 

This course focuses on French cities in the modern era. It explores in greater depth how, in concrete terms, French towns revealed the workings of modern France. Themes such as demography, society, economy, and cultural life, are covered.

The course is composed of 3 parts: phonetics, communication, and comprehension. The phonetics section covers: International Phonetic Alphabet, sounds of French language, notions of systems, combinatory phonetics, standard and regional accents, prosodic phenomena, contrastive and corrective phonetics, phonetic and musical transcription. The communication section covers: oral expression and oral presentation, argumentation. The comprehension section covers: exercises of note taking, technics of summary.

Economic science was built around the debate over the existence or otherwise of a harmonious, spontaneous order, ensuring the coordination of decentralized individual actions. The notions of order and disorder are understood by economists through the concepts of equilibrium, disequilibrium, optimum, crisis and regulation, as well as rationality and self-control. Equilibrium refers to a situation in which the plans of agents are compatible with each other, and in which the rational decisions of individuals are optimal and coherent. Imbalance, whether in the market or during individual decision-making, refers to the opposite situation. An equilibrium can be optimal, i.e. efficient, or sub-optimal; it can be stable or unstable, i.e. it can reproduce itself or not. This course examines how economic theories have historically tried to answer the question of whether the economy tends spontaneously towards a harmonious or optimal "natural" equilibrium or order, or whether it tends towards imbalance, disorder, crisis or the irrationality of individual decision-making. This questioning implies an inter-disciplinary reading of the discipline of economics, which itself draws on concepts of equilibrium and rationality from the natural and life sciences (such as physics, biology, neuroscience, etc.), as well as from other social and human sciences such as psychology, sociology, philosophy and anthropology.