France

Through an analysis of their health policies, this seminar examines the philosophical, historical, and political conceptions underlying the organization of health systems in France and the United States. It looks at the actions of governmental and local actors through decentralization or devolution; health systems and social coverage financing; the impact of political and media debates reflected in the texts, from the Social Security financing bills to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act instituting "Obamacare”; hospital governance; the management of care, technical, and organizational projects in hospitals; and the reality of daily life management and crises.

This course discusses ideas about law through art such as literature, cinema, painting, architecture, monuments, and music. Among the legal concepts discussed are the definition of law and justice; equality and the role of the state; transitional justice; reparations; women's struggle for resources and power; race, class, and gender discrimination; national borders; and the place of law in the family.

This course covers a method to establish causal relationships in non-experimental data, called “Instrumental Variables”. The course covers panel data, that is, data which tracks individuals over time. It also covers situations when outcome data is discrete in nature, such as “subject I chose option A (and not B)”. A range of simple machine learning methods are discussed which are helpful for classification and prediction tasks. Crucially, the course has a maximum focus on hands-on practice, minimal importance to the derivation of formal results.

This course covers politics and strategy in UN peacekeeping (UNPK) operations. To do this, the lecture relies on the works of Prussian officer and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz. The course mobilizes Clausewitzian concepts like the “means and ends”, “trinity”, “fog”, “friction”, "center of gravity” to examine their effects on the politics of UN peace operations. One assumption of this course is that UN Peacekeeping is often undertaken when it is not the appropriate instrument of policy. One of the problems of UN Peacekeeping operations is that they are not guided by a clear strategy. This problem can be traced to the political processes leading to their creation. The general objective of the course is to provide the intellectual tools to analyze more critically how UNPK is organized. The theories used to examine UNPK are mostly Realism (Classical, Structural), Liberalism, and Constructivism. The course focuses on critiquing but not rejecting UNPK. The goal is rather to try to fix the political and strategic problems surrounding this militaro-diplomatic tool invented between 1945 and 1956.