Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersections between gender and religion, examining how religious beliefs, practices, and institutions shape and are shaped by constructions of gender identity, roles, and power dynamics in international and local politics. Moreover, the course critically evaluates the role of gender and religion in shaping law, diplomacy, and conflict resolution strategies. It analyzes the ways in which governments, constitutions and laws, international organizations, and non-state actors incorporate gender and religious considerations into their policies and practices. Some questions therefore regularly returned to are: How have norms for gendered individuals in religious, non-religious, beliefs, and spiritual traditions been negotiated over time? Whose voices matter, when deciding which gendered actions are acceptable (or not)? What happens if we read religious traditions according to the voices of women, queer people, or people who identify with other marginalized gender and sexual identities? This course tackles these questions, showing how gender and sexuality—how they are taught, performed, and regulated—are central to understanding religious communities and international politics.

This course examines the problems and possibilities of peace operations conducted by the United Nations. From a small number of traditional peacekeeping missions (PK) throughout the Cold War that helped to bring peace and security to some war torn regions, to a huge growth in the number of peacekeeping missions undertaken by the UN in the early 1990s, just after the Cold War ended, that included aggressive humanitarian intervention, democracy building, and peacemaking among other goals, there is much to be learned from these numerous peace operations, each with elements of success and failure.

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the temporal and territorial entanglements in Brazil and Argentina since their consolidation as nation-states in the first third of the 19th century until contemporary times. Some of the materials worked with, in addition to theoretical texts, are films, short stories, political and aesthetic manifestos, and architectural and urban projects. The course analyzes and discusses political, social, aesthetical, and literary expressions that, in a variety of ways, address and/or develop what is one of the critical issues in the discursive construction around these countries: the apparent need to narratively connect the present moment to a colonial and pre-colonial past and a future to come, not rarely using fiction as a methodology. The comparative focus on these two countries, in addition to being widely used in the Humanities in specific studies on each country, is justified by the way in which the issues to be explored in the course occur in their similarities and differences, shedding light on the constructions of time and space in what are the two most extensive countries in South America, not only individually but in relation to each other. Furthermore, the methodological and theoretical foundation developed throughout the semester helps consider temporal and spatial issues in other contexts within Latin America and, generally, the Global South. An intermediate knowledge of Latin America's political and social contexts is recommended but not mandatory.

This course analyzes the major upheavals that have shaped the Middle East and North Africa's strategic landscape in the post-Cold War era. It is structured around three key modules. The first provides a chronological overview, from the 1990s "Unipolar Moment" to the collapse of the Syrian regime in December 2024. The second focuses on the persistence of authoritarianism, along with the violent backlash and counterrevolutions that followed the Arab Spring. The third examines U.S. foreign policy and the Global War on Terror. Special attention is given to the Proxy Wars and Culture Wars that will define the future of the region, to the shifting alliances within a context of competitive multipolarity, and to civil societies, literature, cinema, cultural and intellectual fault lines.

This policy oriented course focuses on the European Union's security and defense politics. With the re-election of Donald Trump, questions on how the EU is going to defend itself are high on the political agendas. How well is the EU prepared to take on more responsibility? To answer the question, the course looks at how the EU addresses security and defense policy issues and identify difficulties in the evolution of the EU's security and defense policy. It covers the functioning of the EU's security and defense policy; examines the concepts of security; introduces the different tools of the EU's security and defense policy and the key issues of deeper EU integration. In addition, the course develops presentation and writing skills, ability to understand public documents, research on open source, and work in teams.

In December 2010, the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor sparked the “Arab Spring,” a mighty wave of protests that toppled dictators across the Middle East and North Africa. Spearheaded by young, tech-savvy activists demanding "bread, freedom, and social justice," the uprisings sought economic opportunity, human rights and democratic reform. Fourteen years later, little is left of that hopeful agenda. New, even more ruthless leaders have emerged while autocrats cling to power, crushing dissent and erasing the memory of those revolutionary days. This course examines the counter-revolutionary trajectories that followed the Arab Spring. Through in-depth case studies of human rights violations, it explores how power was reshaped and hopes for freedom buried in MENA. Practical sessions provide hands-on experience in researching and crafting human rights reports, while developing editorial writing skills to present persuasive arguments and advocate for change.

This course analyzes how the issues related to LGBT+ populations give rise to power relations in and for space, between different actors and at different scales, from the local to the global. On the one hand, the course emphasizes the spatial dimension of the minority experience of LGBT+ people. On the other hand, it shows that the issues relating to this group are invested with multiple meanings by different actors, leading to an accentuation of the processes of opposition between “us” and “them”, between “here” and “there”. To this end, the course draws on several social science disciplines. In addition to providing knowledge about gender and sexuality, this course allows students to look at contemporary issues (urban spaces, migration, globalization, international relations, etc.) in a new light. It also introduces students to the research process in the social sciences. 

Although present for two thousand years in Gaul and then in France, Jews are like a “blind spot” in the national narrative. They are only sporadically mentioned in national history as persecuted (crusades, Dreyfus affair, Holocaust). Yet they have contributed to the construction of France at every period through their political, economic, religious, scientific, and cultural input. This course sheds light on more than 2000 years of this rich and eventful relationship, alternating phases of greatness, success, and integration followed by persecution and expulsion, then reconstruction. It is a national history but also a multiregional history, from the Comtat Venaissin to Provence, from Occitania to Alsace, Lorraine and Aquitaine, all the way to the fairs of Champagne and Paris. The course conducts a political reflection on the relationship of a minority constituted as a nation with the French state, and then on its successful integration. It examines the evolution of a religious minority in the very Catholic kingdom of France. Finally, the course addresses social, cultural, and economic history. It highlights the contribution of the Jews to France, but also of France to the Jews, and discovers the richness and diversity of the political, social, economic, scientific, cultural, and religious history of the Jews in France over the past 2000 years and their contribution to France's progress towards modernity.

International economic law is a branch of international law governing a number of economic phenomena, such as international trade and investment. The course focuses on the study of intergovernmental institutional frameworks covering the circulation of goods, services, capital, and labor. It discusses institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes, and the Bretton Woods institutions. Furthermore, it introduces normative instruments such as the WTO Multilateral Trade Agreements (GATT, GATS, and TRIPS) and the EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement negotiations. The course also explores the international regulation of capital and labor, as well as introduces the private governance of international economic relations.

As the main and most comprehensive undergraduate course on economic elites, this class is an introduction to several streams of cutting-edge sociological research on the latter. It presents and discusses the definition of economic elites in terms of organizational positions, wealth, multiple forms of capital and/or class. It explores the different quantitative approaches to describe and study national and transnational business elites, as well as their relations with other fractions of a larger power elite, using – among other methods – network and correspondence analyses. It also draws upon the many contributions of cultural sociology to the understanding of the meaning-making processes and the symbolic economy underlying the professional habitus, the morals, the consumption patterns and the philanthropic practices of these elites.