Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

Most states are small by one or another measure. But what exactly is a small state, and to what extent does size matter for the conduct of international affairs? How can small states influence international relations? This course uses the lens of this category of small states to critically think about key concepts in political science, such as sovereignty, independence/dependence, security, and power. It first introduces the concept of small states, its historical development, and the field of small state studies. It then discusses common characteristics and challenges of, as well as the heterogeneity among, small and microstates, and finally turns to specific issues of importance to small states, including their role in international organizations such as the United Nations or the European Union; security and defense; climate change; or economic development.

This course provides the fundamental keys to understanding the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf region. It offers an overview of the region through a double prism: economy and strategy. It demonstrates how fundamental this region is to global energy flows and, hence, how many powers seek to control the Persian Gulf. The course also includes a simulation module for international negotiations to allow a more practical approach of the subject and its stakes, as well as practice international negotiations, public speaking, and to solicit the knowledge acquired in the course. In view of the breadth of the theme and the area covered, the teaching involves many disciplines, such as history, geography, economics, and international law, with a predominance of international relations and strategic studies.

This course introduces the European Union's political system from a comparative political science perspective. The course provides an in-depth understanding of how the EU's political system operates. It delves into different policy areas, examining both rapid and gradual European integration. Additionally, it analyzes citizens' attitudes towards Europe and the impact of the integration process on national actors like political parties. The course considers each institution's role in the EU's political system, theorizes why and when specific institutions gained more power in the EU, discusses reasons behind varying levels of integration in different policy areas, and evaluates the impact of the EU system on member states' party systems and their citizens.

This course examines questions such as whether gender matters on the internet; how patriarchy, misogyny, and racism get coded into our digital tools; and if a feminist internet is possible. It engages with feminist scholarship from sociology, communication, and technology studies to discuss key theories about the relationship between technology, power, and gender and consider how they are applied to describe various digital pursuits – from Instagram influencer labor to Google searches to data visualizations. The course investigates how feminist theory makes sense of our digital and technologically mediated world. The last third of the course pivots to reviewing feminism put into practice by communities of technologists, designers, and data scientists.

This course provides an international law of armed conflict framework to the main recent and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa regions. It focuses on the role international law plays in the realm of international and regional relations, namely inter-State relations but also State-individual relations through the growth of human rights law. The first part of the course provides an outline of the general public international law framework to key international conflicts faced by the international community. It then applies these concepts to concrete case studies that are discussed in-depth during the second part of the seminar in view of analyzing and studying international law “in motion.” The course is interactive and necessitates active participation and engagement in the class discussions.

This course focuses on collective, systemic, structural violence, such as mass political violence on the one hand, and sexual and intra-family violence on the other. Using the lenses of the social sciences, it examines how they arise. It then looks at the responses to these issues: penalizing the perpetrators, listening to and providing therapeutic care for the victims, dialogue between the various parties, writing a shared history. In pairs, students carry out a fragment of a collective investigation: observation of a mechanism for protecting victims of collective violence (the National Court of Asylum, in Montreuil), or an interview with experts in sexual and intra-familial response. The social sciences (academic sources, and in particular books and articles based on empirical surveys) are privileged (to the detriment of press articles, blogs, reports from international or national organizations). The course provides an opportunity for familiarization with the way in which the social sciences (political science, history, sociology, anthropology, social psychology) view collective, political, and social violence. It reflects on the responses of experts and societies to such violence, and their limitations, and uses social science empirical survey methodologies (ethnographic observation, semi-directive interviews).

This course provides an overview of the main areas of behavioral economics. It presents a wide range of behavioral findings which have advanced our understanding of how economic agents form beliefs, act, and interact in various contexts. It discusses how to incorporate the traditional micro-economic framework to some features of human nature such as altruism, emotions, biased perceptions of risk and time, biased interpretations of information, and bounded rationality. The course studies simple economic models, reviews empirical research, and devotes particular attention to the presentation of experimental methods in economics. It also discusses how behavioral economics can improve the design of effective public policies.

This course provides an overview of the major debates in comparative judicial politics and an introduction to the political science of law and courts, a branch of the discipline known as judicial politics. This is not a course on constitutional adjudication law, and the focus is not on doctrinal analysis or close reading of cases (though cases are discussed to illustrate and examine the topics of the course). Instead, constitutional courts are evaluated as political institutions and judges as political actors. After theorizing judicial review by introducing students to concepts such as the government of judges, juristocracy, and political constitutionalism, specific cases are studied. Topics include: judicial review models across time and space; constraints on judicial power; conflicts between constitutional courts and the other branches of government; decision making within the judicial hierarchy; judicial appointments. The focus of this course is comparative with an emphasis on constitutional courts in advanced democracies; however, courts and legal systems in new democracies and authoritarian regimes are discussed as well.

This course concerns the “Indo-Pacific” space, which has both a geographic and a geostrategic dimension. The course questions these different representations of space, their political use, and the related cooperation policies, at the intersection of military and development issues.

This course on environmental justice examines how environmental processes and policies interact with race, class, gender, and indigeneity to differentially affect people's exposure to environmental harm, and their ability to participate in environmental decision-making. It analyzes environmental injustice in relation to histories of colonialism, as well as contemporary processes of globalized capitalism. The course engages in case studies, discussions, and group projects, fostering a critical view on reconciling localized justice struggles with planetary environmental crises.