Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

From the first European measures to the European Green Deal, this course focuses on energy transition plans and strategies. To do so, it analyzes the stakes inherent to the multilevel governance of energy in the EU, between European objectives, national policy-making, and local implementation of energy infrastructures. Through this multi-scale approach to public policy, the course explores and compares the challenges raised by the regulation of different energy forms in various European countries. It tackles renewable energies such as wind power, fossil fuels such as shale gas, and provides an overview of European energy policy-making through national case studies.

Firms are faced with informational and cognitive problems that threaten their efficiency and even their survival. The objective of this course is to show how contract and governance structures can answer these problems. We will explain how corporate firms, in their various forms, can be analyzed as networks of property rights; we will show how their different organizational designs can be explained by knowledge and information constraints. We will then analyze, through theoretical models (incentives, screening, signalling, etc.) and case studies (CEOs’ remunerations), the way in which asymmetries of both information and knowledge have led to specific modes of executive governance and compensation

Agency/incentive Models
Economics and mathematical analysis
Interdisciplinarity : Psychology/ Economics/ Societal Issues

This course is an introduction to the social and political dynamics that shape the lives of Muslim minorities in Western Europe and North America. The first part of the course situates Islam and Muslims within the larger European and American histories, by comparing how church-State relations, colonial history, immigration and racial inequalities have affected their representations. The second part unpacks a series of public controversies over Islam and Muslims and explores what they reveal about Euro-American societies. Finally, the course investigates how Islam is lived among ordinary European and American Muslims. This course takes a comparative stance by covering a plurality of national contexts to become familiar with the various public and academic debates surrounding European and American Muslims.

The last fifteen years have been marked by a series of expressions of discontent around the globe, emerging in waves of protest (Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Gilets jaunes) and in so-called “populist” movements, both right-wing (Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Bolsonaro) and left-wing (Bernie, Podemos, SYRIZA, Lula). This course analyzes these phenomena as a crisis of political identities in a context of growing precarity. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the course introduces, develops, and critically debates the main concepts of post-structuralist discourse theory (hegemony, antagonism, ideology), and their relation to communication theory, economics, and social psychology. The leitmotif of the course is the articulation of theoretical debate and empirical cases.

Since the 1983's March for equality and against racism (“Marche des Beurs”), up until the current debates on Islamism separatism, the French public sphere is struggling with a new intellectual debate, which can be described as “the postcolonial question”. By defining and questioning this phrasing, this course first establishes a political history of immigration in France, and how it has deeply defined and redefined the definitions of social progress. Moreover, using diverse approaches in social science, the course explains this rising issue of identity politics in France which seems to have deeply impacted the political scene. The appearance of this issue is mostly due to economic crises, recent immigration waves and diverse social and political movements which stirred a topical debate on the notion of identity - but also the parallels established with the American debate on race and gender, and how the French university has used (or refused) these categories. Analyzing the evolution of immigration and Islam in France, and how the administration has tried to address these stakes, the course discusses political and religious phenomena which currently are one of the main fault lines within French parties - both within the left and the right, on the question of integration or assimilation, on a liberal or strict vision of laïcité. The teaching mainly focuses on France, in order to understand the consequences of these events as a matter of domestic policy. However, those dynamics are systematically compared to foreign similar events and replaced in a Euro-Mediterranean context through a comprehensive chronology.

This course studies what legitimate authority is, under what conditions states have it, how law participates in legitimate authority, and how philosophical issues about legitimate authority are represented in positive law. It provides a grasp on the philosophical debate on legitimate state authority that can be applied in practice as jurists.

From recurring economic crises to political upheavals, pandemics to armed conflicts, and the looming climate catastrophe, this course explores how social science perspectives can advance our understanding of the phenomenon of crisis. It provides an overview of divergent social-theoretical perspectives on crises and discusses respective concepts for assessing current socio-economic developments. On the basis of classical and more recent literature, the course examines the emergence and political constitution of crises as well as their transformative and innovative potential. The second part of the course focuses on exemplary contemporary crises and shows which insights social science research offers to makes sense of and cope with our disruptive reality. In addition to developing knowledge about crises and the state-economy-society nexus, the course also provides an opportunity to approach various formats of academic writing, transfer conceptual knowledge to other empirical fields of interest, and concisely present ideas.

This course examines fundamental questions about the nature of wars and conflicts in international politics through an interdisciplinary perspective. It incorporates insights from political science, anthropology, psychology, and history to better understand the current security environment and make sense of the phenomena of wars.

This course offers a comparative study of the institutional law of international organizations. While it is acknowledged that each organization has its own legal structure and functioning, institutional challenges and rules of different organizations resemble each other in some way, and a great deal of body of institutional rules and principles has been developed. International organizations have much in common, such as the law on membership, competence, structures, decision-making and implementation, financing, and legal personality. The course discusses the practice of a number of international organizations, including the United Nations and regional as well as subregional organizations. The course explores the law, life, and functioning of these organizations.

This course examines the ambivalent role of digital technologies in our societies and interrogates the future by questioning their relevance. It considers where we come from and how the pre-web world prepared us for this new reality, notably through science fiction. Then, it discusses what is happening in our daily lives by deciphering the announced technological advances and their effects on reality; in particular, a "synthetic horizon" where the Metaverse, crypto-assets, and artificial intelligence coexist to help humanity meet the challenges ahead. Finally, it considers whether these technologies will really help and explores a horizon that seems the most desirable for all.