Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course offers a comparative and connected history of the British and French imperial experiences, from the mid-eighteenth century until the end of the twentieth century. The British and French empires are usually considered as arch-rivals. By contrast, the course emphasizes Anglo-French collaboration as a key mechanism of Western expansion overseas, and examines how the two empires often influenced each other. Special attention is paid to ideas about race and cultural difference and how they shaped British and French colonial societies. The traditional view that the British favored indirect rule and the French assimilation is tested and its limits highlighted. The course provides the opportunity to engage with recent scholarship on European colonialism, key contemporary texts about imperial expansion, and visual sources.

This course focuses on understanding how photojournalism contributes to the news landscape and how images shape our comprehension of current affairs and history. The course looks at images from contemporary events as well as studying the history of photojournalism and its different fields of engagement in order to give context for its role today. The course also focuses on how Artificial Intelligence is changing the game for the viewers as well as the professional photographers. It discusses questions such as what makes us an ethical photojournalist? Are there ways we should act while covering stories worldwide? Is it always appropriate to make an image or are there times when a conversation needs to happen first? What messages are we trying to convey through our photographs? How do we remain transparent and inclusive as photographers while working in the field?

This course provides both a first contact with the law and a critical reflection on it. It takes certain generalizations about the law that are often encountered in philosophy, politics, or economics, and shows that what may seem obvious is in fact more complex. Rather than presenting what the law is supposed to be or do, the course reveals its paradoxes by constructing problems dialectically. Course readings are chosen by preference from the corpus of philosophy and art (literature, cinema) to provide material for reflection and discussion that is common and interesting to all. It also addresses a few points of legal theory and technique to demonstrate the complexity of the issues and the difficulty of finding non-simplistic solutions. In all cases, the choice of texts demonstrates the diversity, even contrariness, of the opinions expressed and the theories elaborated, to avoid confirming unquestioned convictions.

This course provides a critical overview of the functioning of intergovernmental organizations, with a specific focus on their relevance, role, and contribution in the face of a shifting global landscape. Through a series of case studies and scenarios, it introduces the broad notion of multilateralism and how to identify legal issues, analyze problems, and formulate an informed perspective on intergovernmental organizations.

The focus of this course is twofold: firstly, to study the nature of representations and the impact they have on our society through philosophy, cinema, literature, and art; and secondly, to develop a critical analysis of the image through aesthetics, political theories, cultural studies, and the philosophy of humor. It analyzes different scenarios of the image in order to circumscribe its "field of action," in particular, to understand the motives behind the objects of the representation, the impact on the spectators, and the socio-political consequences that they generate. The course discusses how technology facilitates the spread of images in our society and mirrors, to a certain extent, our way of life. It considers how, as means of communication, images convey our personal and public experiences on a daily basis, captivate our attention, influence our perception of the world, and, if images are to be considered representations, contain aesthetic and political components. 

This course analyzes U.S. foreign policy, primarily through the prism of American military power. The objective is to provide an overview of the major issues at stake regarding U.S. international action, in a fragmented world. Is there a continuity in the U.S. involvement in the world? Are their ruptures? How could we explain U.S. foreign policy from an ideological point of view? What are the main geopolitical challenges to the American administration today? The course is divided into three main parts, each of which addresses specific questions. The first focuses on the continuities and ruptures of US foreign policy, from the end of the Second World War to the post-9/11 period. The second part examines U.S. international strategy in its ideological dimension, through the major debates that surround it. Finally, the last part looks at the practice of American foreign policy and its major geopolitical challenges, with a special focus on Russia, the Middle East and China.

This course in public economics analyzes the design of taxes and transfers. The first part of the course introduces key concepts in public economics. The second part is dedicated to the analysis of particular policies covering the environment and climate change, unemployment insurance, redistribution, and capital and firms taxation. Course sessions include student presentations on actual policies in particular countries; for example, carbon taxes in Sweden, unemployment insurance in the United States, housing benefits in France, or corporate taxation in Germany.

This course investigates minorization, how it relates to categorization and differentiation, and to what extent minorization plays a role in mass violence and colonial situations. It introduces the concept of minorization, one of the fundamental questions in sociology for understanding the issues of today's society yet missing from the French university catalog, and its place in academic debate.

This course takes as its starting point the description of cultural places and moments in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, whose role in both the building and the representations of the global stage has increased and diversified since the late 1990s. It then focuses on contributing to the definition of power in those political entities and understanding their place on the global stage through the lenses of political sociology. 

Throughout the 20th century, the presence of the word "democracy" has become mandatory in political discourses. Politicians from the left and the right claim to speak in the name of democracy. At the same time there is a disagreement about what democracy actually is, and a feeling that democracy is in crisis or at risk. This is expressed in politics, in criticism of the model of liberal and representative democracy, in the demand for a "real" democracy, and in voting for "populist" parties. But the discussion also arises among intellectuals. In light of contemporary debate, this course introduces, develops, and critically debates some of the major theories of democracy in political thought – liberal, deliberative, radical – and the responses they offer to the current crisis of democracy.