Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course discusses the issues European migration policies seek to address, from curbing irregular migration and increasing migrant returns, to attracting talents and making asylum systems work. It explores the range of actors who shape this agenda and how policies at EU and EU Member State levels are intertwined. The course critically assesses the main migration issues in Europe, examines the trade-offs faced by European policymakers, analyzes how migration policies are designed and implemented, and outlines the effects European migration policies have on countries of origin and transit.

This course is an introduction to the study of religion in the social sciences. It examines what people do with religion and what religion does to people. The guiding thread of this course is to investigate how “religion” itself as a category is debated and contested. A question it regularly returns to is: what counts as religion and who gets to decide? The course is divided into three parts. The first part explores the definitions of religion that have been provided by classical authors. The second part analyzes the intersections of religion with other social categories such as class, gender, and race. The third part interrogates the politics of religion and how States, international organizations, political actors, and citizens grapple with religion, how they seek to regulate it or use it to further political ends. The course is interdisciplinary and exposes students to various approaches of religion rooted in political science, sociology, and anthropology. By the end of this course, students are equipped with theoretical and methodological tools to best appraise the place of religion in contemporary societies and discuss such complex and debated issues as secularism, religious freedom, religious discrimination, religious violence.

This course examines the ambivalent role of digital technologies in our societies and questions our future by questioning their relevance. It first considers where we come from and how the pre-web world prepared us for this new reality, notably through science fiction. It then invites us to understand what is happening in our daily lives by deciphering the announced technological advances and their effects on reality. Finally, the course imagines a horizon that seems most desirable for all.

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. The course discusses how to incorporate to the traditional micro-economic framework some features of human nature such as altruism, emotions, biased perceptions of risk and time, biased interpretations of information and bounded rationality. It studies simple economic models, reviews empirical research, and devotes particular attention to the presentation of experimental methods in economics. The course also discuss how behavioral economics can improve the design of effective public policies.