Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course examines core political science questions concerning judicial decision making and judicial power: What explains the judicialization of politics? To what extent do ideological and strategic considerations influence how judges decide cases? Under what conditions are courts able to constrain other political actors? What is the policy impact of judicial decisions and what can judges do to increase their impact? This is not a course on constitutional adjudication, 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, courts are conceptualized as political institutions and judges as political actors. The course covers topics such as the government of judges, constraints on judicial power; conflicts between constitutional courts and the other branches of government; decision making within the judicial hierarchy; judicial appointments. After having examined the fundamentals of constitutional courts, the course compares models of judicial review through various case studies: the USA strong model; the Kelsenian model as applied in France, Italy, Germany and Spain; the Commonwealth and the Nordic weak models; the Irish hybrid model; the Latin America model(s); the Canadian and Israeli activist models; the new democracies model(s). The course finally addresses contemporary challenges to judicial review such as popular constitutionalism and the lack of diversity on the bench.

The course looks at the global Indo-Pacific system, area ,and politics. The Indo-Pacific space has both a geographical dimension and a geostrategic dimension. As a geographical object, this area refers to the vast sea area stretching from the South China Sea to East Africa, through the Pacific Ocean, Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and the shores of East Africa. As a geostrategic object, Indo-Pacific must be understood as the expression of an objective alliance of regional powers (Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand) seeking to promote alternatives to the Belt and Road Initiative, both in the Indian and Pacific oceans and on the Asian and African continents where China is present. As a political object, what is the name Indopacific?  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.

This course provides an exploration of the relationship to Eastern European Jewishness, both secular and religious, from the end of the 18th century to the present, marked by profound social, economic, political, and cultural transformations. The complex relationship between all of them reflects on the evolutions of Jewish singularity, paradigmatic to other minorities. This interdisciplinary course introduces a modern encounter between Jews, societies, and States, both in culture and politics, including the consequences of the Holocaust and its legacy in the present. It offers a precious key to understand the diversity of contemporary debates on singular versus universal rights, traditions versus modernity, rural versus urban cultures, religiousness versus secularity and beyond that, the condition of modernity in Europe. Olga Tokarczuk's Nobel Prize-winning book, THE BOOKS OF JACOB, is the focus of reflective, historical, and creative work throughout this course. The creative cartographies produced are presented to and potentially commented on by the author.

This course explores the current state of play in EU platform regulation and the societal developments to which it responds. It covers the most important current issues in platform governance, including topics such as harmful social media content, platform labor, competition in digital markets, and the “platformization” of media and culture. It also explores and analyzes how EU law is responding to these issues, in areas such as data protection and competition law as well as sector-specific regulations targeting platforms, like the just-passed Digital Services Act. While the course focuses on legal issues, a legal background is not essential, as the focus is on how the EU is aiming to address concrete policy issues rather than on technical/doctrinal questions. The course encourages thinking in a critical and interdisciplinary manner. Rather than simply attributing social changes to technological developments, it encourages thinking about how platform companies' technology and business practices interact with and influence broader social and political trends. To this end, class sessions focus on discussing the assigned reading and helping students formulate and share their own opinions on each week's topics.

This course concerns biodiversity law which is, first and foremost, a right to protect species, their habitats, natural areas, and ecological continuity; as well as a law governing certain activities, whether they contribute to the regulation of species (hunting) or are detrimental to them (urban planning, agriculture, development of major infrastructures). The course provides the foundations needed to understand these major legal issues in their various aspects (international law, EU law, and domestic law) while drawing on concrete, emblematic cases.

This course focuses on the ancient history of the Middle East as a textbook case illustrating the transition from prehistory to history, via the establishment of a centralized power served by a powerful administration, an influential religion, a codified practice of writing, and subtle economic and diplomatic networks. It investigates the unifying factors behind the extension of the geographical contours of this cultural area, what memories classical antiquity retained of this distant East, and the discoveries it made. The course examines this abundant premise, at the crossroads of political, cultural, religious, and artistic sources, to shed light on a few fundamentals with parallels to our own times that should be considered with as much curiosity as caution.

This course focuses on the sociology of the State and its relations with society in contemporary Russia. Historical and political sociologists have focused on the state in the form it has taken in the West since the Middle Ages. These essential and fundamental analyses form the starting point for study of the sociological reality of the state in post-Soviet Russia. Using the tools of the historical sociology of politics and comparative politics, the course studies the political transition following the collapse of the USSR, the reform of public action, the trajectories of elites and state agents, and the reform of the state and its authoritarian modernization. Ultimately, the course considers what makes the recent transformations of the Russian state so singular on the one hand and so banal on the other, in the context of the global neoliberal modernization of the state and public action.

This course demonstrates how the political mobilization of law can be analyzed from a sociological perspective. At the intersection of the sociology of law and the sociology of mobilizations, it shows how the "weapon of law" constitutes an essential dimension of contemporary mobilizations. The place of law in the repertoires of collective action is examined: its scope, its limits, and the historicity of its uses. The course looks at various forms of mobilization, both in France and abroad, such as anti-colonial struggles, feminist mobilizations, trade union struggles, the defense of freedoms, and mobilizations in favor of the environment.

This course offers a political history of the environment through the mobilization of the working classes around issues related to common goods, industrial risks, health, and pollution. It also takes a global, long-term approach to these mobilizations. The course is designed as an introduction to research: it first introduces scientific writing through a reading note based on an article, then analyzes primary sources to present findings at a "mini-colloquium," and finally provides an opportunity to write a collective research article.