Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course provides the fundamental knowledge for the understanding of France's foreign policy in the Middle East from 1995 to the present. It weaves a panorama of the policy deployed in the region from the presidency of Jacques Chirac and the renewal of the Arab policy of France to draw up the assessments and perspectives. This course provides the cardinal elements of understanding the elaboration and application of France's Middle Eastern strategy. French foreign policy is examined through the prism of a chronological triptych that corresponds to three inflections of the foreign policy implemented: a posture inscribed in the Gaullist tradition with President Jacques Chirac (1995-2007); followed by the "Westernist" posture leading to a progressive alignment with American and Israeli strategies during the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande (2007-2017); finally, a willingness to return to a Gaullist position attempted by President Emmanuel Macron (2017-2022). 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 clear predominance of international relations and foreign policy analysis.

This course is a collective exercise to establish a portrait of each of the past ten presidential elections in France and create a systematic comparison with the 2021-2022 campaign and the 2022 vote. Through close investigation of these elections, the course examines fundamental, far-reaching elements in order to better understand the 2022 election. Studying the candidates, their platforms, their profiles, non-votes, votes against the system, the campaign, the context, and the debates, it identifies the most relevant criteria and establishes a description of each election to draw conclusions as to the elements that characterize the current campaign.

This course analyzes how organizations in contemporary societies, often giant public administrations and private companies, operate. It provides the basic concepts of organization theory from a sociological perspective: control and efficiency; resource interdependencies and power; and bureaucracy (for organizing routine work), collegiality (for organizing innovative work), and combinations of both. The course discusses the role of organizations in the political economy, in social stratification, and in a digitalized society. Within this framework, the course puts a special emphasis on struggles to promote new institutions and to encourage innovation in the face of global challenges such as climate change.

This course provides a detailed understanding of the European jihadi phenomenon, from its inception during the war in Afghanistan (1979) to the fall of ISIS (2019) and its current reconfigurations on the Old Continent (2020-2023). It is the results of a decade of on-the-ground research, it explores the way jihadi groups and organizations spread their ideas throughout the Old Continent, from the French “banlieues” to the British and Belgian inner cities, and from the German countryside to the Scandinavian metropolitan area. The course also covers female activism, online activism, and the way jihadism functions behind bars. It points out the poorly understood centrality of prisons in the making of European Jihadism and its current reconfigurations since the fall of ISIS. The course introduces jihadism and its key concepts, including pre-modern Islamic theology and jurisprudence to demonstrate how these references were appropriated and repurposed by jihadi ideologues for political ends. It concludes on the current debates in Europe surrounding jihadism and Islamism in the wake of the killing of Samuel Paty in France and subsequent attack in Vienna, Austria.

This course introduces current issues relating to decision-making within corporations, increasingly important actors in global matters. The course includes an exploration of the basic corporate governance structure provided by corporate law, with a focus primarily on U.S. corporate law. The course also examines the effects on corporate governance dynamics of various real-world factors. The course begins with an introduction to the various sources of U.S. corporate law, including discussion of the question “what is a corporation” as distinct from other forms of business organization. Following this introductory discussion, the second part of the course includes a deeper exploration of the corporate governance structure: the rights of shareholders and the respective powers and duties of boards of directors and of officers. The discussion focuses on the relationships, both formal and informal, between these three primary actors in corporate governance. Using this understanding of corporate law and governance, the course then focuses on recent debates concerning corporate “personhood,” including whether corporations should be subject to criminal liability and prosecution and whether corporations should be required to operate in a socially responsible manner.

Chile has experienced a series of political, economic, social and cultural upheavals during the twentieth century. This course examines the phenomenon of violence, memory, and amnesia through the history of political conflicts. It underlines the roles of silence, oblivion, repression, and humiliation in the formation of authoritative and dictatorial regimes and opposes them to the exaltation of memory in the legitimization of a cause. The course involves a diachronic analysis, introducing the historical and sociological context of nineteenth century Chile, before exploring the period stretching from the beginning of the twentieth century to the democratic transition in 1989, and concluding on the return of speech through the victims' testimony. From the rise of political consciousness to egalitarian combats, from conservative regimes to progressive governments, from the experience of Popular Unity to Pinochet's military coup, the study of Chile is a probing illustration of the intertwine of opposites and contraries shaping a collective consciousness. The course proposes a multidisciplinary point of view in order to embrace the complexity of political and cultural change, as well as an innovative pedagogy; historical archives, testimonies, and documentaries provide the background for a reflective study relying on systemic analysis and strong bases of methodology. Guest speakers from different fields (lawyers, authors, film directors) are invited to address the group, in order to share knowledge and experience, and give professional and personal points of views on different aspects of the course, stimulating an interactive conversation with the students.

This course introduces the world of intelligence; both the theoretical and practical concepts, as well as how it works in both the public sector (government agencies) and the private sector (corporations and intelligence vendors). It provides an understanding of concepts such as the Intelligence Cycle, intelligence analysis, intelligence collection methods (human intelligence, open-source intelligence, signals intelligence) and briefing techniques. The ethics of intelligence and the differences in the public and private sector are introduced, as well as career options in intelligence. This course uses case studies of intelligence operations in both government and corporate environments to expose real world applications of intelligence tradecraft.

This course addresses the state of relations between the three world superpowers which are the European Union, the United States of America, and the People's Republic of China. The course addresses the subject of these triangular, complicated relations by developing China-United States relations, European Union-China relations, and European Union-United States relations. Each of these parts begins with a historical reminder and then explores the reset of these relations today. A large part of the course is also devoted to cross-cutting issues within this G-3, such as climate change, trade policy, digital technology, soft power, human rights, defense strategy, et cetera. This course adopts new perspectives to the understanding of the G-3 dynamics. A decentered perspective from each superpower's points of view (Brussels, Washington, or Beijing) is adopted.