Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course introduces the field of social network analysis (SNA). Social networks are ubiquitous nowadays; SNA emerged in the 1960s as a vibrant social science specialty trying to give substance to individuals, not through their inner psychological and demographic, or professional characteristics but through the relationships they entertain with their social environment. The first objective of this class is to introduce the concepts and metrics designed and theorized by this specific stream of sociology and test how operative they still are in our connected environment. How useful are centrality or cohesion measures today? What can we learn about our current online world with concepts forged in the 1960s and the 1970s like homophily, transitivity, cohesion, diffusion processes? To do so, this course examines the seminal papers in SNA. However, this intellectual journey is complemented by a more hands-on approach, as half of the course is devoted to teaching the students basic operations in Python such that they can collect data from digital social media platforms before modeling, measuring, and visualizing this data using recent network analysis libraries. The course puts the ancient concepts of SNA to the test and assesses how fruitful they are in understanding online interaction data. No prior coding experience is required as the course extensively uses AI capacities (such as Gemini, directly available in Google Colab notebooks) to assist with coding. The class alternates readings of historical sociology papers and more contemporaneous articles typical of the digital age mixing concepts from SNA in the larger realm of computational social sciences. Most classes are split into three parts: the discussion around a scientific paper, a lecture about a new SNA-related concept, and a third part where students are invited to experiment on their own laptops with the newly introduced concepts, metrics, or algorithms with empirical data.

This course provides a general overview of secularism in the world. Reading texts, scientific articles, press articles, and historical documents, it reviews case studies with a comparative approach from political science, history, sociology, philosophy, and theology. Topics include the regime of separation of the Churches and the State in France, the secular state, the American civil religion, the Italian concordat, the Danish case, Turkey, the Mexican separation, and the Belgian derogatory regime. 

This course provides an advanced, comparative insight into citizenship debates with a specific focus on the intersection between citizenship, migration, and belonging. The course primarily concentrates on Europe and Northern America but systematically introduces comparative elements with other regions of the world (Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East) to provide a wider, global perspective on the politics of citizenship. The course delves into the transformations of citizenship regimes through the review and discussion of key scientific contributions in the field of citizenship studies, which has developed at the nexus of different disciplines over the past thirty years (political science, sociology, history, law). Beyond discussing citizenship and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion it entails, this course is also an opportunity to address more general concerns in social science research, such as how to assess change, how to ensure comparability across contexts, and how to address the gap between policy on paper and policy in practice.

This course offers a study of the Second World War from a worldwide perspective. It explores these themes in two parts, in unfamiliar places and across unusual timescales. The first part begins with the question of what makes (and unmakes) a war a "world war" and reviews the conflict's development from its origins to its ending, well beyond the familiar 1939-1945 chronology. In the second part, it explores themes both familiar and unfamiliar from a global viewpoint, from the war's multinational forces to its ecology, economy, and popular memory.

This course performs micro-genealogies of various strands of “practical philosophy” and “philosophical practice,” both ancient and modern, to rethink how philosophy can provide the conceptual tools needed to tarry with the complexities of individual and social life. It addresses questions such as what is happiness and the good life; at what expense do we find happiness; what are the conditions for freedom; and how to engage with death, illness, and finitude. This course critically examines how happiness has been imagined in the past and the present, from virtue and duty to wellness and bliss.

This course is an initiation to writing for the theater, examining the link between writing and spoken text. It includes several writing exercises that lead progressively toward a short play which is then workshopped among the class. In addition to this practical dimension of writing, the course includes reading and discussion of the dramatic texts of various actors.

This course provides a critical understanding of the major issues currently faced by European countries, and the interplay between Member States, European institutions, global challenges and democratic legitimacy concerns. It analyzes the facts to understand the major causes and potential consequences and think of possible solutions to address challenges existing in the euro area, those created by the unprecedented migrant flows in Europe, stemming from climate change. The course also looks at the rise of Euroscepticism and the issue of democratic deficit in the European Union. The course provides a critical approach and a solid understanding of the major issues and debates on the topics covered during the class.

In examining how contemporary political power is organized, notably through constitutions, this course presents a view of issues past and present, legal and political, French or foreign, national and international.  It also offers several keys so that students can orient themselves among the facts, the information, and the documentary sources.  Students are given a certain amount of information but also encouraged to build intellectual and practical skills to bring out their critical thinking abilities, their ability to hold a rational argument, and stimulate their creative intellectualism.  The themes examined in the course include: defining a certain number of fundamental notions related to the analysis of constitutional law and the political institutions; examining several examples of foreign political institutions; and understanding the trajectory, the situation, and the characteristics of today’s French institutions.  Through case studies and applied examples, each course meeting is an opportunity to enrich the methodology required to examine these issues.

This course addresses the key issues that affect the economy and society in emerging markets: globalization, slowing growth, Covid-19, demography, women, urbanization, religion, commodities, water, renewable energies, climate change, currencies, enterprises, and geopolitical power politics. The course considers how the emergence of BRICS, the five major emerging national economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and the following wave of emerging countries appearing in the South, from Nigeria to Indonesia through Ethiopia and Vietnam, has created a strategic challenge for the OECD countries. The emerging markets are analyzed as both growing markets and competitors, with which new partnerships must be invented.