Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course provides an introduction to finance. The course starts with a brief discussion of the functions of financial systems, an overview of existing financial assets, financial intermediaries and markets, and an introduction to firm types and firms’ financial statements. The first part of the course deals with the time value of money and its applications: understanding interest rates and valuing bonds. The second part addresses investment decisions by firms and explains the basics of project and firm valuation. The course then introduces the notions of risky assets, risky returns, and risk aversion and highlights the benefits of diversification. It presents the foundations of portfolio theory and the central model of equilibrium asset pricing, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, before highlighting some of their important applications. The last part of the course discusses the efficient market hypothesis and the contending theories of behavioral finance. Basic knowledge of probability and statistics is a prerequisite for the course.

This course provides a solid overview of the law of international security, a set of rules regulating the maintenance and restoration of international peace and security, within which States and other actors exercise their policies, adopt decisions, and form mutual relations on the international scene. It covers international legal norms and to applies them to concrete cases in the world politics. The course sheds light both on the centralized international and decentralized regional levels of collective security mechanisms. In addition to the prerogatives of the United Nations, the role of the NATO, European Union, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, African Union, Economic Community of West African States, and Organization of American States is covered. It focuses on diverse measures aimed at the protection of international security, both involving and not involving the use of force (economic embargoes, targeted sanctions, interruption of diplomatic relations and, finally, the recourse to military force).

This course introduces students to critical approaches to international law and excavates the ideas and histories that help shape international law's subjects, categories, and boundaries. The course engages with critical theories (TWAIL, critical legal studies, Marxism) that challenge the narrative of international law as a universal and progressive project. This course consists of three parts which provide students with a foundation to reflect on both the limits and potential of international law. The first part of the course explores how colonialism helped produce international law's actors: the State, victim, perpetrator, and international community. The second part engages with non-legal discourses (narrative, mythology, emotion) to explore how these categories are sustained. The third part of the course investigates whether the discourse presents a crisis of imagination that makes alternative international engagements unthinkable.

Using mainly law, sociology, and economics but also philosophy, literature, and psychology; and focusing on different actors such as states, societies, consumers, and banks; the course deals with current controversial issues such as the rising role of money, the global distribution of wealth, the erosion of monetary sovereignty, the legal challenges of alternative and stateless currencies, and the disruptive effects of cryptocurrencies on finance and banking industries. The course is divided into three parts: the origins and essence of money, the socio-economic and legal issues raised by money in today's society, and the current challenges coming from the rise of cryptocurrencies.

This course provides an analysis of the relationship between the regionalization of criminal policy and the globalization of criminal law. It introduces the concept of and analyzes the types of criminal policy. The course provides a comparison of national, regional, and international criminal policy; and compares a variety of methods of regionalization of criminal policy towards drug crimes. It identifies and analyzes the challenges and explores the efficiency of joint regional criminal policy.