Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course discusses ideas about law through art such as literature, cinema, painting, architecture, monuments, and music. Among the legal concepts discussed are the definition of law and justice; equality and the role of the state; transitional justice; reparations; women's struggle for resources and power; race, class, and gender discrimination; national borders; and the place of law in the family.

This course covers a method to establish causal relationships in non-experimental data, called “Instrumental Variables”. The course covers panel data, that is, data which tracks individuals over time. It also covers situations when outcome data is discrete in nature, such as “subject I chose option A (and not B)”. A range of simple machine learning methods are discussed which are helpful for classification and prediction tasks. Crucially, the course has a maximum focus on hands-on practice, minimal importance to the derivation of formal results.

This course covers politics and strategy in UN peacekeeping (UNPK) operations. To do this, the lecture relies on the works of Prussian officer and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz. The course mobilizes Clausewitzian concepts like the “means and ends”, “trinity”, “fog”, “friction”, "center of gravity” to examine their effects on the politics of UN peace operations. One assumption of this course is that UN Peacekeeping is often undertaken when it is not the appropriate instrument of policy. One of the problems of UN Peacekeeping operations is that they are not guided by a clear strategy. This problem can be traced to the political processes leading to their creation. The general objective of the course is to provide the intellectual tools to analyze more critically how UNPK is organized. The theories used to examine UNPK are mostly Realism (Classical, Structural), Liberalism, and Constructivism. The course focuses on critiquing but not rejecting UNPK. The goal is rather to try to fix the political and strategic problems surrounding this militaro-diplomatic tool invented between 1945 and 1956.

This workshop for advanced level students (C1 and C2) offers a framework, space, and means to approach creative writing in French. In a relaxed environment, the workshop provides an opportunity to discover authors in touch with the current world, express sensitivity, and exchange ideas about French literature, particularly contemporary literature. The workshop consists of exploring various authors and genres to find one’s personal style and voice in French; story writing; cinematographic, theatrical, radio, and poetic writing. Linguistically, students develop the ability to characterize, in writing, the multiple descriptions (places, characters, emotions) contained in their productions; orally contextualize and justify the choices made in their writing; question texts and authors with delicacy and subtlety; and express feelings. The workshop provides an opportunity to reflect on one’s relationship to writing (pleasure, anxiety, necessity) as well as one’s relationship to writing in a language that is not one’s mother tongue (frustrations, freedom of expression).

This course is structured in two parts, theoretical and practical, and examines the diverging ontological, epistemological, and political frameworks to resolve the biosphere crisis to the human habitability of planet Earth. The first part of the course compares post-dualist approaches (advocating the abandonment of the society-nature distinction) with the theories that recognize a heuristic and epistemological value of the society-nature dualism. The second part of the course maps the range of policies, ideologies, and collective actions in response to the climate disaster: from neo-Malthusian eco-fascism defending a nationalist rootedness in the territory; to the liberal eco-modernism of green growth; as well as the socialist project of a Green New Deal and the agroecological peasant movement, La Via Campesina.