Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course covers the recent developments in experimental and behavioral economics as well as their extension into neuroeconomics. It demonstrates how developments in cognitive psychology and neural exploration in the subjective representations of the stakeholders have enriched the discipline at the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels. The course investigates several iterations of this young sector which is being shaped by a never-before-seen cooperation between the hard sciences and the social sciences by showcasing several applications: monetary incentivization, entrepreneurship behavior and attention control, behavioral finances, risk attitudes, the rules of cooperation, the role of knowledge and belief in decision making, the mechanisms of coordination, et cetera.

This course highlights the unique link between the school and the Republic. It first investigates the origins of the school in the West and the eventual establishment of elite education systems by the Church. It then examines how the political landscape throughout the centuries and the call for education for the masses evolved into the school model of today, particularly during the Fifth Republic following the election of the president by direct universal suffrage. The course addresses the web of crises and tensions surrounding the democratization of education that persist today.

This course is about nations and nationalism since the eighteenth century. It provides basic concepts and historical examples. Nation and nationalism are presented in a rather neutral way, which means neither nationalist nor curative. This approach reflects today's global understanding of national realities, nationality, and nation-states. As the scope of the course is more international than French, nationalism is not presented as “nationalisme,” which is often understood as a social disease in current French debate. Examples are taken from world history and issues are addressed on a world scale. The course also compares the different paths of state-building: the city, the empire, and the nation. Topics include founding fathers of the modern nation; founding fathers of nationalism; relevance of the nation in the 19th and 20th centuries; the dominant feature: equality or liberty; modern nationalism; wars, nations, and empires; history vs sociology; ethnocultural reality vs political myth; from resistance to unity; and new types of nationalism.

This course introduces the arts of diplomacy and negotiation. To this end, the course offers both a theoretical and practical approach and presents the key concepts and tools behind the arts of diplomacy and negotiation. It analyzes the links between diplomacy and negotiation as well as the main challenges attached to traditional and modern diplomatic practices; discusses the impacts of globalization on the evolution of diplomatic practices and more specifically the impact of culture on international negotiation; identifies the main tools and strategies for successful negotiations: therefore, the course also serves as an introduction to communication techniques. It provides an opportunity to practice all these tools and concepts during workshop sessions, exchange in group debates, crisis and negotiation simulations. The course is designed to be very interactive: students are expected to actively participate in class and their communication skills will be assessed.

This course addresses the major challenges of a kind of political organization which is highly depreciated and suffers from a worrying lack of confidence from the citizens in every contemporary liberal democracy: the political party. The course focuses on the problems of both new and traditional political forces: from electoral decline to financial issues, from ideological void to organizational disintegration, it analyzes the role of political parties today and explains how they are trying to reinvent themselves in modern-day democracies. With a concise overview of a major subfield of the political science literature, this course demonstrates how an everyday subject can be observed through different perspectives, and how a mosaic of academic works can be used to draw a global picture which goes beyond current democratic dead ends.

This course studies the main steps of the French-German reconciliation and cooperation, and their impact on the European construction and transatlantic relations. The emphasis is not only on the bilateral dimension of this relationship, but also on the international one. A large role is given to the post-Cold War era and to the different Franco-German initiatives which came about during the development of the European Union and continued through the failure of the European Constitution. At the heart of this course are the visions and the philosophies which are often quite different of President Macron towards Germany. The course discusses the role of the “Franco-German couple” in the European Union and how the visions and philosophies are often very different in terms of European integration.

This course introduces the nuances of gender in relation to the international human rights law framework. This interdisciplinary course provides an understanding of international human rights law; exposure to the main human rights conventions and their gendered objectives; and the manner in which gender is of relevance from a human rights perspective. Further, students develop critical thinking and analysis skills whilst comparing different instruments of international human rights law.

This course provides an introduction to the sociology of religion to shed light on current issues. After an historical review of the emergence of a sociology of religion and a presentation of the main works that structure the discipline, the course discusses various issues, including social integration and the religious phenomenon, religious identity, militancy, religion in the public sphere, individualization of beliefs, and the place of religion in the political sphere. Each theme is embodied by a topical issue (e.g. the notion of “radicalization”, church militancy in the United States), which is studied in the light of the work available to date. The theoretical dimension of the course are also supported by the presentation of empirical studies.

This course explores the main political and moral theories that have been developed to face the new reality of unprecedented ecological upheaval caused by human activity. It imagines political solutions (environmental ethics, critique of technology, radical ecology, ecological democracy) to address several questions at the heart of contemporary political debates: whether humans should have a moral obligation towards nature and living beings; recognize a crime of ecocide; fight against the ideology of technical progress and invent new forms of life that are more resilient and respectful of the environment; reaffirm the importance of the precautionary principle in public action; and imagine a new social and ecological contract that would include non-human life forms and future generations.