Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course explores the major questions raised by the ambition of today's literature to render justice, as well as the risks of public and even legal contestation to which it is exposed. By browsing works that have given rise to a public debate, scandal, or even lawsuit, and exposing the terms of the controversy and its stakes (the difference between fiction and testimony, the rights of the characters in the face of romantic or family settling of accounts, the limits of the representable, the debates on cultural appropriation, the traumatic risks of reading, the search for transgression, new forms of censorship, etc.), this course introduces contemporary literature in its liveliest and most political form. It also returns to major societal issues (the rise of populism, social crises, the Me Too affair, contemporary family recompositions, debates on postcolonialism, racialism, etc.) from an original angle: that of the story of fiction.

Embracing voice, music, theatre, poem and visual arts, opera can be considered as a “total” art form. It is endlessly reinvented by a changing society, which it also contributes to shape. Sometimes forbearing political events (some uprisings started in opera houses), often used as propaganda by the rulers of the time (from Louis XIV to Hitler and many others), opera entertains a unique relationship with the political power. During the Age of Enlightenment, opera became at times a vector of subtle social criticism and political utopia. Today, contemporary issues such as the #metoo movement can find their ways into opera staging, not without controversy. This course proposes a cross-thematic journey into opera, power, and politics (history, sociology, and philosophy are also called upon when relevant) from Monteverdi to Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, John Adams and many others, confronting musical works with the dynamics of power. The course examines various video extracts from operas as a basis for discussion and to foster the development of a personal critical perspective on the complex relationship between opera and power.

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.