Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course is a practical workshop where students create a methodological reading grid to allow them to decode with certainty what news is factual and what can sometimes be used for propaganda purposes. The course covers how to review images, sources, publication dates, itineraries, virality, and context to authenticate the veracity of content.

This course is an examination of the Western Balkans' path to the European Union, with an emphasis on the post-1989 developments. It looks at the course content through political, economic, historical, and international perspectives. Over the semester the focus is on the ever-developing relationship between the EU and the Western Balkans, EU approaches towards integration, conditionality mechanisms, and individual paths of the seven new republics created after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Topics include: Balkans in Europe; the Dissolution of Yugoslavia and its Consequences; EU conditionality and the accession mechanisms; state-building, democratization, Europeanisation, and transformation of the Balkans.

This course considers the main components of American soft power, the ability of the United States to influence through non-coercive behavior, and how they have evolved over time. Also covered are the current challenges, limitations, and constraints to American soft power. Students consider how the public perceives US leadership and the soft power initiative and actions meant to secure it, and the potential consequences of the Trump presidency on America's soft power capital.

This course is transdisciplinary in its framing and combines various approaches and scholarship from critical security studies, surveillance studies, sociology of technology, data sciences, human rights, and international law. The course develops a reflexive understanding of the main categories at work when using geopolitics, security and securitization, mass surveillance, and privacy rights, by joining different experiences too often fragmented by disciplinary knowledge. It analyzes the scripts they produce in order to build a transdisciplinary understanding reflecting the debates (or lack thereof) concerning digital spaces.