Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course is designed to help students get to know and better understand the capital of Paris. Much has been said, written, and heard about Paris, yet the capital remains a place of mystery. In fact, Paris is three cities in one: an international city, a national city, and the city where Parisians live their daily lives. We know what happens there, but do we know what is at stake behind the cultural representations of Paris, its social change, the public action that takes place there, and its electoral geography? Who are the Parisians during the 2026 municipal elections? These questions are all mysteries to be solved. This course draws on a variety of approaches (culture, cinema, history, geography, sociology) and relies on the curiosity and sagacity of students to solve these puzzles, as they write and present their electoral program as candidates in the 2026 Paris municipal elections.

This course introduces the emerging landscape of "green industrial policy.” Focus is first be placed on defining such policy, broadly construed as public interventions targeting rapid industrial change in pursuit of national decarbonization. The course then foregrounds historical precedents of rapid industrial change, especially in the Global South. From here, it surveys ongoing policy experiments in different regional contexts, and concludes with case studies of China, Mexico, and France. Throughout the course, attention is placed on distinct theoretical and methodological approaches to studying green industrial policy, with students completing original research proposals.

For the past two centuries, historians have focused their work on understanding the political, economic and social developments that created the modern world. Debates over the growth of trade, the development of institutions, the causes of war and ways to achieve peace, the creation of health systems, and the evolution of ideas formed the basis of the field. History, for most of history, was considered a purely human endeavor. In the past few decades, however, climate change and human impact on Earth's biosphere have demonstrated that this framework is incomplete. Humanity has always been part of and dependent on the non-human world and now, as the Anthropocene debate suggests, the human race is undoubtedly a major cause of changes to Earth systems. The future of humanity and the planet can no longer be separated, which forces us to reconsider the role of non-human environments in the development of modern human societies. To do so, this course relies on the tools of environmental history, a relatively new and rapidly growing historical subfield that studies the human relationship with the natural world. Each session addresses a specific feature of our modern era through an environmental lens, including globalization, industrialization, empires, warfare, food production, and energy use. Sessions are a combination of lectures, source analysis and group discussions. At the end of the course, students are familiar with the broad themes of the environmental history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are able to apply this historical methodology to their own interests.

British living standards have stagnated for almost fifteen years, and on present trends will be the same as Poland's by 2030. What has gone "wrong" with the quality of Government in Britain? What errors and mistakes have its governments made? What lessons can be learned for other nations? Is relative British decline reversible? This interdisciplinary course draws on intellectual traditions in history, political science, economic history and economics to explore how the Academy explains the perpetual British crisis, drawing on the course leader's research in modern British history and politics at the University of Oxford. Its method is case study-based, beginning with the First World War (the conceptual, introductory topic) and passing through other "failures" of the British State since 1914, including Appeasement; the Suez Crisis; Concorde, the Community Charge (the "Poll Tax"); Rail Privatization; the Iraq War; and the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/8. An overview of "public policy failure" literature is integral to the course.

This course explores the architecture and politics behind global finance, and how it can be reformed to address the world's most urgent needs: climate change, inequality, debt sustainability, and beyond. The challenge today isn't just what we fund, but how we fund it. Through a mix of academic literature, case studies, student-led presentations, and guest lectures by senior experts from leading institutions, the course explores which actors shape the global economy, how they wield their influence, and what it would take to reform them.

This course focuses on race, discrimination, and racial inequalities. The course addresses three key questions: what is race as perceived in the U.S. and Europe, and what are the sources of racial inequalities; what does social science research tell us about patterns and trends of racial inequalities; and what policies can alleviate racial inequalities? The course systematically adopts comparative perspectives focusing on the North American and European contexts. It also addresses research on race and racial inequality within an interdisciplinary lens particularly building on sociology, economics, and social psychology.

This course explores the ambiguous connections between population dynamics and climate change. After a lecture-based acquisition of basic knowledge in the field of demography, the course studies the link between climate change and population dynamics in an interactive way by discussing scientific articles. It discusses which demographic dynamics linked to fertility, mortality, and migration impact environmental changes. Hereby, the course considers questions such as how far climate change can be explained by population growth; whether demographic pressure helps adapting more quickly to climate change; and which regions are the most responsible for climate change, in economic and demographic terms. A particular focus is determining which populations are most vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation. Based on this fundamental knowledge, it discusses possible actions to dramatically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and further deterioration of the environment as well as to protect the most exposed and vulnerable populations. It tackles climate-change related education, access to reproductive health care and family planning, gender equality in education and economic participation, investments in public health care services and technical improvements. This allow students to answer questions about what policies should be recommended to alleviate climate change, in the light of population growth and population aging, and which best-practice examples exist that help mitigating the effects of climate change for the most vulnerable.