Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course introduces the Sahel region, whose strategic importance is expected to rise in the next decades. Located between the Maghreb and the Gulf of Guinea, the Sahel region is at the crossroads of many strategic issues. The course analyzes security threats (socioeconomic difficulties, cross-border trafficking, ethnic tensions, etc.) and terrorist threats as a result of the numerous cross-border and rural spaces characterized by a security vacuum that contributes to criminal and terrorist groups' activities. It examines the states’ structural weaknesses and political tensions that have jeopardized the region’s stability, as well as the rapid demographic growth and urbanization that could lead to new socioeconomic prospects or increased instability.

This seminar presents and discusses the key institutions that govern market economies, seen as political and legal constructs. The focus is on core institutions like private property rights and its alternatives, all sorts of debts, wage labor and its variants or the architecture of individual markets (like those for global commodities or microcredit). A lot of attention is given to State institutions, including indeed the courts and the law, though non-State actors also play a great role in the regulation and maintenance of markets. Their mutual relations are of course of major interest. Every lecture is based on examples drawn from either developed or developing countries, today or in the more or less distant past, accompanied by readings of an article or book chapter.

This course teaches listening comprehension, oral expression, spoken production, and written expression in Portuguese. Students learn familiar words and common expressions, ask and answer simple questions, understand familiar words and simple sentences such as those in notices and posters, and write simple correspondence.

This course focuses on the crisis of democratic politics in Europe, placing it in the wider context of the evolution of postwar democracy, as well as seeking to build accounts of our present politics. It develops a refined understanding of democratic politics in Europe, introducing academic accounts of party democracy, technocracy, and populism, and deploying them in the context of postwar European history. In so doing, this course enriches the understanding of commonly deployed notions and concepts for the purpose of contemporaneous political analysis, rendering more clearly both the disjunctures and continuities of Europe's Democratic Age.

From a political science perspective, this course investigates the stark material inequalities that exist between countries and world regions. It covers the transnational political-economy processes that shape inequalities within and between countries, including perspectives on the winners and losers of global trade, the deregulation of global finance, the precarity created along global production chains, tax evasion of multinational companies, migration, and the rise of global tech companies. The course reflects on the consequences of these processes for areas such as democracy, gender relations, and climate change.

This course covers Europe's foreign and security policies since the end of the Cold War with a focus on political, strategic, and foreign policy challenges. It combines historic understanding and political analyses of the main challenges faced by the European Union and clarifies several concepts such as European diplomacy, Europe's grand strategy, EU hard versus EU soft power, the EU in its regional dimension, and the EU in a multipolar world.