Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po)

This course introduces how to find relevant and exhaustive data, how to compute and analyze data, how to propose and objective assessment of the data, and how to recommend appropriate policy. It decrypts main statistical sources by economics and policy makers to formulate their decisions. Topics include surveys, GDP, unemployment, imbalances, and leading indicators. The course covers the process for determining these data points as well as the meaning embedded within them.

This course promotes debates on how gender has become an international social marker for the conception of public policies around the world. In this sense, the course thinks critically through the perspective of gender inequality and sexual diversity in different social contexts. The discussions start with a general introduction of the field of gender and sexualities in sociology to provide a capacity to integrate gender in previous sociological knowledge. Subsequently, it introduces traditional social markers (such as class, race, ethnicity). Each session is then based on a specific topic, based on a specific bibliography, for students to prepare, in different groups, an exposition for the class. This initial discussion has the objective of promoting the debate and stimulate the discussion among the students according to their experiences and their academic interests.

This course provides an introduction to Market Finance, with both an empirical and theoretical content. The objective is twofold: first, to give students an overview of how financial markets behave, and their main empirical features; second, to provide them with conceptual tools to understand these stylized facts via economic notions: the definition of risk, the quantity of risk, and the price of risk. The course starts with the introduction of these concepts. Via interactive games and experiments, students learn why the definition of risk, and how taking risk should be compensated for, may be complex, individual specific, and time varying. Various financial assets are covered in light of the definitions and concepts studied. In the second part of the course, the empirical evidence observed in financial markets over the past 100 years is studied. Students learn the main facts on financial market behaviors and how the evidence informs our understanding of investors' risk expectations and risk valuations. The pricing of SRI (Socially Responsible Investing) assets is discussed, as well as market behaviors since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.

This course is an introduction to the history of epidemics from the Neolithic period to neoliberal twenty-first century. It adopts an original angle: the perspective of planetary health, a recently emerged framework that proposes to address the interplay between health and disease, local environments, and the planetary crisis. The course engages simultaneously with the history of medicine (including the legacies of Hippocratic and medieval theories of epidemics), with global history (trade, war, colonialism, international governance), and with environmental history (emergence of pathogens, ecological transformation, multi-species histories, Anthropocene studies). Exploring examples including cholera, plague, Covid-19, and HIV-AIDS, it explores how epidemics are embedded within wider pathogenic ecologies shaped by political structures, planetary change, and human (in)action and ignorance. To do so, it follows a “place-based” approached, which avoids the repetitive and sometimes stereotypical genre of epidemic narratives. Focus is also placed on greater Paris as a region marked by the experience of epidemics and epidemic control.

This course uses a literary approach to political themes founded on the reflective and aesthetic values of certain works. This approach is supplemented by a philosophical, moral, and political reading of the works from an internal and external viewpoint which place them in their historical context and measure their weight outside of that context. This course develops a reflection on the political fable genre. After a general introduction (overview of Rabelais, Boccalini, Swift, Voltaire, Orwell, Huxley), the course centers on a formal, structural, and moral analysis of two famous collections of fables which use a philosophical and ironical approach: the 12 books of La Fontaine's fables and the 33 chapters of Tchouang-tseu as an art on the variation. In these different philosophical, satirical, didactic fables, the course studies the following double dimensions: political/moral, lucidity/illusion, wisdom/folly, animal/human, direct allusion/indirect allusion, and irony/humor. The art of the variation is defined in the different arts and contexts.

This course critically examines China's relationships with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the five Central Asian countries, focusing on the implications of its economic and security policies. It explores China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its impact on regional dynamics, particularly in light of rising radical and terrorist groups. The course addresses the heightened scrutiny of South-Central Asia (SCA) due to geopolitical competition and the aftermath of NATO's withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has allowed terrorist organizations to exploit the situation. Counterterrorism emerges as a central theme, analyzing how China's strategies intersect with its foreign policy objectives in SCA. Additionally, the course contextualizes China's approach within Global international relations frameworks and historical Chinese concepts during Xi Jinping's era, examining interactions with various international stakeholders and their implications for the evolving global order. Through this lens, the course engages critical discussions on the complexities of China's influence in SCA and its broader geopolitical ramifications.

This course covers Africa's current international relations and provides a historical outlook on relations and connections between African societies or states and the world from the first Pan-African conference in 1900 until the end of the Cold War. Drawing on the global history approach, the course goes beyond the traditional imperial history that tends to focus exclusively on Euro-African exchanges and demonstrates how Africa became entwined with world politics, interacted with diversified actors across the world (in Asia, Middle East and Latin America), and tried to shape global affairs. The first part of the course focuses on Great Divergence and Atlantic revolutions to contextualize European colonial conquests. The second part considers the history of African resistance and struggles, anti-colonial and post-colonial solidarities across the world, Panafricanism(s), and African integration. The third part of the course addresses divergent paths of decolonization, Africa's role in the Third world setting, the role of technology, and the Cold War rivalries. More generally, this course combines the transnational, cultural, and diplomatic history of Africa. Each session consists of two parts: a short introduction by the seminar leader and academic discussion around required readings to analyze primary sources and documentaries.

This course offers an introduction to the study of migration, borders, and security in the 21st Century. It explores how the governance of migration and borders has been transformed to include a diverse range of actors away from the exclusive domain of the state. Increasingly, EU agencies, IGOs, NGOs, security professionals, and religious organizations have become key players in governing mobilities. Key rationalities underpinning this governance are explored, from managerial, to security, and humanitarian. Emerging practices for migration control often defy territorial logic to borders, instead taking place in so-called transit and sending countries or in virtual spaces through surveillance and technology mechanisms. Thus, far from disappearing, as some scholars of globalization maintain, borders are emerging in new spaces both inside and outside the territorial state. This leads us to question the location of borders, their constitution, and their effects on liberties and fundamental rights. The course provides students with the knowledge and concepts to think critically about how power works through borders and with what effects on states, populations and individuals in terms of their inclusion/exclusion, freedom, and mobility.