Political Science

Using Benedict Anderson's imagined communities concept, this class questions the new identity politics in France since the end of the “Trente Glorieuses”. The appearance of this phenomenon is mostly due to economic crises, recent immigration waves, and diverse social and political movements which stirred the contemporary French public debate. This class is structured around two concepts which are the Quartiers populaires (banlieues, or suburbs) and the Territoires (peri-urban areas), which embody France's new social, political, economic and cultural fault lines. Since 1983's March for equality and against racism 1983 (“Marche des Beurs”), up until the current “Yellow Vests” movement, the French public debate is punctuated by a new interest towards these two spaces. The rise of new paradigms within those spaces are discussed furtherly during the whole semester. This teaching mainly focuses on France, in order to understand the consequences of these events as a matter of domestic policy. However, those dynamics are systematically compared to foreign similar events and replaced in a Euro-Mediterranean context with a comprehensive chronology.

The course explores the key components of the European Union-United States diplomatic relations in the twenty-first Century. It analyzes the way diplomacy is designed and practiced in the US and the EU. Several areas of cooperation are studied through the lens of current tensions, including in the specific areas of trade, security, and human rights. The course also explores how the populist and nationalist political movements and neo-authoritarian tendencies, which are challenging liberal democracy on both sides of the Atlantic, are affecting the transatlantic relationship. To this end, this course also examines the foreign policy specificities of the Trump presidency and the EU response to them.

This course provides an advanced introduction to contemporary political theory. Both parts of the course engage normative- and critical-theoretical texts by considering present-day political and social problems. Part One investigates political-theoretical concepts and arguments in view of increasingly precarious social and economic conditions for much of the world’s population. What norms of justice, equality, and liberty might justify efforts to redistribute material resources? How have recent changes in capitalism affected human desires with regard to work, work’s products, and work-based relationships, and what new forms of freedom or submission might such altered desires promote? Part Two confronts pressing questions that stem from climate change, global migration, and racial and colonial violence. What shifts in modern notions of nature-human relations might climate change spur and under what political conditions would people respond to these ethical imperatives? What obligations does a political society have to migrants and what new conceptions of political agency might migrants’ work and political ventures suggest? What are the sources of colonial and racial violence, and what ethical and political commitments should anti-racist and decolonizing responses entail? Teaching 15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the MT. 15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the LT. 1 hour and 30 minutes of lectures in the ST. There will be reading weeks in MT Week 6 and LT Week 6. Formative coursework Students are expected to submit two formative essays in MT and a mock exam paper in LT. The course requires students to organize their workloads, to complete readings in advance of lectures, and to prepare to participate actively in seminars. The course thus emphasizes the development of verbal and written communication abilities. Students also should expect to tackle basic questions about what it means to write political theory by exploring tensions and affinities between normative/ethical and critical-theoretical approaches. Indicative reading John Rawls, “A Theory of Justice”; Robert Nozick, “Distributive Justice”; Kathi Weeks, “The Problem with Work”; Jacques Rancière, “Disagreement”; David Schlosberg, “Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism”; Joseph Carens, “The Ethics of Immigration”; Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”; Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Hind Swaraj”; James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” Assessment Exam (60%, duration: 2 hours) in the summer exam period. Essay (40%, 2000 words) in the LT. GENERAL COURSE STUDENTS ONLY: The Class Summary Grade for General Course students will be calculated as follows:15% class participation, 50% assessed coursework, 30% formative coursework (15% per assignment), and 5% attendance.

This course examines the various social, cultural, political and economic phenomena that shape the daily context of society and aims to create a broad understanding of social reality. Themes covered include: analysis of social reality (cultural construction of society, social order, origin of social norms, culture wars and social structuring processes); society of the welfare state (society and economic systems, market economy to market society, origin of the welfare state); unemployment and the labor market; politics and power (ideologies and transformation of society, political decision-making, democratization of society); social impact of new technologies; globalization and social transformation.

In this course, students learn about key issues in defining political participation and recent trends in different forms of political participation across the world; micro, meso, and macro level factors influencing participation in elections and protests; current issues in political participation research; and how to assess the relative influences of stable and temporal factors in voting choice.