Political Science

This course introduces different types of electoral systems, including the main categories of majoritarian, proportional, and mixed systems, and highlighting the significant variety of rules within each. Additionally, it explores how electoral systems are not neutral: they can influence the behavior of voters and parties, and can shape the quality of political representation (e.g., representation of women, degree of congruence between citizens' preferences and government decisions). Finally, the course considers current debates on electoral system reforms, and new electoral systems that propose to improve democratic representation.

This course explores the complex interplay between environmental issues, politics, and social change in the Arab world. It examines how natural resources, such as water, oil, and land, shape regional power dynamics and influence political conflicts. Through case studies, the course analyzes the impact of colonial legacies, globalization, and climate change on ecological and social systems in the region. The course also highlights grassroots movements and policy responses that address environmental justice and sustainability challenges. By engaging with interdisciplinary perspectives, students gain critical insights into the environmental dimensions of political struggles in the Arab world.

This course provides a theoretical examination of government regulations exploring their necessity in the context of market and government failures. It delves into the various types of regulations, how they function, and their impact across different sectors. Additionally, the course discusses the role of government-market interactions in national development. 

Students will gain insight into the foundations of regulatory frameworks and the government's function within them; comprehend the economic principles and theories that underpin government regulations; recognize various forms of market and government failures along with appropriate remedial actions; explore different categories of economic and social regulations, examining real-life cases both domestically and internationally; conduct in-depth analyses of regulatory instances, discerning their impacts and challenges based on these evaluations. 

This course examines the ways in which processes of colonization and de-colonization affect contemporary politics, resistance, transition, justice, the global order and localized and global challenges. 

This course examines the main aspects of intra-European mobility, whether legal, political, socio-economic, or cultural. It introduces the paradigm shift in intra-community migration and living together that goes hand in hand with this specific way of conceiving the cohesion of the European Union and its relationship with its neighborhood, making Europe at the beginning of the 21st century a laboratory for experimenting with a post-national citizenship. Analysis of reference texts and figures is supplemented by discussion time to help students reflect on their own experience as mobile citizens or, comparatively, on their experience of migration outside Europe and interculturality. Several case studies illustrate the analysis and highlight the diversity of situations that intra-European mobility can involve.

Being useful appears like a value per se: it would be an absolute, an ideal giving meaning to a life, a job, a public policy, a political project. Usefulness has been defined as a good in itself, and its negative, uselessness, as a criticism that devalues any object, especially any object in the political sphere. In contemporary times, the dividing line between useful and useless has come to be seen as a division between good and evil. But is this axis of division neutral? On what conceptual history does it rest? This course identifies the sources that have fueled the way in which, in a neoliberal context, public interest has become the equivalent of the Public Good, and the useless as the parasite that must be reduced, hunted down, and annihilated. An analysis of the notions of liberalism, neoliberalism and new public management are required for that.

This course considers and explains why and how the international system is characterized by the return of a tough competition among states. That is what we call power politics. This dynamic is reflected in the return of inter-state conflicts (Russia/Ukraine, Iran/Israel) and the risk of their spreading to other regions (Taiwan, South China Sea). The central question addressed in this course from both a conceptual and empirical perspective is why we moved within a decade from a world of economic interdependence based on the decline of interstate wars to a world where states are on the forefront of global competition including through the weaponization of economic interdependence. This course is by definition transversal and trans regional since the competition affects all regions of the world. It focuses on three types of actors: the drivers of this new competition who are setting the new rules of the game (United States and China), the contenders who have global ambitions while facing obstacles on their way (Russia, India, and the European Union) and the Hedgers who are middle income countries who are trying to leverage this new global dynamic for their own benefit (Brazil, South Africa, UAE, Indonesia, and Vietnam among others).

The course is an interdisciplinary course drawing on political science, law, and history. Although the major focus of the course is on the European Court of Justice, the politics and law of other courts and international tribunals are also discussed, certainly including the United States Supreme Court and the politics of the US constitution, but also perhaps including the Supreme Court of Ireland and the German Bundesverfassungsgericht as well as international dispute settlement tribunals such as the World Trade Organization, Investor-State Dispute Settlement systems, and the European Convention on Human Rights. Students also study alternative approaches to understanding and investigating court decision-making, including through a focus on legal texts, use of the comparative method, archival research, judicial biography, and quantitative approaches.

This course is based on a so-called “bottom-up” field approach in order to measure the social and societal effects of public policies in a different way. To illustrate this method, it draws on various visible situations related to migration: resurgence of shantytowns, increase in unaccompanied minors wandering around, etc., in order to analyze the sociological mechanisms at work within migrant groups, host societies, and countries of origin. This method uses social science research tools to be able to evaluate and then propose improvements to the policies and measures put in place. It is an introduction to action research based on a shared field diagnosis facilitating the acceptance of change and social innovation.

This course introduces the politics and power dynamics of policy making and implementation. Students examine how selected social problems (e.g. teenage pregnancy and welfare reform) are constructed and why some are high on the policy making agenda whilst others are not. This course challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about policy responses to selected social problems via an examination of politics and power; explores the ways in which social problems are socially constructed in political discourse, public debate and policy presentation; locates the lived experiences of social problems within the context of global and local inequalities; and differentiates between policy design, implementation, and lived experience.