Course Content

The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with politics and political power in Africa.

Although the colonial period has profoundly impacted African governance and institutions, and former colonial powers have clearly shown intent and ability to pull strings to manipulate events, the State has been appropriated by African leaders and communities, who strive to build pluralistic institutions, forge democratic processes, and take on the biggest challenge of all: building nations from numerous and sometimes mutually hostile ethnic groups.

We will discuss issues, such as: The relationship of state building to nation building. Why do seemingly democratic elections routinely produce controversy and violence? How does political legitimacy relate to ethnicity? Does democracy create development? We will study perhaps the most provocative issue: “why, after sixty years of self-rule, do some African governments still appear unable to provide basic public goods to their populations?”

Course Content

The environment has been on the political agenda since the late 1960s. Since then it has undergone a process of institutionalisation and achieved some progress in tackling environmental pollution and degradation of natural resources. At the same time, persistent environmental problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental and health risks from chemicals, exist which cannot be solved with the conventional environmental policy instruments and therefore need novel approaches.
This course provides an introduction to and overview of environmental policy. The course focuses on national, EU and international environmental policy with special attention given to the role ideas, interests, and institutions play in the policymaking process in environmental politics. We will look at state approaches as well as the role of society in environmental policy and politics. The focus is on the industrialised nations, which are largely responsible for causing contemporary environmental problems, but also beyond on North-South issues and development themes.

Descriptif du cours

Europe et Union européenne

Ce cours consiste en une formation consacrée à l’Union européenne à partir d’une approche renouvelée des « questions européennes ».

De manière largement dominante, les questions européennes sont en effet traitées à partir d’une approche juridique essentiellement basée sur l’analyse des traités communautaires, ainsi qu’à partir d’une approche institutionnelle qui se borne à examiner et détailler les pouvoirs (organes) européens et leurs actions (fonctions). Il s’agit dans les deux cas d’une approche très théorique qui ne permet pas toujours d’accéder aux réalités politiques et pratiques de l’Union européenne, et notamment à l’imbrication étroite entre niveau communautaire et niveau national.

La formation proposée dans le cadre de ce séminaire souhaite offrir une compréhension renouvelée de la nature et du fonctionnement concret de l’Union européenne en fournissant des éléments de problématiques structurants permettant des clés d’entrée possibles pour une analyse dynamique, et dans la mesure du possible pratique, des relations de pouvoir entre les institutions communautaires mais aussi entre les Etats membres de l’UE, sur les plans historique, géopolitique, politique, institutionnel économique et international ;

Développée sur la base de 8 séances de 3 heures, l’approche retenue conduit nécessairement à identifier les principaux enjeux, via les interventions du responsable du cours et celles d’intervenants extérieurs, l’ensemble étant complété par des questions/réponses avec les étudiants et la consultation des références bibliographiques qui seront fournies.

Cette approche s’appliquera à quatre dimensions incontournables pour appréhender les « enjeux européens », dimensions qui structureront le cours autour de 4 volets :

1) Un volet historique et géopolitique ;
2) Un volet politico-institutionnel ;
3) Un volet économique ;
4) Un volet externe.

Descriptif du cours

Le cours vise à fournir une introduction à la réflexion épistémologique concernant les conditions et les modalités de production de savoirs scientifiques, notamment sur des objets sociaux et politiques. En quoi la science politique est-elle une science (sociale) ? Quels rapports de filiation ou d’antagonisme se sont-ils historiquement établis entre les sciences humaines et sociales d’une part, et les sciences de la nature de l’autre ? Quels sont les enjeux politiques et sociaux impliqués par la réflexion épistémologique ? Le cours s’interrogera autour de telles questions, en pratiquant, en tant que fil conducteur des séances, un aller-retour entre ​science de la politique et ​politique de la science – ou mieux : ​politiques des sciences –, ce qui impliquera, en même temps, d’interroger politiquement la question de la production des vérités scientifiques.

Course Content

The course introduces students to theorizing about world politics in the academic (sub-)discipline of International Relations (IR). While both practices of ‘international relations’ and the conscious reflection about them reach back in time much further, IR as a separate academic field of knowledge has been formally institutionalized only in the interwar period, spreading and gaining further traction after 1945. Ever since, the discipline has struggled over its historical origins, its subject matter, its methodologies, and, of course, the supposed drivers and dynamics of international politics. The course presents major theories of IR by revisiting the shifting fault lines of the discipline, tracing major schools and disputes from once hegemonic realism through versions of liberalism, the English School, and constructivism to critical theory, feminism, and postcolonialism. In so doing, it explores a variety of topics in international politics, including great power competition and war, international cooperation and organization, democratic peace and norm diffusion, the marginalization and misrepresentation of ‘others’, and the rise of ‘the rest’ and apparent shift towards global international relations. Throughout, the course highlights how theoretical controversies over the nature of international politics do not simply reflect actual practices of international politics, but also constrain and enable particular politics in practice, that is, by shaping what appears at all necessary, desirable, and possible.

Course Content

This course deals with the political aspects of global health, which designates the compound of policies adopted and enacted by public and private actors within and across nation-states. The course asks how global health is governed, what kinds of interventions it is made of, and what its economic implications are at the global level.

Course Content

The course offers a general overview of the political, economic, social and cultural processes that have characterized the last century. From a temporal perspective, the course approaches the period following Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the “short 20th century” as comprised by the beginning of World War I in 1914 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. From a spatial perspective, the course aims to give a global and wide overview of historical developments that goes beyond the Euro-Atlantic space, including developments in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The course is structured in twelve (12) sessions of two hours. The contents are divided in five (5) units, going from the outbreak of WW1 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The content of each sessions will provide students with basic knowledge and concepts to understand the political, economic, social and cultural developments of the period, as well as a number of bibliographical references that they will be able to draw from in the development of their future career.

As for evaluations, 75% of the final grade will come out of a final written exam, whereas the remaining 25% will come out of a short written assignment during the semester.

Course Content

Like most of our modern fields of study, History and Geography as we know them today, were born at the end at the nineteenth century, in an era of dynamic state building. Therefore, the preferred unit of analysis that emerged to frame historians and geographers’ narratives of the world’s past and present was, and to some extent still is, the national scale. It is easy to acknowledge the obvious ideological background that has led most countries around the world to build national histories to back emerging national identities, at a time when another political unit, the Imperial one, was crumbling almost everywhere. Nowadays, the United Nations hosts 193 member states with the latest addition of South Sudan in 2011. All of them are national political entities.
Nevertheless, over the past decades, History and Geography, like many other fields of study, have had to adapt to a major paradigm shift that has enlarged the scope of their narratives from a national to a global scale. This new paradigm is what defines most of our contemporary representations of the world. We call it globalization. Of course, one may discuss endlessly over the validity or reality of such a broad and ill-defined concept and its consequences over various fields of studies, including the Humanities, but this goes beyond the scope of this course.
As world history emerged as a global alternative to the national narrative, it soon became obvious that a global perspective also had to include a transdisciplinary approach in its analysis in order to provide a truly global perspective on history and geography. The fields of History and Geography have thus become more connected than ever before. Broader units of analysis have been added to the nation state, such as civilizations, area studies, continents, language groups … All in an attempt to transcend the limits of the nation-state. However some of these broader units are geographic ones, natural spaces or ecosystems such as deserts, grasslands, mountains or oceans. Against all odds, these harsh environments, which may at first look like barriers limiting human contacts, have come to be regarded as “zones of interactions” that have served as meeting places between peoples of different backgrounds. Seas and Oceans are such places and provide History and Geography teachers with examples of trade, travel, migration, imperial conquest and religious and cultural interaction in almost every period that reach far beyond the limits of national state borders. This approach aims at enabling students to analyze events and phenomena with a broadened perspective and a less restricted focus besides introducing the complexities of writing historical and geographical narratives that manage to articulate the global and the local in a coherent and comprehensive analysis of past and present events.
Seas and oceans, by their size and contact with multiple and diverse areas look like the perfect historical and geographic frame to display exchanges of all kinds and scales, an aspect sometimes overlooked by classical history.
Maritime networks provided important linkages between diverse ecological zones and facilitated contacts between societies that had access to diverse resources. The richness and complexity of these cross-regional connections set the pattern for the globe-spanning interconnections we know today as globalization.
In this course we will attempt to build together a global picture of how seas and oceans have played and are still playing an important part in the elaboration of our current global world-system.
Themes will revolve around the concept of seas and oceans as historical and geographical units of analysis, the British empire, Caribbean pirates, East India Companies, Polar seas, overfishing, current environmental issues…

Descriptif du cours

Objectifs du cours
Ce cours est une introduction à l’économie. Il vise à vous faire découvrir le champ d’intervention de la science économique et vous familiariser avec les notions de base de l’économie.
Étudier l’économie, c’est mieux comprendre le monde dans lequel nous vivons. Pourquoi le prix des loyers à Paris est-il plus élevé qu’à Lille ? Pourquoi certaines entreprises licencient-elles alors qu’elles font des bénéfices ? Pourquoi les prix augmentent-ils rapidement dans certains pays et plus lentement dans d’autres ? Que font les économistes ? Quels sont leurs buts ? Quelles démarches suivent-ils ? Pourquoi les échanges sont mutuellement bénéfiques pour les individus et les nations? Les économistes cherchent à établir les principes économiques qui serviront à formuler des politiques visant à résoudre les problèmes économiques.

Objectifs spécifiques

• Définir l’objet et la méthode de l’économie
• Éclairer à l’aide des théories et auteurs sur les principales écoles de la pensée économique contemporaine,
• Présenter les différentes composantes de l’activité économique en utilisant, comme outils, le système élargi de la comptabilité nationale.
• Etudier les principaux agrégats macroéconomiques (consommation, investissement, chômage, inflation, etc.) et leurs interactions
• Etudier le rôle de l’État dans l’économie
• Analyser les relations économiques internationales
• Décrire le comportement du consommateur
• Décrire le comportement du producteur

Contenu
Ce cours est organisé comme suit :

• Ch1 : L’économie et son domaine
• Ch2 : Brève histoire de la pensée économique
• Ch3 : Présentation de l’activité économique
• Ch4 : Mesure de l’activité économique
• Ch5 : Le rôle de l’État et la nouvelle économie politique
• Ch6 : Mondialisation et interdépendances
• Ch7 : Théorie du consommateur – une synthèse
• Ch8 : Théorie du producteur – une synthèse

Bibliographie
Mankiw G. et Taylor M. (2019). « Principes de l’économie », De Boeck, 5ème ed.
Stiglitz J. – C. Walsch (2015). « Principes d’économie moderne », de Boeck, 3ème éd.
Varian, A.H. (2015), Introduction à la microéconomie, (9ème éd.), De Boeck

Évaluation
L’évaluation du cours portera sur un contrôle continu à mi-parcours en classe et un examen final. Chaque sujet comprend des Questions à Choix Multiples (QCM) et des Questions de cours. La pondération est la suivante :
Évaluation Pondération
Contrôle continu 50%
Examen final 50%

Course Content

The United Nations (UN) aims at fostering a synergy between peace, democracy and development in the world. In the past 30 years, civil conflicts and wars have had an increasingly devastating impact on community life and development. Additionally, not only do these conflicts tend to last longer, they now involve both states and non-state actor

Course Content

This introductory module provides a first acquaintance with International Political Economy. It addresses both mainstream and critical theoretical approaches and locates them in the historical development of Political Economy as an intellectual tradition seeking to analyse the strutures and processes which constitute the global economy. The module briefly introduces the theoretical approaches at the basis of pre-disciplinary political economy – classical PE and the Marxist critique to PE – to then develop a historical analysis of the emergence of the global economy. It offers an introductory understanding of the historical component of IPE.
By the end of the course students should have achieved:
• an introductory understanding of the different theoretical traditions in IPE;
• an introductory knowledge of the historical patterns in global political economy

Course Content

This course aims to introduce students to the history of modern international political thought and nourish critical and conceptual understanding of major issues of this period. This course focuses on the main English political philosophers who have participated directly in crucial theoretical debates on the idea of international between 17th to the beginning of 19th century. The course is organized with the following question: how the articulation of new thoughts in political economy and international political theories can help to understand the shift from “perpetual war” (beginning 17th) to the birth of the modern ideal of “perpetual peace” (the end of the 18th century)? Based on the readings of primary sources (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Ricardo, Bentham) and historians of political thought (Armitage, Fitzmaurice, Hont), each class session will be devoted to engaging the students with conceptual analysis, historical context and normative questions in modern international thought.

Course Content

The purpose of this undergraduate course is to introduce students to important conceptual and theoretical issues in the field of sociology. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate a range of theoretical propositions concerning such topics as agency, subjectivity, rationality, interdependence, cooperation, delegation, institutions and social change. Further the class will apply these theoretical approaches to empirical themes and topics. Thus, the class covers both theoretical way to the study of Sociology in terms of Grand Social Theories but manly takes a perspective of empirical sociology and look at some key topics in Sociology At the end of the semester, students should have a sound knowledge of major tenets of social theory and their empirical application. They should also be able to understand and use fundamental sociological concepts

Course outline:
1. What is Sociology?
2. Theories and Perspectives in Sociology
3. Globalisation and Social Change
4. The Life Course (Socialization)
5. Long Break
6. Stratification and Social Class (Poverty)
7. Global Inequalities
8. Gender and Sexuality
9. Race, Ethnicity and Migration
10. Religion
11. The Media
12. Nations, War and Terrorism and Short Summary and Conclusion

Course Content

The course aims to provide students with a basic understanding of the logics and main principles of public international law. International law, as its name indicates, is the law that applies in the relations between (inter-) the States (-‘nation’). It is therefore not a branch of domestic law – like commercial, constitutional or yet family law – and, indeed, differs from it in many ways. Its main characteristic probably lies in the fact that the international legal order lacks a single central authority capable of ensuring universal respect for rules. It operates in a horizontal rather than vertical fashion. As a result, not only are States the main subjects of international law, but also its main guardians. This seemingly paradoxical situation is the source of most of the particularities that
surround the making, the practice as well as the logics of international law. The course will seek to familiarize students with these particularities and with the content of the most important rules of international law. The purpose is to make sure that they acquire the necessary (legal) tools to critically assess and analyse how the international (legal) system works. To this end, the course will try, as much as possible, to draw illustration from current international events and push students to use the rules and principles of law expounded during the course to
analyse them. The classes will therefore not take a classical ex cathedra format, but open space up for discussion and debate as well.

Descriptif du cours

En se donnant la division spatiale de l’interne et de l’externe, tel qu’elle en est venue à sous-tendre l’ensemble des divisions que l’on tient pour caractéristiques de la ‘modernité politique’ (entre le national et l’étranger, la politique intérieure et la politique extérieure, le maintien de l’ordre et la guerre extérieure), l’enseignement vise à introduire les étudiants à la spécificité que l’époque moderne a eu de conceptualiser les rapports entre unités politiques avec l’avènement de l’International moderne. Il le fait en contrastant entre elles contrastant les époques de la Grèce antique, de la Rome antique, médiévale et moderne (jusqu’au XIXème), en présentant les manières dont l’exercice continuellement changeant du pouvoir et de l’autorité se rapporte à des formes d’organisation politique de l’espace elles-mêmes variables dans le temps. L’enseignement est centré sur l’Europe.

Descriptif du cours

Dans une approche par les ‘savoirs’, et dans le prolongement du travail de problématisation de la division spatiale entre l’interne et l’externe entrepris au 1er semestre, l’enseignement cherche à introduire les étudiants aux ‘savoirs’ de ‘relations internationales’ ou susceptibles d’être rapportés à ce que l’époque moderne en est venue à nommer les ‘relations internationales’. En repartant de la Renaissance et des écrits de Machiavel, il s’agit d’abord de montrer comment les ‘savoirs de gouvernement’ ont pu se spécifier dans un savoir positif à l’usage du Prince puis, à partir de Richelieu, se scinder entre ce qui deviendra la science camérale d’un côté, le savoir de ‘politique étrangère’ de l’autre (tableaux de Princes, etc.). Dans une perspective plus archéologique (Foucault), il s’agit ensuite d’explorer les manières dont ces ‘savoirs de gouvernement’ ont emprunté leurs concepts à d’autres blocs de savoirs (la dynamique, l’économie politique, la géographie, etc.). Enfin, il s’agit de montrer comment les ‘relations internationales’ ont pu, à partir du milieu du XXème siècle, être construites comme ‘objet de connaissance” susceptible de servir de socle à l’édification des ‘Relations Internationales’ comme discipline dont on interrogera alors les rapports à la science politique, à l’histoire et au droit.

Course Content

This course explores the development of the foreign policy of the Republic of Ireland. The course explores the idea of how small states operate in foreign policy, and examines how Ireland’s foreign policy is shaped and how it has evolved since Irish independence. The course covers a range of specific topics including Ireland’s relationship with the EU and Anglo-Irish relations (including the whole Brexit issue from an Irish point of view).

Descriptif du cours

Le trauma s’est imposé depuis la fin du XXe siècle comme « nouveau langage de l’événement » selon les mots de Didier Fassin et Richard Rechtman. Si très tôt dans son histoire, le trauma psychique est un enjeu médical, juridique, voire politique, il a aujourd’hui largement débordé les espaces théoriques et pratiques d’où il est issu. Terme à l’origine spécialisé, il innerve désormais les représentations les plus courantes concernant la vie psychique des individus comme l’appréhension des événements, de la mémoire et du passé sur le plan individuel et collectif. La naissance des trauma studies dans les années 1990 aux États-Unis confirme cette centralité du trauma. Des problématiques connexes (la transmission, la mémoire), des figures (la victime, le témoin), des formes (le témoignage, le récit) ou encore des motifs (la hantise) se sont alors retrouvées fortement liées au trauma. À partir d’un corpus théorique et littéraire ce cours problématisera la catégorie de trauma et en interrogera les usages, notamment en littérature, depuis la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle jusqu’à nos jours.

Descriptif du cours

Le but de ce cours est de familiariser les étudiants de première année avec l’environnement universitaire et de leur offrir une boite à outils (moyens, techniques, parfois simplement l’état d’esprit) leur permettant de faciliter leur apprentissage, de rendre leurs recherches plus efficaces ou encore d’améliorer leurs productions intellectuelles.

Descriptif du cours

Le but de ce cours est de familiariser les étudiants de deuxième année avec les technologies numériques, à la fois d’un point de vue pratique et d’un point de vue scientifique. Le cours insistera notamment sur l’importance de savoir travailler avec des outils informatiques, de savoir protéger sa vie privée sur Internet, et de comprendre les bases de la sécurité des réseaux informatiques.

Descriptif du cours

La guerre et la négociation diplomatique sont deux moyens distincts de résolution d’un différend. Elles ne surviennent au demeurant pas dans le même contexte relationnel, social et historique. Si l’étude du contexte dans lequel la guerre survient fait l’objet d’une abondante littérature, celle du contexte dans lequel la négociation est choisie pour résoudre un conflit est plus rare.
Le but de ce cours est de donner aux étudiant·e·s des pistes analytiques pour comprendre ce contexte, mais aussi le contexte dans lequel la négociation peut être rejetée car considérée comme impossible ou inenvisageable. Ce contexte sera particulièrement caractérisé par les représentations dont font l’objet la négociation, l’objet du conflit, les parties prenantes, leur position sur la scène internationale, etc. Nous explorerons l’ensemble de ces pistes analytiques à travers le cas de la politique des États-Unis en matière de négociation à l’égard de la Corée et de l’Iran, face à leurs programmes nucléaires respectifs.

Course Content

These last decades have seen a significant rise in the role of indigenous identities in sociopolitical struggles throughout Latin America.

This class will examine the ongoing expansion of this phenomenon in its political and cultural dimensions from a multidisciplinary perspective, bringing together the latest research from historians, anthropologists and political scientists from both sides of the Atlantic.

We will especially concentrate on the issue of the political participation of native groups in national and local levels, combining the diversity of national cases with a broader regional perspective. Also, we will focus on the intersections between ethnicity, feminism, ecology and alternative economic policies across the region.

Course Content

The course aims to introduce the students in the political, economic and social history of Southeast Europe with a special focus on the case of Yugoslavia. Sessions covers the country’s history from the initial moments of the Yugoslav project in the 19th century until the final disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s. By examining the history of Yugoslavia, as well as its violent dissolution, we aim to introduce the students into debates concerning the relation between nationalism and politics, but also to offer them a view into the history of communism in Eastern Europe.

The course consists of nine (9) sessions along a chronological order. As for evaluations, 100% of the final grade comes out of a final written assignment.

Course Content

This module provides a first acquaintance with the main concepts in the political economy of natural resources. Students will acquire introductory competences on the political economy of the natural resources that are fundamental to the functioning of our economy and society, such as land and water, fossil fuels, metals and ores, air and biodiversity. The module will guide the students through an analysis of the creation of cheap nature and cheap food, including an analysis of the global food system before and after the global financial crisis of 2007/8.
By the end of the course students should have achieved:
• an introductory understanding of the political economy of natural resources
• the ability to compare different interpretations of the role of natural resources in the contemporary global political economy

Course Content

International law and politics maintain a complicated relation. Political science sometimes looks down on international law, seeing it as a utopia disconnected from the realities of international relations and incapable of influencing (let alone constraining) the behaviour of States. International law, for its part, tends to deprecate politics, depicting it as a disorganising and destabilising rather than ordering force in international relations. The objective of this course is to investigate this complicated relationship. We will see how political scientists have started to take international law seriously has an object of study and as an integral element of international politics, but also how international lawyers have integrated the political (realist) critique of international law. Analysing international law as a socio-political phenomenon does not, however, necessarily lead to the conclusion that law is irrelevant. In examining and illustrating how the law the product of power struggles, these interdisciplinary inquiries, on the contrary, suggest that law is a paramount tool of international politics. Still, this does not mean that international is completely handmaiden to power. It can also be an instrument of political resistance and a vector for social change.

Course Content

Regional integration is both political, a tool to institutionalize continental unity and coherence, and economic, whereby countries seek to maximize their interests through increased trade.
This course tries to answer the following questions: Why and under which conditions do states decide to transfer political authority to regional organizations? To what extent are African citizens and civil society able to take part in regional integration projects? Has regional integration increased self-reliance or reduced poverty on the continent?
To answer these questions, beyond the main theories which explain the development of regional integration, we will study some of the programs designed to increase cross-border communication and boost regional trade in Africa.
We will also look at some of the major political and economic issues which require regional cooperation and solutions: Natural resource management; Peace and security; Food security; Energy and industrialization.

Course Content

The growing awareness of the profound impact of human activities on the planet, its ecosystems and its climate has given rise to a wide range of ‘social movements’ calling for the protection, conservation, and/or sustainable use of the environment and its resources. While many consider environmental issues – and their solutions – to be apolitical, championed by actors on different ends of the political spectrum and indistinctively cutting through class, race, gender and ethnicity (“We are all in this together”), this undergraduate course helps students unveil the different (and often conflicting) ethical positions and values underpinning the ‘environmental turn’ in contemporary political claim-making. Drawing on social movement theory and environmental ethics, we will critically explore some of the most vocal claims, theories and ideas surrounding ecological and environmental issues, including ‘deep ecology’, ‘ecomodernism’, ‘environmental justice’, and ‘ecofeminism’, among others.

Course Content

The course introduces students to theorizing about world politics in the academic (sub-)discipline of International Relations (IR). While both practices of ‘international relations’ and the conscious reflection about them reach back in time much further, IR as a separate academic field of knowledge has been formally institutionalized only in the interwar period, spreading and gaining further traction after 1945. Ever since, the discipline has struggled over its historical origins, its subject matter, its methodologies, and, of course, the supposed drivers and dynamics of international politics. The course presents major theories of IR by revisiting the shifting fault lines of the discipline, tracing major schools and disputes from once hegemonic realism through versions of liberalism, the English School, and constructivism to critical theory, feminism, and postcolonialism. In so doing, it explores a variety of topics in international politics, including great power competition and war, international cooperation and organization, democratic peace and norm diffusion, the marginalization and misrepresentation of ‘others’, and the rise of ‘the rest’ and apparent shift towards global international relations. Throughout, the course highlights how theoretical controversies over the nature of international politics do not simply reflect actual practices of international politics, but also constrain and enable particular politics in practice, that is, by shaping what appears at all necessary, desirable, and possible.

Course Content

The United Nations (UN) aims at fostering a synergy between peace, democracy and development in the world. In the past 30 years, civil conflicts and wars have had an increasingly devastating impact on community life and development. Additionally, not only do these conflicts tend to last longer, they now involve both states and non-state actors. Consequently, peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts are now central to the UN agenda and regional stability. There has been a surge of interest in avoiding deadly conflict by developing effective early warning systems.
How does the UN deal with armed conflicts which today occur more frequently within states than between them? As we study the challenges of building and maintaining peace in a turbulent global order, we need to understand how and why the UN has become progressively more involved in post-conflict reconstruction, including re-establishing the rule of law and strengthening state capacity, through comprehensive peace agreements.

Course Content

The objective of the course is to give a general overview of the problematic of the use of force in international relations, and provide students with the basic analytical tools to better understand current events. At the crossroads of law and political science, it will seek to familiarise students with the main legal principle that ring-fence the right for States to resort to military force. The prohibition of the use of force, in fact, is one of the cardinal principles of the international order. Yet war remains recurring in international relations, to the point where we sometimes forget that, as a rule, it is permitted only in a strictly limited number of circumstances. Taking a look at the main issues and controversies that currently surround the question of the legality, of the legitimacy as well as of the opportunity of using armed force, the course will shed light on the complex interaction of these different elements and dynamics. It will, in sum, aim to empower students into thinking critically about current events, about the role that the use of force plays, and about the synergies and limitations that law, politics and ethics pose to one another.

Descriptif du cours

Aborder ensemble utopie et dystopie littéraires permet de traverser l’histoire de la littérature de la Renaissance à nos jours en s’interrogeant sur les capacités de la fiction à problématiser le monde extra-littéraire, à en questionner le fonctionnement, à en exacerber les potentialités pour le meilleur ou pour le pire. Le contexte historique et politique est prépondérant pour comprendre la portée et les enjeux de ces formes narratives. Il s’agira donc de se demander tout au long de ce cours comment la littérature réagit face au monde, comment elle en explore les possibles ou en réfléchit les virtualités inquiétantes, les errances et les échecs. Après une étude de 1984, utopie négative désormais classique mais néanmoins d’actualité, nous nous demanderons dans quelle mesure Dondog d’Antoine Volodine, écrit en 2002, est également une dystopie ou déplace légèrement la question des rapports de la littérature à l’histoire en faisant de l’héritage mémoriel du XXe siècle et de la défaite de certaines de ses utopies des enjeux centraux.