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American political history and culture; political institutions (presidency, Congress, judiciary) and processes (political parties, nominations, election systems and electoral behavior). Civil liberties in the Bill of Rights. Students encouraged to participate with comments and questions. Brief discussion of reform proposals.

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The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with politics and political power in Africa, in its theoretical and empirical aspects.

Although the colonial period has profoundly impacted African governance and institutions, and former colonial powers have clearly shown intent and ability to to manipulate events on the continent, African leaders at national and regional levels do strive to build pluralistic institutions, forge democratic processes, and take on the biggest challenge of all: bring together diverse, numerous and sometimes mutually hostile ethnic groups and build nations.

Discussions on key issues will deal with: the necessary ingredients which foster state and nation building; democracy, accountability and violence; how and why does political legitimacy relate to ethnicity? to what extent does democracy foster development? why does the abundance of natural resources in some areas seem to impede the provision of basic public goods and services?

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Since 2008, the European Union has suffered a series of crises, including the financial crisis and its specific EU dimension of the Eurozone crisis, the so-called migration crisis and the Brexit crisis. This course seeks to examine these crises and to explore their political consequences. The course begins with a discussion of relevant theoretical perspectives on the contemporary politics of the EU. It then analyses the policies and politics of the financial, migration and Brexit crises, paying particular attention to alternative and critical interpretations of these events. The course then examines the impact of these crises on different European political party families. It explores the accelerated decline of social democracy; the problems of the centre right; the emergence of new radical left parties in some countries (such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain); and the growth of the populist right (such as UKIP, AfD and Lega).

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This course is about the politics of health care and public health in the European Union (EU). Its sessions will touch upon the funding and organisation of health systems and policies in Member States, and focus on how the European Union intervenes in areas such as health services, public health or pharmaceutical regulation.

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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.

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The learning goals and objectives of this course are the following: first, understand what made international relations a full-fledged academic discipline, a branch of knowledge developed in the aftermath of World War I. Establishing itself as a discipline for the study of the relations between states, Second objective is being able to identify and discuss current global challenges.
This course includes three parts: the first presents the main empirical and historical facts from which International Relations originates, particularly with the birth of the nation-state.
The second part focuses on the main IR theories which attempt to explain international events. These are : Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, Critical theories.
The third part deals with current global trends and challenges, why and how they may be related to one another: Global power shifts, Climate change, Wealth and Poverty, Global governance, economic and political Regionalism.

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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

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

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This course is intended to teach you basic r​esearch design​ and
show you some of the ​research methods​ available to social scientists.

You will have to use such skills to write up your undergraduate dissertation in the last
semester of your studies. Later, you will also need those skills for your Masters dissertation.

Because writing skills are highly transferable, they will also be useful in your professional life to write policy papers and country reports.

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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

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These last decades have seen a significant rise in the role of indigenous identities in sociopolitical struggles throughout Latin America. Besides being a powerful driving force for collective action, politicization of ethnic specificities has triggered change in several areas of Latin American societies. This class will examine the ongoing expansion of this phenomenon in its political and cultural dimensions from a multidisciplinary perspective. This approach, bringing together the latest research from historians, anthropologists and political scientists from both sides of the Atlantic, offers a comprehensive understanding of both the continuities and transformations of power relationships based on ethnic criteria in the region. 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, as well as on the challenges behind the concept of plurinationality as a model for social and political harmony in contemporary Latin America societies. We will also focus on the intersections between ethnicity and feminism, indigenous experiences of local political autonomy and the future of indigenous people in 21th century Latin America.

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Regional integration in Africa started with a political dream and took shape through projects aimed at ensuring shared prosperity. The dream, that of pan-africanism, was the topic of a groundbreaking international gathering, the first Pan-African Conference in 1900. One of the key participants to that conference, W.E.B. Du Bois, lived to see the dream of African unity evolve into a fully-fledged institution, the Organization of African Unity in 1963.
Regional integration is both political, a tool to institutionalize continental unity, and economic, where countries seek to maximize their interests through increased trade.
Key questions we will ask throughout this course include: Why and under what conditions do states decide to transfer political authority to regional organizations? To what extent are African citizens able to take part in regional integration projects? To what extent have regional integration projects managed to increase self-reliance or reduced poverty on the continent?

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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.

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The United Nations (UN) aims at fostering a synergy between peace, democracy and development on the five continents. The challenges are, obviously, enormous. In the past 30 years, civil conflicts and wars have had an increasingly devastating impact on community life and development throughout the world. Not only do these conflicts tend to last longer, they also have become more complex, involving both states and non-state actors. Consequently, peacekeeping and reconstruction operations have become central to the UN agenda and regional stability.
How does the UN, the only truly global organization, deal with armed conflicts which today occur more frequently within states than between member countries? As we study the challenges of building and keeping the peace in a turbulent, changing global order, we will try to understand how and why the UN has turned progressively towards prevention and post-conflict reconstruction, re-establishing the rule of law and strengthening state capacity.

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.