The Transformation of the State and Modes of Governance

There has been a long legacy in Sciences Po of studying the State. This traditional concern of the political sciences has become an ever increasing domain by the very transformation of the ways States everywhere recast their role, interventions, cooperation and their limits.

This is true not only for the French State, in full crisis, but also more generally in advanced industrial democracies and in many other areas of the world. A major effort of political theory, comparative political sociology, comparative public policy and law is necessary to understand the ways in which the French, European and many nation-States reinvent themselves.

Furthermore, seizing the contingency of particular forms of authority sheds light on the way in which political control is exercised elsewhere. A study of the transformation of the State – as a historical concept and a political practice – thus necessarily benefits from and informs the analysis of governance across time and space.

Projects submitted in this area might focus on the intersection of different levels of political jurisdictions; the nature of the State apparatus in a comparative perspective; the emergence and functioning of new forms of public intervention; the extension of public intervention both at the supranational level and in areas that were previously considered private or “apolitical”; also, the challenges of legitimacy and democratic authority in a world where the boundaries of political control are in flux.

See the blog of the project Réseau Etat Recomposé (in French)