The eight priorities - 2009/2013
Data,
Infrastructure, Methods
This is primarily a necessary and rather belated
way to catch up with the level of technical expertise
in the whole range of social and political sciences that
is now taken for granted at the international level. But
it is also a research priority in which Sciences Po has
already gained a critical mass of expertise, and can expect
to make its mark by developing its original competence in
electoral science, new survey capacities,
new qualitative skills, and new ways to handle
digital data for the social sciences (by the creation
of the Sciences Po Medialab).
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The
Social and Political Embeddedness of the Economy
All social science disciplines have therefore developed interdisciplinary
fields to study how politics shape and contain the
evolution of markets, how the economy changes
social interactions and transforms political
settings, how markets are embedded in societal
norms and transformed through institutional adaptation
or how socio-economic systems and their political structures
vary across countries and evolve over time.
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The
Changing Scale of Politics
Although everyone agrees that globalization
is a major phenomenon to be handled by all the social and
political sciences, there the agreement ends; the very definition
of globalization, the multiplicity of scales
at which it should be considered, its long term history
and evolution, the impact it has on a wide
range of political and economic issues is the object
of vast debate.
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The
Transformation of the State
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.
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Inequalities
and Democracy
Equality is at the heart of the democratic ideal.
Yet, in most democracies today social inequalities are either
persisting, as in France, or are on
the rise, as in the United States. And even when
inequalities are not increasing, the feeling that they are
too important is a predominant concern of Western populations.
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Politics
of the Earth
The politics of the environment, technologies, infrastructures
or health bring into ever closer dialogue the natural
and the social sciences. This
research priority aims at developing the basic and applied
tools that are necessary to rethink the place of nature in
politics and see how the political sciences can be revamped
in order to handle a trajectory change in public policy
and civilization unprecedented in its scale and its
attention to details
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|
Cities
and Politics
Sciences
Po now has a long tradition and a critical mass of researchers
in the multidimensional aspects of cities:
law, economics, sociology, geography and urbanism. This unique
set of skills should be brought to bear in an original way,
portraying cities as the most obvious, most material and yet
most often downplayed means of handling all the classical
questions of the social sciences. Indeed, studying cities
is one of the most promising ways to study the dynamics
of globalization and its materialization in urban processes.
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New
Forms of War and Peace
The ever-present threat of conflict
and war is reflected in the importance of “peace
strategies”. The term commonly covers notions
ranging from conflict prevention and resolution
to peace missions and intervention, but also encompasses post-conflict
situations, State-building, reconciliation and justice. Peace
strategies are based on the premise that these wars risk becoming
contagious and can disrupt the regional order or the international
balance.
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Last updated:
10/07/09 |
