Graduation ceremony for the School of Research, Class of 2026

On Friday 26 June, the Cinéma Le Grand Rex hosted the School of Research’s graduation ceremony, a highlight of our academic year, celebrating the culmination of our students’ journeys.

On this occasion, we were delighted to congratulate our 154 Master’s graduates as well as our 53 new PhD graduates, who received their Master’s and PhD degrees in the presence of their loved ones, their tutors and members of our academic community.

The ceremony provided an opportunity to recognise their hard work, perseverance and dedication throughout their research journeys. We offer them our most sincere congratulations and wish them every success in the academic, professional and personal endeavours that lie ahead.

We would also like to extend our warmest thanks to our Honorary Graduate, Uliana Pavlyuchkova, valedictorian of the 2026 Master’s in History cohort, and to our Honorary PhD Graduate, Pierre Leonard Le Roux, PhD in Economics, for the quality and inspiration of their speeches. Their speeches poignantly and intelligently reflected the values of curiosity, rigour and openness that drive our School of Research.

Once again, our warmest congratulations to the entire Class of 2026!

Graduation Speech School of Research, Sciences Po Class of 2026

Dear graduates, dear families, dear colleagues and guests,

I offer you my warmest and most heartfelt congratulations. To you, and to everyone who helped you arrive at this moment, families, friends, mentors, colleagues, some of whom are here today, many more who are not. You all deserve to be immensely proud.

To the graduates of the School of Research, whether you are graduating with a master's or a doctorate degree; today you have completed an important rite of passage in the academic world. 

This passage was surely not easy. I am sure it was filled with moments of doubt, of pages that remained unwritten, of arguments that collapsed and had to be rebuilt, of findings that unsettled you, and nights when the questions felt too large and the answers too far.

But above all it was, certainly, filled with choices about what to research, what to write about, where to dig deeper in the archives, and what to spend endless hours thinking about, measuring and theorizing.

The novelist Naguib Mahfouz in his Cairo trilogy noted: "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."

After all, there are no wrong questions, there are only insufficient answers. And as a researcher, some questions are more difficult to ask, delving into complicated themes it is normal to wonder, is it worth the risk? Is it worth the cost? 

The most challenging questions come at a high cost. This cost falls unevenly. It falls harder on those who are already marginal, already under scrutiny, already presumed to be too political by virtue of what they study or where they come from. Pressure on academic freedom has always been a challenge. 

In last year’s graduation speech, I spoke about the importance of speaking truth to power, drawing on Edward Said, Palestinian professor at Columbia University, who insisted that the intellectual should not be corrupted by fear of power, or the desire to remain within the comfortable mainstream. 

Today, I want to speak of a similar issue, reflecting on an African proverb, one that has travelled across the continent for generations and that Chinua Achebe has often evoked. 

The proverb says: "Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter."

Many stories are about the hunters, the forceful and the powerful hunters. These are indeed important stories not to be neglected. In the stories, the hunters triumph, because the hunter is the one writing it. 

Fewer stories are about the lions, those whose voices have been hardest to reach and whose absence makes it easy to forget they ever mattered. Let us not wake up one day and find the lions and the memory of them extinct.

Someone needs to choose to tell their stories, to decide that their reality matters before it is too late, before the unthinkable becomes undeniable, like the climate crisis, ignored until the evidence overwhelms us, and suddenly Africa is cooler than Paris. 

Some of you must have written about the hunters, and some about the lions.

I hope you all asked yourselves from whose perspective are you recounting. Whose narratives you are reproducing and whose you are ignoring. Always be aware of these choices and the biases and blind spots they carry. 

As graduates of the School of Research, you have spent years learning to ask questions: with rigor, with evidence, with intellectual courage. This is crucial for the times we live in.

You hold in your degrees, and in the years you spent working towards them, an important source of power – we all know too well that there are many forms of power, but I want to underline the power of knowledge. I hope you value the kind of power you hold and know to treat it responsibly. 

What you have been learning, here, in your research, dissertations, seminars, archives and fieldwork— is to explain and expose structures. The forces that shape what we take for granted, the background rules, the causal relations, the material conditions, the hierarchies of interest as well as the distribution of resources and power. 

The essence of research is rigorous inquiry, one that is aware of the blind spots, questioning what others take for granted, asking how come things are so, could they be any different, what would that change, who would benefit and who would lose. Some call this critical thinking; others consider it to be simply how research is done.  

This is not a marginal intellectual exercise. It lies at the heart of the social sciences. It proceeds from a refusal. A refusal to accept that the arrangements that we have inherited are natural, inevitable, or the only possible answer to the questions they claim to resolve. 

The social sciences, under threat in many places, are essential for working democracies.

Research contributes to knowledge and knowledge is power. It is important to know the biases our disciplines might carry (whether law, economics, political sciences, history or sociology) – so that we can pursue research that is aware of these limitations. 

For example, the law might present itself as neutral, treating people equally before its rules: and yet those rules were written by some and not others, and the equality they promise has never been equally distributed.

Economics might claim itself as science, objective, technical, beyond politics: and yet every model encodes assumptions about what counts as value, and whose welfare is being maximized.

Political science might present itself as realism, hard-headed, value-free, a map of power as it actually operates: and yet every map has a cartographer, and every cartographer has a point of view.

History might present itself as the authoritative record of what happened, inevitable in its arc, a clear-eyed account of things as they are: and yet the archive is nothing but fragments, it is never complete. 

Sociology might present itself as the systematic description of society, objective, empirical, value-free: and yet every choice of what to study, whose voices to record, and which structures to make visible is a deliberate choice.

Each of these disciplines endeavours to present a dominant narrative, foreclosing the question that things could be otherwise.

Rigorous research precisely refuses these foreclosures. It is critical of these biases and determined to not ignore it. It insists that alternatives are thinkable. Things donot always have to be this way. Alternatives can always be imagined. If you think of it, the untold stories of the lions can present us with an entirely different horizon of possibilities. 

Think of what it meant, historically, to bring gender into law; not as a variable but as a structural lens. 

To bring inequality into economics; not as historical context but as constitutive logic. 

To bring the Global South and colonialism into international relations; not as a problem to be managed but as a site of theory, of alternative frameworks, of knowledge that the dominant paradigm has systematically excluded.

Each of those moves, were at the time, unwelcome and frowned upon. Each was dismissed as too political, insufficiently rigorous, outside the scope of the discipline. Each faced the quiet resistance of editorial gatekeepers, hiring committees, funding structures that made some questions viable and others more difficult to pursue.

And yet each, over time, transformed the field.

Your research, whatever its discipline, whatever its geography, is a form of resistance to different forms of erasure. You have the power, through your knowledge, to overcome this erasure and transform the field further.

Hopefully, through you we will get to hear many stories not just of hunters but also about lions, zebras, giraffes and scarabs and the lands they roam. 

You leave today not only with degrees, but with a responsibility to keep researching and writing, regardless of the careers you choose, whether in academia or beyond. 

You graduate with colleagues across disciplines, across borders, across generations, who share the conviction that the social sciences exist to do something that matters, to make the world a more legible, a more accountable, and a more just place.

Cherish the people who helped you get here. Co-write, co-research, co-teach with those you’ve met along the way. Find in the company of others the courage you cannot always sustain alone.

I wish you the joy, and the power - of researching, of writing these stories; stories of both hunters and lions, so that neither the lions go extinct, nor do hunters go unchallenged. 

So that it becomes harder for the erasure to hold, harder for any single story to present itself as the only truth.

Congratulations.

Dina Waked, Dean of the School of Research