The nation is at once an emancipatory and an exclusionist concept. This is the theme developed by Alain Dieckhoff, CNRS research fellow and director of Sciences Po CERI, in his latest book, Nationalism and the Multination State*. Grounding his analysis in the history of the nation-state, Dieckhoff helps us understand the shifting manifestations of the concept and the tensions generated by nationalism. Interview with the author.

Etienne Wasmer, permanent faculty member of the Sciences Po's Department of economics and co-director of LIEPP, has co-authored with Olivier Gergaud (KEDGE Business School and LIEPP) and Morgane Laquenan  (LIEPP) the first paper to analyze a very, very, very big database aptly called « A Brief History of Time ».

The paper describes a database of 1,243,776 notable people and 7,184,575 locations associated with them throughout human history (3000 BCE-2015 AD) and then sets out to analyze it.

In a recent article published in the Capital Markets Law Journal, Jérôme Sgard, researcher at CERI, analyses how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) acted as a third-party in a total of 109 debt restructurings between 41 debtor states and their creditor banks, how this regime emerged through trial and error during the 1970s; and how it was implemented and accounted for and justified after the 1982 Mexican crisis.

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Emmanuelle Loyer, historian at Sciences Po, was awarded the 2015 Prix Femina Essai last autumn for her biography of Lévi-Strauss. Drawing on previously unused archives, Loyer’s book explores the career of a peerless figure whose thought was shaped by a keen sense of the senses. Interview.

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s multi-faceted identity is one of the most striking features to appear in your biography. He seems anxious to belong to several eras and several cultures at once.

 What if we could improve diagnosis and treatment of a disease by revisiting how our understanding of it—or lack of—evolved over time? This strategy is at the heart of the SILICOSIS project, which by combining medicine and history has already improved the monitoring of patients exposed to specific types of dust particles.