<i>Espace mondial</i>, what does it mean? This is, as you know a French word. It's also a course which has been offered to the students of the French institute of Sciences Po. The famous and well known French Institute where we are training so many French politician. <i>Espace mondial</i> I keep the French word because I would like to designate something a little bit different from what is currently offered in the American or British or many European universities. Of course this course is very closed to global studies, that’s to say a global vision of our world which tries to go further, to go beyond the classic vision of inter-state relations. But <i>Espace mondial</i> has also a French touch. That to say the French vision witch is coming the French culture and the French history on what the world is now. This is implying new perspectives and also new context. New perspectives. New perspectives that to say Global studies and here <i>Espace mondial</i> will prompt us to reconsider action, to reconsider identity, to reconsider space and territory, to reconsider also the main dimensions of our world. To reconsider action first of all. It is not possible now in our present world to conceive an action, even a local action, without situating it in a global context. That to say the decision making process, even at individual level is quite different from the traditional perspective we had about it. But it implies also that the world order is mainly made of billions of individual actions, of so many interactions between individual actors or groups, that to say in our world we have presently seven billions actors. That to say we can’t consider the world from the initiatives taken by the only states, that implies also that we have to move to the non state actors: NGOs, multinational corporation, media and so many aggregated transnational actors, migrants or investors and so on. So action doesn't mean what it did mean previously. But new perspective is also a new vision of identity: we are now in a world of plural, volatile identities. We are in a world in which the national commitment is no more the main parameter of the international decision and the international behaviour of people. We are in a world in which alterity has a very complex meaning, that to say we have now to define the others, and the others are not only friends or enemies, are no more the citizens of the same country and the citizens of other countries. We have so many transnational flows that identities are crossing, identities are more and more complexes and made of different kinds of allegiances and commitments. New perspectives: it means also a new vision of space and territory. Previously it was very easy to consider the world as made of the coexistence of nation states. We are now in a world which is more complex. First of all because borderlines are not so efficient as their were before, and so there are many transnational relations which are ignoring borderlines, that’s why the territorial sovereignty that existed previously doesn’t exist as it was before. And also we are observing so many regional integration processes in Europe, Latin America, Africa and so on. And so what the famous japan's scholar Kenichi Omahe called “region states” is one of the parameter of the very complex territorial order of our world. That’s to say now we have transnational integration, regional integration but also local spaces witch are getting more and more important and more and more relevant. We are in a glocal world. That why space is something difficult that I try to express through this word of <i>Espace mondial</i>. And also we have among this new perspective to consider the multiple dimensions of our world. Do you know that every 3 hours 2 800 people die of starvation in the world, that is to say the equivalent of 8 World Trade Centre attacks every day? This is a fundamental parameter of our new world, this is the new dimension. Consider for instance that the football club Manchester United has a budget of 1 billion 400 millions euros when the FAO which is specialized as you know for covering starvation in the world as a budget which is limited to 600 millions. Consider that the American attack on Iraq coasted 1 000 billions dollars when the budget of the DPKO, that to say the Department of the United Nation which is specialized in peace keeping has a yearly budget of only 7 billions dollars. That's to say that the dimensions of our world and of the international action are very diversified and that we have to consider all these discrepancies as one of the main parameters of our <i>Espace mondial</i>. New perspectives but also new intellectual context. I am a political scientist but however I know now that for observing the world and the <i>Espace mondial</i> I have to mobilize the knowledge which has been shaped by so many social sciences, it is impossible to have a correct vision of our world without taking into account economics, history, sociology, law, geography, anthropology and so on. Of course I am not a specialist of all this disciplines but my attempt is to consider the results of my colleagues in different fields and to make a synthesis that I will offer you during all this lectures. We have now to stand in a transdisciplinary behavior, vision for taking into account our present <i>Espace mondial</i>. The other new context is universalism. All of us and especially among western people we are convinced that we are bringing universality. Of course many human values are universal, but no one in the world invented universality, universality is also made of plurality, and we have to consider this plural vision of the world for explaining war, power, peace and so on. This implies to go back to comparison, this lecture will stress on comparison as the main way for understanding our world, for explaining the social and political processes and also to offer very modestly some solutions. And the third new context is that we are in a world of mobility. The global world implies a mobile world, that to say trough migrations but also through circulation of information, of ideas and overall by multiple interaction, interplaying between actors. This mobility is at the core of this new vision of the world. It is the French touch, of course this French touch as we will see together is not so different to the others, but the specificity of this MOOC is to offer you a vision which has been shape through the long political and intellectual history of France. But Ladies and Gentlemen I am not a native of an English speaking country, I am a French man and so I will use the English language for trying to get in touch with you, please forgive me for may bad English, but the main perspective is to get in touch with you, and that is the real project of our MOOC.<font face="Calibri" size="24"></font>
