Léonard COLOMBA-PETTENG, Master's & PhD in Political Science

I was admitted to the first year of Sciences Po in 2013. I studied at this institution for ten years before defending a doctoral thesis in political science. I started by studying in the Europe-Africa programme at the Undergraduate College, which was still based on the Paris campus. Between 2015 and 2016, I studied at the University College of London. I discovered a different academic culture and pedagogy, a little more horizontal and more focused on personal readings. Back in Paris, I enrolled in the Master's in International Relations at the Sciences Po School of Research. There I met, among others, Bertrand Badie, who kindly agreed to supervise my dissertation. Having reached the end of his career and unable to supervise a new thesis, he advised me to talk to Christian Lequesne about my doctoral project. So I asked him if he might be interested in my thesis project one afternoon in January 2018, and on the same day he invited me to come and discuss it with him. I quickly discovered that Christian Lequesne is a particularly responsive thesis supervisor - an extremely important thing - and that he always knows how to be very encouraging!

My interest in political science is quite distant. I had chosen the ‘Political Science’ option at high school and I had invested a lot in this subject for which I had obtained the maximum mark in the baccalaureate! The year I was accepted onto the Europe-Africa programme was marked by a resurgence of French military interventionism. I had been closely following the news around the launch of operations ‘Serval’ in Mali, ‘Sangaris’ in the Central African Republic, and then ‘Barkhane’ in the Sahel. I enrolled at the École de la recherche in 2016 with the idea of writing a dissertation on Franco-African military cooperation. Using the conceptual and methodological tools of political science, I wanted to reflect on the renewal of bilateral defence agreements during Nicolas Sarkozy's five-year term. One of the results of my dissertation highlighted the growing importance of the European Union in these matters. The thesis on which I subsequently worked at the Center for International Studies (CERI) extended the reflection by studying the local implementation of a European crisis management instrument in the Sahel. I travelled to Niamey, Agadez, Bamako and Brussels to interview and observe the practices of European diplomats, soldiers, police officers and gendarmes. My years at the School of Research gave me the tools to carry out this research and understand the different stages: problematisation, review of the scientific literature, theoretical framing, data collection, interpretation of the empirical material, structuring of the demonstration, writing. I was also able to see how my field of study is structured, which is important for understanding how I could situate my contribution to the scientific literature.

First of all, I remember the excellent working conditions. It is important to be aware of this privilege, in my opinion, because unfortunately we are not all treated the same throughout France. This includes things that seem trivial but that enable us to progress very efficiently, such as access to an almost unlimited printing service. We also have funding that allows us to travel abroad for conferences or field surveys. We also have a gargantuan scientific catalogue and can easily find help from highly qualified librarians. I am thinking in particular of Michaël Goudoux, who helped me a lot. In addition, the Sciences Po School of Research has established partnerships with excellent universities. It is thanks to one of these partnerships that I was able to spend six months doing research at the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Oxford. I have fond memories of the great intellectual emulation within my class. Several of us were admitted to doctoral programmes, and I am delighted that we all made it safely to the end of our theses!

It's a difficult question to answer because I really enjoyed many of the courses I had the opportunity to take at the School of Research. I remain very impressed by the erudition of Pierre Grosser. He is someone capable of telling you about almost any historical event in the 20th century in the world with such a degree of precision that you end up wondering if he didn't experience them first hand. I was also impressed by the teachings of Guillaume Devin on international cooperation and that of Bertrand Badie on multilateralism. I really liked the way they managed, in different styles, to progressively unravel the thread of their reflections from session to session. I could also mention a lecture by Frédéric Ramel on the contemporary transformations of war: I discovered an iconoclastic way of thinking and teaching. We were assessed by means of a twenty-minute oral exam in which we had to put ourselves in the shoes of an author and answer a specific current affairs question. We only had a few minutes to prepare for this exercise. The subject I drew at random led me to embody Jean-Jacques Rousseau and I was asked to explain ‘my’ conception of the role of the French Parliament in the deployment of armed forces abroad since the constitutional reform of 2008... The exercise was perilous but stimulating to the point that I still remember it perfectly!

I chose to pursue a PhD because I wanted to try working in higher education and research. The idea of becoming a teacher-researcher came to me during my first years at Sciences Po. My favourite courses were those that were developed around major research questions. I am thinking, for example, of the political sociology of contemporary Africa course that Richard Banégas gave as part of the Europe-Africa programme. I was also very much influenced by the people I met: the parents of some of my classmates were in research and I think I was very impressed by their personal journeys. I already had the feeling that I could enjoy preparing lessons and passing on knowledge. I also liked the idea of being able to study complex, sensitive or even controversial issues independently, taking the necessary time and distance. Doing research in the social sciences is a certain way of questioning the problems that affect society as a whole and a certain way of studying them with as much rigour, honesty and reflexivity as possible. Let us remember that teacher-researchers are among the few members of the civil service who enjoy full independence and complete freedom of expression in the performance of their duties. It is even a constitutional principle!

The thesis prize of the French Political Science Association (AFSP) has existed since 2007 thanks to a partnership with the Mattei Dogan Foundation. It is awarded every two years to four doctors who have defended their theses in the past two years. I had the pleasure of receiving this prize at the last AFSP Congress in Grenoble, alongside three brilliant colleagues. To apply for this prize, we were asked to send an application file including a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, the official summary of the thesis, the report of the thesis jury and the full version of the thesis. I think that the letter of application is the main lever for trying to convince the jury, given that the other parameters cannot really be modified at this stage. In this letter, I explained the reasons that led me to want to get involved in higher education and research. I also briefly returned to the objectives of my thesis and my methodology, trying to highlight the originality of my approach. Finally, I mentioned what the thesis had brought me on a more personal level. This research allowed me to discover professional worlds and unexpected places through field surveys in Niger and Mali and research stays at the Université libre de Bruxelles and the University of Oxford. I also had the opportunity to attend various scientific events in Scotland, Spain, the United States, Ghana and Switzerland. In all these places, I was able to meet people who helped me progress. I wanted to mention this in the letter of application for the AFSP thesis prize.

Today I am a lecturer at the Institute of Political Studies in Strasbourg. I teach general international relations courses, particularly at undergraduate level. I also teach more specific courses on peace building and interest groups and lobbying on various masters programmes. For the scientific part, I am attached to the SAGE mixed research unit (Sociétés, acteurs, gouvernement en Europe) where I try to find the time to continue working on topics related to diplomacy, international security and multilateral cooperation between Europe and Africa.

I would advise this student to spend a lot of time thinking about how to fit the doctoral programme into a career plan. Access to permanent positions as teacher-researchers is increasingly limited due to a lack of resources. The path to achieving this is fraught with uncertainty and insecurity for most people. I see no reason to think that the situation will improve in the coming years in view of the budget cuts planned in higher education and research. This does not mean that you should give up before trying, but it is such an important and concrete dimension that it should be kept in mind when embarking on a doctoral project. There are several tools that can be used to find out more about these issues. A considerable amount of work is carried out by the volunteers at the office of the Association nationale des candidat(e)s aux métiers de la science politique (ANCMSP), who devote a lot of time and energy to fighting job insecurity in this field. Their mailing list is particularly effective and recognised for its usefulness. Finally, I would recommend listening to the podcast ‘Dazibao’ produced and directed by Marjolaine Guillemet. Each episode is an opportunity to discover the journey of a young researcher (in a master's degree, thesis or postdoctoral programme). Beyond the diversity of research topics, this podcast provides an understanding of the different possibilities for thesis funding and the concrete difficulties we have to deal with.