International Studies

This is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course offers a critical understanding of global health policy as a historical, political, and moral assemblage that deals with the consequences of global inequalities. The course addresses the issue of illness and suffering as the personal embodiment of broader social processes within local moral worlds embedded in historically deep and geographically broad social dynamics. The course focuses on the following issues: The cultural construction of the experience of illness, the social production of medical categories and the illness experience, the concept of embodiment and its theoretical outcomes, the concept of social suffering, and the anthropological contribution to the concept of global health.

This course explores the basic conceptual tools and competing theoretical arguments within the academic field of International Relations, which try to explain the nature, scope, and degree of success of various regional cooperation schemes. The course is divided into three sections: The first section outlines the key concepts and theoretical arguments. The second section explores, using these concepts, the nature and fortunes of regional cooperation in Europe, Asia, Latin American, and Africa. The third section focuses specifically on the challenges and various examples of regional cooperation in the Middle East.

This course introduces the key issues underlying the interaction of states and transnational actors in the international system, particularly the problems of international peace and cooperation, regionalism, democratization, nationalism and cultural conflict.  Unlike conventional foundation courses in International Relations (IR), this course approaches the field from a student-centered approach. The course begins with an introduction to the main theories of International Relations, then an introduction to critical perspectives in IR. After students' understanding of the theories covered are examined through the midterm, the course discusses a series of empirical case studies and global issues. The goal is to integrate theory and practice, by presenting theoretical ideas and concepts in conjunction with a global range of historical and contemporary case studies.

The course explores development and social change in and from the Global South. The course adopts a critical political economy perspective to trace the recent history, politics, and power relations which, following the 1980s debt crisis, saw the Global South integrated into neoliberal globalization. The course starts by locating the globalization project in the Global South and provides two further weeks of critical theory introducing students to the economic and political processes that makes development in the Global South a profoundly unequal, gendered, and racialized project. 

This course provides a study of the principle theories of human rights and the role of human rights in democratic societies. It looks at the challenges of guaranteeing human rights in different cultural contexts, the function of human rights in the constitutional order, and issues regarding justice of law, the legitimacy of power, and rights-based theories.

This course provides an overview of theories on international politics and security as well as specific security issues between China, South Korea, North Korea and the US.