Political Science

This course examines the political economy of global monetary and financial relations. It is structured around such questions as: What is the global financial system and what purposes does it serve? What are the choices of monetary and financial policies open to national governments, and what determines governments’ different policy choices? How do governments and markets interact in the arena of global finance? How do private actors influence the governance of international finance? When and why are efforts to regulate global markets successful, and what are the distributional consequences of such efforts? What are the political causes and effects of global financial crises? In seeking answers to these questions, this course focuses on empirical and theoretical political economy models of money and finance. 

This course studies the relationship between states and social movements in Latin America. First, it provides an overview of Latin America at the beginning of the 21st century, with some of the strong political changes that mark the first decades of the century. It then talks more specifically about the political intermediaries that were multiplied or imposed within the framework of these changes, before studying further precisely some of the most important mobilizations of the period contemporary such as feminist mobilizations, indigenous peoples, or against megaprojects. Thus, it considers the different forms and repertoires that these movements use to oppose the public policies of their governments. The multiplicity of these forms provide an overview of the actions of protest in the American subcontinent to the most contemporary period.

Beyond the idea that revolutions are the driving forces of social and political transformation, this course examines revolutions in their historical time as well as across history from the perspective of political anthropology. It uses the concepts of liminality, social dramas, crowd behavior, imitation, tricksters, and meaning formation. These concepts disentangle the study of revolutions from structures and the search for causes and outcomes, as well as from ideology, culture, and agency, opening them to a comparative analysis at the level of process, form, and symbolism. After a theoretical introduction, the course turns its focus on historical experiences of the major socio-political revolutions of the modern era: the "big three" revolutions (French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions); the "third world" (Mexico, Cuba) to eastern Europe in 1989; from Iran (1978-1979) to the Arab Spring (2011). The course concludes by looking back at the main themes covered by the class and examining the prospect for revolutionary change in the contemporary world, thus considering whether the concept of revolution should be consigned, or not, to the "dustbin of history." Students are encouraged to develop comparisons across time and space.

This course offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the politics, economics, and foreign policy that constitute international politics of the Korean Peninsula. It explores how Korea dealt with its first encounters with imperialism and tackled the complex task of modernization, to understand how these prewar historical legacies continue to affect the domestic politics, society and international relations of South Korea today. 

Topics include ethnic nationalism in Korea, imperial Japan, territorial disputes in Asia, the Comfort Women issue, South Korea’s industrialization, the LGBTQ movement in Korea, feminist and anti-feminist movement in Korea, North Korea and its nuclear weapons, to name a few. 

Prerequisites: A course in political science or in Asian Studies 

This course is concerned with how people, governments, organizations, and businesses understand environmental problems, negotiate interests, create policies, and implement solutions. It blends environmental studies, political science, political theory, law, social psychology, and economics. Its central aim is to analyze the structures and mechanics of power, knowledge, solidarity, cooperation, disagreement, and conflict as they are operate in different societies and at different scales of social organization. 

Its focus is on Italian environmental politics, which provides a complex case study given the many urgent issues Italy has to confront (including accelerating climate change, energy dependence, new challenges to food and urban systems, pollution, and rapid ecosystemic transformation and landscape degradation), its peculiarities (including its morphology, its centrality in the Mediterranean region, the constant entanglements between natural and cultural heritage on its territory, and the long shadow of criminal activities profiting at the expense of localities), its pugnacious, multilayered politics and highly bureaucratized policy-making, high levels of internal socio-economic and cultural diversity, and its evolving international relations.   

The course asks questions like: who and what causes environmental problems, and how? Who is affected? Who decides what should be done, in whose name, and with what authority? What power do different actors have? What values guide environmental policy? How do national and local environmental policy-makers interact with regional and international institutions?

This course introduces the influence of digital technologies on society, with a particular focus on the interplay between technology, disinformation, and society during political campaigns. As digital technologies continue to shape the political landscape, the spread of disinformation poses significant challenges to democracies worldwide. The course explores the mechanisms and impacts of false information dissemination on social media platforms, examining the sophisticated techniques employed to create and spread disinformation. A key focus is on disinformation related to elections, analyzing recent political campaigns to understand the strategies behind these efforts. The course also investigates the dual role of artificial intelligence in both generating and combating multimodal disinformation, including text, image, video, and audio. It discusses the ethical, fairness, and transparency concerns that arise from the use of Al in this context and explores strategies for identifying and neutralizing false information at scale. By engaging with these topics, students gain a comprehensive understanding of the societal, political, and economic implications of disinformation in the digital age, equipping them with the critical skills necessary to navigate an increasingly complex digital era.

How has race become a method for categorizing and ordering humanity? How has the politics of anti-racism sought to dismantle both racial orders and the categories they rely on? In this course, students grapple with these questions by exploring the diverse intellectual voices have sought to understand and theorize racism and anti-racism. These thinkers include those who were engaged in struggles against imperialism and colonialism, in addition to contemporary forms of racial domination.

This course examines comparative politics through the prism of cities, analyzing how urban spaces both drive and reflect political and socio-economic transformations. Drawing on historical sociology, it reinterprets foundational political processes—such as the monopolization of violence and the construction of national authority—through the perspective of urbanization and state-city relations. The course explores diverse urban political traditions in Europe and around the world, comparing how historical and contemporary urban dynamics reshape political societies. Key topics include denationalization and decentralization, the rise of informality, extended urbanization, shifts in welfare provision and solidarity, the transformation of trust networks, and the political implications of environmental change. Throughout the semester, students read and are (re)introduced to the works of some of the main social scientists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Fernand Braudel, Saskia Sassen, Diane Davis, Charles Tilly, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Michel Foucault.

This course explores the governance and political development of the European Union (EU).  It emphasizes the EU’s unique and complex system of governance and its efforts toward policy innovation with focus on its historical development, driving factors, and crisis responses.

This course analyzes the theoretical perspectives of international politics as well as the challenges of the contemporary global agenda, considering the interests of nation-states It. contrasts the causes, development, and consequences of international conflicts, considering the interaction between the actors involved.