Political Science

The study of politics includes not only how the political world operates, but also how it ought to operate. This course focuses on some of the most important contemporary political thoughts that have been presented within the last few decades. Topics include democratic ideal, liberalism, conservatism, socialism and communism, fascism, politics of identity, green politics, and populism.

This course examines both philosophical topics in human rights and the history and politics of human rights in Argentina, specifically during the military dictatorship and the democratic transition. Philosophical topics include: analysis of human rights, genocide, and torture; competing philosophical justifications; feminist theory and women's human rights. Historical topics include: a survey of Argentine political history; Argentine state violence; other social actors in the violation of human rights; the lexicon and discourse of violence and how they shaped the body politic; transitional justice; the role and morphology of collective memory; gender in human rights violations.

The conflict environment in which peace mediators operate has changed considerably since the end of the Cold War. The discrete Cold War conflicts between a state and a major political rebel group, each backed by a Cold War power, have fragmented into localized, urbanized, and criminalized conflicts of the kind we see in Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, and South Sudan today. At the same time, peace mediation as a field has become increasingly professionalized and standardized through the international codification of peace mediation norms and techniques of peace process design. This course considers how the process design tools, concepts of conflict analysis, and norms underpinning "peace mediation" are evolving to negotiate peace in increasingly complex intra-state conflicts. The course begins by examining the traditional realist and liberal concepts of conflict analysis and techniques of peace process design developed to understand and manage conflict during the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War era. Using critiques from peace studies, comparative politics, global IR theory, sociology and post-colonial theory, the course highlights the weaknesses of these traditional IR approaches to peace mediation in the post 9/11 international security environment.

This course examines the triangle of politics, public policy, and implementation. It looks at the issues of making policy work in practice; the academic perspective on everyday government practice; the promises and pitfalls of policy implementation; professional relationships; autonomous agencies; public management; and policy implementation theory.

The course begins with a study of the rebuilding of Europe and the stark division of the continent following the Second World War. It compares how countries across Western Europe embraced varying combinations of liberalism and socialism while the 'Iron Curtain' sealed Eastern Europe within Communism until that system's stunningly peaceful collapse that climaxed in November 1989 with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. It also traces the evolution of the European Union, despite references to the 'United States of Europe', dating back to the earliest visions of European integration. The course analyzes how the European Union has been developing on a fundamentally different path from the United States of America and any other political system.