Political Science

The course focuses on the nature and purpose of international organizations as supra-national entities created by sovereign states for the management of their relations. It exposes students to the nature of the international organizations, types, features, organs, and their roles and importance and deals with the challenges that confront international organizations which inhibit their ability to achieve their aims. Students understand the nature and types of international organizations as well as their relevance to the management of the international system. Students identify and classify the international organizations according to their geographical spread and functional importance. The primary goal is to encourage students of International Politics to be able to understand why States decide to form organizations to assist them to manage relationships between and among them. Students interrogate the relevance of these organizations that serve as a vehicle of sustenance of global peace as well as obstacles that impede their functioning. They must be able to identify and explain the various types of international organizations and why they exist.

This course explores the foundations and components of social policy as an academic discipline and the historical relationship with social work. It examines the idea of social policy as a process, product, and intervention. This course discusses the historical process of social reform and the origins, development, and crisis of the welfare state.

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. This course explores the connection between globalization, the evolution of criminology, and crime, and how this connection changes in space and time. Globalization affects crime phenomena in a variety of ways: creating new conditions and opportunities for new types of crime or reshaping more traditional criminal behaviors and increasing insecurity and fear of crime. Moreover, globalization requires new categories to explain and understand crime and therefore affects and reshapes many traditional criminological theories. Finally, globalization has an impact also on strategies of crime control and surveillance.

This course presents an overview of the major Sunni and Shiite Islamist organizations that have developed and spread throughout the twentieth century. Through the cases of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Jama‘at ul-Tabligh in India, the Hizb al-Tahrir in Palestine, the Islamic Da‘wa Party in Iraq, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and even the afghan origins of al-Qaeda, the course explores the origins, ideology, social bases, and actions of these organizations, as well as their various forms of transnationalization in the Muslim world. The circulation of actors and ideas are particularly developed in order to highlight the anchoring of Islamism in an increasingly globalized space.

The course offers a global perspective on US foreign policy from the early period to the present. The class focuses on major episodes of US foreign policy-making rather than individual US administrations. Topics include general knowledge about the history of US foreign policy; detailed knowledge of at least one major episode (case study) or historical period of US foreign policy-making; the ability to apply theoretical perspectives in the analysis of US foreign policy.