Political Science

This course introduces its participants to mass media systems and structures in Germany and Europe and provides them with the analytical tools and background knowledge to assess the ways in which the mass media and politics interact and thus shape each other. The course begins with an overview of the different structures of mass media (public/private) in Germany and selected European countries, including how they have historically developed and particularly which political ideas have shaped the frameworks in which media institutions and individuals operate. At the same time, the course takes a critical look at how the media in turn have shaped and are still shaping the ways in which the political process works and presents itself to the public. Historical and current case-studies are utilized to analyze the manifold points of interaction between media and politics. At the end of the course, students also have the opportunity to compare European and American media politics and to ask whether there may be trends and influences across the Atlantic that are shaping today's politics and mass media on both sides.

This course examines interactions between contemporary China and world politics. It systematically analyzes and applies theoretical frameworks of international relations, comparative politics, and interactions between domestic and international politics. The course explores major issues and debates in the study of so-called “global China” phenomenon and its major characteristics. It also empirically surveys the relations between global China and every other region (Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Oceania).

This course examines the evolution of the historiography of the Cold War, with its recent transformations, to then analyze the nature of today's international relations marked by the “return of competition between the super powers,” an expression created by the Pentagon in 2016. The Chinese and Russian analyses of the evolution of the world that we have long called "Post-Cold War" is also studied.

This course offers an exploration of the origins, functions, and effects of political institutions in historical perspective, paying particular attention to their dynamics (that is, how different institutions appeared and how they changed over time). The course utilizes critical reading and discussion of research papers that apply theoretical insights and empirical tools to engage in major debates about the nature and consequences of political institutions. The course integrates material from a variety of disciplines including political science, international relations, political philosophy, economics, and history. The course examines what types of political institutions form, why they form, what they do, and how they evolve. Students discuss a series of debates related to the rise and consolidation of states in historical perspective, and review current (and some classic) works on the subject. These debates include why nation-states came to dominate over other state forms (such as empires or city-states), which role elites played in state formation, in which ways the functions of the state began to take shape, or how state capacity was built and sustained in different places and times. 

This course returns to the formative texts of Michel Foucault on the topic of biopolitics, a concept that provides key insights into our contemporary political moment. It examines the major debates that have followed in political theory in the study of bio-power and biopolitics as terms integral to the fields of public health and virology (contagion, transmission, immunity, incubation, resilience, quarantine) now stand at the center of political discourse, framing conversations around policing, political economy, sovereignty, and democratic society. The course examines conceptual and historical questions of how life came to be understood as the object of government and how this has intensified the operations of power in the modern era. It also expands understanding of the concept by engaging with the array of topics in which biopolitics has made transformative interventions, from understanding the politics of DNA sequencing and stem cell research to analyzing the transformations of labor and global warfare. It considers how Foucault’s formulation has had wide-ranging effects on political theory, changing the way we understand the body, racism, colonialism, neoliberalism, war and violence, and the category of the human.