Political Science

This course sheds light on the history of Liberalism through a comparison between Britain and France. It builds a step-by-step history of liberal movements, liberal ideas, and their contradictions, both through British political history and French history, to provide a better understanding of both historical debates and today's issues regarding the notion of Liberalism in context. The course questions the view of Britain as a country of successful liberalism and France as one of failed or incomplete liberalism. It addresses Liberalism and anti-liberalism at the crossroads of political history, intellectual history, and political philosophy.

The course provides a study of major school of thought, debates, and theoretical approaches in the discipline of international relations (IR). It discusses the main arguments and interventions of IR theories, the differences and similarities between them, and their accounts of such important concepts as state, anarchy, war, change, cooperation, capitalism, norms, identity, culture, order and justice and so on. It also puts IR theories into the intellectual context or the development of so-called ‘great debates’ since 1945.

This course examines the themes surrounding global organizational processes: how state systems work, where the desire for a global political order comes from, which institutions regulate global relations and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Are we on course for a global government, or will the rise of new centers of world power instead lead to greater fragmentation? The emphasis lies on the last hundred years, in particular on institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and other global governance organizations. Research is conducted into the motivations behind setting up these institutions, how the interests of various individual nations (or groups of nations) were represented, and which obstacles formed an impediment to decisive governance on global issues. Attention is devoted not only to political organizations, but also to economic and cultural institutions (IMF, the World Bank, ADB), to allow students to acquire a thorough understanding of the structure of the international order and the recent developments in an increasingly polycentric world.