Political Science

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program in History and Oriental Studies. The course is intended for advanced levels students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on neoliberal political economy and its social impacts on local contexts. Emphasis is placed on a critical approach to the aid industry as a key issue for understanding global governance processes. Students create a research project and bibliography autonomously on a topic related to the course. Since the end of the cold war and the triumph of a neoliberal order, Africa has faced a huge number of conflicts and devastating social effects. Starting with the analysis of selected ethnographic cases (Congo, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leon, etc.), the first part of the course explores the etiology of contemporary African wars focusing on the link between local violence and global economic and political processes. Special attention is placed on the relationship between youth and war and the social imaginary. The course explores topics including neoliberalism and inequality, the African State, globalization in Africa, African conflicts, war economy, young people and children in Africa, witchcraft in contemporary Africa, and development enterprise. The course includes traditional lectures and group discussions. The instructor focuses on the general topics in order to introduce the various scholarly debates. Specific examples are discussed in order to give a concrete idea of the different topics. Students are encouraged to work autonomously, comment, and ask questions. The course includes visual resources (i.e. documentaries, maps and photos).

This course engages the points of contention around the theorization and conceptualization of war as these arise from the debates and conversations between differing perspectives and schools of thought in IR, political studies, and the social sciences, including a specific emphasis on critical approaches. The course questions whether war has fundamentally changed in late modernity, or if it reveals a transhistorical continuity in its core nature, or, if people can identify a common logic in its aims, motivations, methods, practices and effects. Secondly, the course explores the transformative impact and effects of war. In this, it frames war as disruptive of certainties, highlighting the way it regularly undermines expectations, strategies and theories, and along with them, the credibility of those in public life and the academy presumed to speak with authority about it. 

This course explores the many forms of relationship between politics and visual culture. From the ancient world to the present, politics, whether formal or popular, has had a visual dimension. Politicians have been concerned to control their appearance; various media (from painting to theatre to television to the internet) have been used to both serve and defeat this goal. The course surveys the relationship between politics and visual culture and allows students to engage with contemporary issues surrounding politics, film, and digital culture.

Cities have become major actors on environmental policy. However, the crosscutting nature of environmental problems involves the city in a web of relationships with other levels of government and non-governmental actors. Therefore, the understanding of environmental policy in cities raises the need to unveil the “black box” of the different dimensions of governance (urban, metropolitan, multi-level). The aim of the course is to introduce students to the complexity of implementing public policies in urban contexts through the particular complexities of the environmental issues. For such purpose, the course addresses the basic concepts of policy analysis, the different discussions and theories on governance and orients them towards the specific case of environmental problems in different contexts. Particular attention is placed on air quality, mobility, and climate change.

This course explores the articulation between environmental attitudes and worldviews and how they contribute to shaping green political action in a context where the imminence of a global ecological crisis (global warming, threats on biodiversity, scarcity of resources) is no longer in question. The course covers a diversity of social sciences approaches: how conceptions of nature shape our attitudes to its enjoyment, understanding, and exploitation; the challenges to environmentally friendly public policies at the national, the European, and the international levels, including; the role of individuals from collective mobilization to the emergence of the “citizen-consumer”; the parliamentary and the extra-parliamentary strategies of environmental movements and of the counter-movements, in the EU and beyond.