Political Science

This course looks at the geography of the contemporary Arab world, including origins and consequences. Topics addressed include: the Arab world as a geographic object; Islam as a shared and at times divisive faith; ethnic and religious minorities in the Arab world; recent states with complex heritages; forms and practices of power in the Arab world; from Caliphate to Nation State; the Arab world as a space of movements; from the medina to the metropolis, the tradition and modernity of the Arab city; hydrocarbons as a source of wealth and as an obstacle to development; water as a vital and coveted resource; the Arab world in the face of food-related challenges; interface or periphery, the Arab world and its margins, and between the temptation to withdraw and promises of an opening, the Arab world in the face of globalization.

The course is designed to equip students with experience, knowledge, and skills for succeeding in globally interdependent and culturally diverse workplaces. During the course, students are challenged to question, reflect upon, and respond thoughtfully to the issues they observe and encounter in the internship setting and local host environment. Professional and personal development skills as defined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), such as critical thinking, teamwork, and diversity are cultivated. Assignments focus on building a portfolio that highlights those competencies and their application to workplace skills. The hybrid nature of the course allows students to develop their skills in a self-paced environment with face-to-face meetings and check-ins to frame their intercultural internship experience. Students complete 45 hours of in-person and asynchronous online learning activities and 225-300 hours at the internship placement.

This course offers a study of public management and administration. Topics include: political system and public administration; key factors in designing public administration structures; evolution of public management; strategies and instruments for the improvement of public management; conflict, interests, and power networks in public administrations; public values and organizational culture; public sector models and comparative public managements.

This course examines key issues in Chinese politics, including the historical background of the system, the roles of the party/state, the style of leadership, the forms of popular participation, and the distinctive features of Chinese politics. The focus is political change.
Classic essays by Sun Yatsen, Lu Xun, Mao Zedong and others provide students with grounding in the key problems modern China has faced, as well as the solutions it has pioneered. From that foundation, the course will move on to contemporary institutions and intellectual debates over inequality, human rights, and the future shape of political reform in China

This course offers rich insights on important issues in international politics: threats to international peace and security, humanitarian crises, and armed conflict prevention and management. Beyond these particular crises, the course examines the changing power relations among states at the global scale. It considers complex forms of political decision-making and social monitoring, involving a diverse group of actors: politicians, national and international bureaucrats, diplomats, militaries, rebels, investors, business(wo)men, consultants, activists, scientists, artists, journalists, etc. The course examines how the multidimensional interactions these actors entertain locally or in faraway headquarters blur the divide between the intervenors on one side and local actors and host governments on the other.

This course is concerned with positive political economy and public choice theory applied to the study of political conflicts, democratic institutions, and public policy. The course covers the main tools for the study of public choice (rational decision-making theory, game theory, social choice theory) and a number of both theoretical and applied topics, including the empirical study of institutions. This course covers the main topics in positive political economy and institutional public choice. These include the aggregation of preferences; voting paradoxes and cycles; electoral competition and voting behavior; the problems of and solutions to collective action; welfare state and redistribution; the impact of information and mass media on voting behavior and public policy; the theory of coalitions, the behavior of committees and legislatures including agenda-setting and veto-player power; principal-agent problems in politics; models of bureaucracy.