Political Science

This seminar gives a broad understanding of the lines of theorizing and types of research that animate the study of human rights issues and human rights mobilizations in post-Soviet Russia. Acquainting students with academic research in history, political science, and social science on the matter, the seminar seeks to analyze these topics through the lens of comparative politics and comparative political sociology. This course first analyzes how human rights have been constructed as a cause, discourse, and a legal and institutional framework since the Soviet human rights movement. Then it continues to cover the development of human rights in the 1990s and 2000s until today, when human rights have become a dominant frame on a number of very heterogeneous issues for media and activists denouncing the political regime in “Putin's Russia”. It pays particular attention to the sociology of actors, as well as to historical, political, and social conditions of emergence, possibility, and development of human rights mobilizations.

This seminar looks at the way in which intellectuals, revolutionaries, and novelists theorize on pressing political issues on the African continent. The ideas of African thought leaders are discussed to understand knowledge production from a distinctly African perspective focusing on political ideas from the wake of independence until today. The seminar also examines the ways in which Africa has been imagined in a Western context and debates the difficult endeavor of decolonization – both inside Africa and outside. Thematically the seminar is divided into four sections: African independence and democratic transition; aid and exploitation; the colonial encounter in political literature; and contemporary ideas and critiques. The above issues are debated with the help of path-breaking texts. The seminar draws on a wide range of primary materials. Students are asked to analyze seminal speeches from African freedom fighters as well as literary classics. The aim of the seminar is to open up to African ideas and viewpoints which are all too often ignored in the Western context and to re-examine the colonial legacy.

This course covers the causes and international ramifications of the war in Syria, from the 2011 Arab Spring protests to the rise of ISIS, and from the interventions of Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia to those of the United States and its allies. After a brief introduction on the modern history of Syria and the geopolitics of the Levant, the course refocuses on policy analysis, with special attention devoted to understanding how the United States and its European allies initially responded to the crisis and how their policies evolved over the past seven years. The course thus considers conflict resolution and peace building in failed states, the risk of conflict spillover in neighboring countries, and the heightened risk of ISIS-inspired terrorism on a global scale. It also examines the Syrian refugee crisis and the catastrophic impact of the war on the political, economic, and social life of Syria and its people.

This seminar introduces both the theoretical perspective of European integration and selected fields of political-economic engagement with the subject. Among other topics, it covers the areas of work and migration, capitalist location competition (taxes, industry, labor), monetary policy, the euro crisis, and trade policy.

This course examines the political economy of Spain and the European Union. Topics include economic politics and national economics; 1982-85, the politics of adjustment; 1986-90, recuperation and reform, integration in the European Commission; 1991-93, end of the growth model, lost years; 1994-97, recuperation and the politics of convergence; 1998-present, the peseta, the euro, and the turn of the century, Spanish economic politics and globalization; privatization of public businesses; political economics of highways; regulatory reform; political economics of pension reform. Previous coursework in economics and political economy are recommended for this course.

This course provides an advanced examination of environmental politics in Australia. It surveys the various issues, stakeholders, and movements at the forefront of key environmental debates, including analysis of the theory and discourses of the environment, and an examination of policy implementation.

Since transnational migration and refugee movements in 2015 have increasingly transcended European external and internal borders and in many cases reached the heart of Europe, European migration and border policies have become the focus of political and scientific debates. Various forms of migration and border control in Europe are being discussed, the standardization and expansion of which have been observable for several decades. These processes of regulation and control of migration are investigated through migration and border research that is critical towards power and domination. This concerns especially the contested negotiations for freedom of movement, rights, participation and affiliation between a large number of actors - not least the migrants themselves. The research perspective focuses on institutions, stability and structures, as well as on conflicts, resistances, dynamics and transformations in the creation and development of migration and border political realities. The theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions of the research field also bring together the claims and the endeavors to always reflect on the practice and function of academic knowledge production and to include it in the analysis. The seminar, which introduces the central debates of critical migration and border research, first provides an overview of classical approaches to migration and border research and the normative and socio-theoretical criticisms of them. Based on this, the second part discusses the concept of the migration and border regime, which forms the basis of the seminar. Against this background, the third part deals with interdisciplinary perspectives on empirical research fields, such as European migration and border policy, spatial analyses of borders, critical perspectives on integration, citizenship, and migrant resistance as well as the integration of migration and gender.