Political Science

This course is an examination of the Western Balkans' path to the European Union, with an emphasis on the post-1989 developments. It looks at the course content through political, economic, historical, and international perspectives. Over the semester the focus is on the ever-developing relationship between the EU and the Western Balkans, EU approaches towards integration, conditionality mechanisms, and individual paths of the seven new republics created after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Topics include: Balkans in Europe; the Dissolution of Yugoslavia and its Consequences; EU conditionality and the accession mechanisms; state-building, democratization, Europeanisation, and transformation of the Balkans.

The focus of the course is on the role of information in a wide spectrum of examples and contexts, ranging from individual decision-making to collective choice, to strategic interactions between asymmetrically informed parties, to markets under asymmetric information. The course launches with individual decision-making. It examines how new information is used to update decision-makers’ beliefs and revise their actions, culminating with the notion of the value of information. Next, the course turns to collective decision-making. It scrutinizes procedures for aggregating individual preferences and raises issues of efficiency, justice, strategic voting, and manipulations of private information. Finally, the course makes an excursion into the field of information economics. It looks at contract design to provide specific incentives: for instance, to the experts with superior knowledge to report their information faithfully, or to the employees to exert a certain level of effort. Finally, the course discusses the impact of asymmetric information on the insurance markets.

This course explores the main theoretical strands in the contemporary study of international relations. Students are introduced to several key approaches in the study of international relations, including realism, neorealism, Marxism, liberalism, and interdependence theory and democratic peace theory, and to the central empirical questions these seek to address: Are states the only significant actors in world politics? Is the international system constituted in a way that makes war sometimes inevitable? Is the international conduct of many states guided more by economic objectives than by the quest for military security? Are democracies set never to go to war against one another? Is war partially rooted in human psychology? What are the political consequences of growing social and economic interaction between states and societies? 

This course considers the main components of American soft power, the ability of the United States to influence through non-coercive behavior, and how they have evolved over time. Also covered are the current challenges, limitations, and constraints to American soft power. Students consider how the public perceives US leadership and the soft power initiative and actions meant to secure it, and the potential consequences of the Trump presidency on America's soft power capital.

The course is an introduction to the study of comparative politics and provides an overview of some of the key theoretical frameworks, concepts, and analytical methods of this field of study. We study democratic political systems with a view to understanding and explaining their differences and similarities with respect to their political institutions, the behaviour of their key political actors, and their policymaking processes and performance. The course examines the building blocks of the comparative approach. We describe, explain and examine the consequences of different political institutions, with a focus on established democracies, including executive-legislative relations, electoral systems, and strong judiciaries.

This course is transdisciplinary in its framing and combines various approaches and scholarship from critical security studies, surveillance studies, sociology of technology, data sciences, human rights, and international law. The course develops a reflexive understanding of the main categories at work when using geopolitics, security and securitization, mass surveillance, and privacy rights, by joining different experiences too often fragmented by disciplinary knowledge. It analyzes the scripts they produce in order to build a transdisciplinary understanding reflecting the debates (or lack thereof) concerning digital spaces.