Political Science

This course explores key topics in politics and gender. These include: theories of gender including discussions on sexuality and masculinity, the impact of gender on citizenship and voting behavior, whether it matters what the gender of political representatives is, how to ensure that political institutions are gender balanced, what the normative arguments are about the use of positive action measures, the concept of security through gendered lenses, the impact of gender in armed conflict, women's rights and human rights, and the importance of gender in international development. Throughout the course, students seek to focus on gender rather than on women and explore how various differences such as gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality intersect to create inequalities.

This course critically examines the role that ethnic conflict plays in national and international politics. The course provides advanced knowledge of nationalism, and close familiarity with current thinking around the role of the ethnic nationalism in particular. The course analyzes the most influential theories, historical and contemporary, about the role of ethnic nationalism (as opposed to civic nationalism), regionally and internationally. A range of competing theoretical approaches are considered, concentrating on the theory of a "divided society".

Cities around the world are confronted with major problems concerning economic development, sustainability, social inclusion, safety and transport. This course does not focus exclusively on local governments but studies the city – i.e. the variety of private businesses, NGOs, citizens, stakeholders etc. – as a problem solving system. Using a combination of insights from public administration, political science, and urban studies, students discuss five perspectives on urban governance reflecting different ways to deal with the challenges that cities are facing: the managerial city, corporatist governance, pro-growth governance, welfare governance, and smart governance (including the role of ICT and network governance). The perspectives are used to analyze the variety of urban governance practices both in the Netherlands and around the world: the course has both a local and a global focus. The course introduces students to urban governance in Utrecht and other cities in the Netherlands, but also other European countries, the US, India, and China. International students are invited to present material concerning cities in their own countries to enrich learning about urban governance in this course. This course uses different formats, including lectures about the literature and brief presentations by the students in which they relate the literature to empirical examples in cities. Guest lectures go deeper into the practical aspects of urban governance in different contexts. In concluding presentations, students present an analysis of urban governance in two comparable cities. The idea of these presentations is that contrasting cities helps to study mechanisms of urban governance and assess the merits and drawbacks of different approaches.

This course explores the complex nature of culture, as well as the multiple axes of cultural diversity, and examines the effects of cultural identities, values, and practices on domestic and international politics. It compares constitutive, strategic, and institutional perspectives on culture. The course examines the challenges of cultural diversity for the modern international order, and focusing on questions of sovereign equality, international law, and human rights. Students gain an understanding of how culture relates to world politics.

The purpose of this course is to equip students with the ability to: First, to establish a basic understanding of international organizations, including their history, operations and interrelationships. Second, understand the current situation, limitations and prospects of the country's participation in international organizations. Third, arouse the enthusiasm of young people to participate in the affairs of international organizations, and even to work in international organizations. Fourth, when planning their future career, young people can take into account the direction of international organizations and transnational orders.

 

This course enables students to understand major strands of contemporary political Islam, their historical background, similarities and differences, present significance at the regional, national and subnational levels, and likely future directions. The course begins with a discussion of conceptual and theoretical issues in the study of political Islam, before briefly examining the history of Muslim politics up to the nineteenth century and the rise of modern Islamism. More recent versions of Islamism are approached through country-based case studies organized into three broad types: Islamists competing for power through democratic and pseudo-democratic mobilization; Islamism in self-proclaimed “Islamic states”; and Islamic national liberation movements in weak and quasi-states. The course then moves away from country-based case studies to focus on the transnational jihadist movement, before concluding with discussion of possible future directions Muslim politics in the region might take. Prerequisite for this course is an intermediate level international studies or political science course.

Students complete an independent study research project under the supervision of a University of Bocconi professor. Project content, length, and structure are agreed between the student and the professor. The research is graded and given credit based on the recommendation of the supervisor, and is considered as one University of Bocconi course.

This course considers environmental issues as a crisis of governance. Students are introduced to political aspects of anthropogenic environmental change at and across various levels of social organization. The course offers a survey of the complex institutional terrain in which environmental change is problematized and tackled, as well as the political and governance processes related to sustainability issues. At the core of the course are ten storytelling lectures that draw on a diverse range of real-world examples, aided by various audio-visual materials. The introductory lecture explores what the politics of the Earth is about. The three lectures that follow expose students to different ways in which environmental affairs are apprehended (where boundaries are drawn and how problems are framed), how society is organized in pursuit of sustainability, and some of the key analytical problems of Earth system governance. These lectures on key tools, ideas, and concepts are followed by a series of problem-oriented lectures that focus on different issue areas such as climate, ocean, water, and biodiversity. Governance challenges of each of these environmental problems are studied at a particular scale or level at which the problem is conceptualized and solutions implemented (i.e., global, regional, national, and local). Then these levels and issues are brought together in a separate lecture where the complex dynamics of multi-level, multi-sector governance for sustainability are examined. The concluding lecture discusses some of the key challenges of and opportunities for transformative environmental governance of a “new” Earth in the Anthropocene. The ten lectures are supported by seven interactive tutorials in five smaller groups. The tutorials are designed to aid understanding of the politics of the Earth with various interactive activities, games, and analyses, as well as practical exercises for the purpose of assessment. The course is designed not only to introduce Earth's politics as a subject of scholarly enquiry, but also to equip students with necessary skills and knowledge to be a change agent for a sustainable future. In the end, students have a better understanding of how the system of Earth system governance works at and across different levels of social organization, and how its effectiveness could be improved for humanity to navigate through complex, interrelated environmental problems in the decades to come.