Political Science

Students examine how we form opinions about the world, cases of conflict, diplomacy, and the role of non-state actors and major global institutions in creating/sustaining the world around us today. In particular, students assess the different assumptions within particular approaches to IR, their methods and understanding of who and what matters in global politics; how approaches conceptualizes international institutions, and the relationship between agency and international structure. Students investigate issues like whether there is equal sovereignty in the world today, what do we mean by "North-South relations" and the links between theory and practice. Key concepts include anarchy, sovereignty, power, hegemony and empire, the state, and the international system.

This course focuses on why countries democratize, when democracy consolidates or backslides, and what drives these processes. It considers a variety of challenges to democracy at the national and international levels such as corruption, discontent, economic inequality, globalization, legitimacy, authoritarian contestation, technological change, polarisation or populism. The aims of this course are to introduce key concepts and theories in the study of democracy, to foster an understanding of broader processes such as democratisation, democratic consolidation and backsliding around the world, to develop analytical skills necessary to identify and scrutinize the contemporary challenges to democracy.

This course provides a better understanding of France, its population, their characteristics, and the country’s political life. The curriculum focuses on current French society and its evolution in relation to the weight of history, its territorial dynamics, and cultural and political ideals.

This course introduces the discipline of international relations and provides students with the intellectual and analytical tools to understand how the world came to be how it is today, and where it might be headed in the decades to come. Topics include mainstream and critical perspectives on international relations, placing Western and Global South perspectives on the discipline into dialog with each other, global inequality, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. 

This course investigates questions that are both central to political philosophy and of current political importance. They include: What does it take for a society to be just? How can we come to own natural resources? and more. 

This course introduces students to the basic framework and key concepts to understand the behavior of voters and politicians in elections. It also explores the foundations of political parties and electoral competition. The course acquaints one with the knowledge and terminology of political science, but also gives one tools to evaluate information and think critically about how politics works.

This course examines dominant schools of political thought in the 20th century and political theory relevant to assisting interpretation of the politics of development. Modern liberal democratic thought and 20th century Marxist thought; Nazism and Neo-conservatism; Anti-colonial thought and Nationalism; and West Indian political thought will be reviewed and assessed. This course will also provide exposure to critical methodologies used in contemporary political sciences.

This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of innovation and its dynamics. It explores the determinants of innovation, drawing on theories to examine how and why innovation occurs, and the types of innovation that may emerge from different political economy perspectives and institutional frameworks. Part of the course involves examining policy evaluation and design, specifically discussing how to provide policy advice that considers the complex societal ecosystem, including societal hopes and fears.

This course offers an introduction to the field of political science. Topics include: politics and political power; forms of political organization; democracies and dictatorships; state structures; parliaments and political representation; government systems; culture and political socialization; actors in the political system; political and electoral behavior; public policies; challenges of politics in today's world.   

The course introduces students to the study of nations and nationalism from both an empirical and a normative perspective. It encourages students to explore the advantages and disadvantages of nationalism and national identity in light of recent history and current political developments. Students are introduced to contemporary normative debates on the political morality of nationalism and provided with conceptual tools to engage in these debates in a theoretically sophisticated way. They employ their conceptual and theoretical knowledge to explore possible solutions to contemporary political problems involving nationalist claims, and they deepen their understanding of the relationship between empirical and normative analyses of politics.