Political Science

This course involves studying the ethical aspects of various principle issues in contemporary world politics. It introduces students to a number of ethical difficulties surrounding identifying and applying ethical principles to aspects of world politics, such as war and human rights. Students begin by asking to what extent moral action is possible in international politics. As such, the course starts by analyzing theoretical approaches to the place of ethics in world politics and then moves to consider specific issues such as war, human rights, and the politics of the human and torture, for example.

The course provides an introduction to the politics and economics of European integration. It draws upon theories of international relations, political economy, and governance to assess the origins of the European project and the politics of market integration after 1945. Students analyze the EU’s evolving institutional framework by charting the constitution-building process and mapping the distribution of executive, legislative, administrative, and judicial functions over time. The course then explores the expansion of EU power and legal competence in key policy fields over the past two decades. It begins by considering the history and theory of economic and monetary union, as well as the causes and consequences of the Eurozone crisis. The course also explains the rapid development of the EU as an internal and external security actor in the post-Cold War era through cooperation in asylum and immigration policy, and foreign, and defense policy. It ends by reflecting on the scale and pace of the EU enlargement process and the wider political implications of the EU’s democratic deficit. 

This course approaches the economics of refugees as a theme in its own right within the economics of migration. It provides a comprehensive overview of the contemporary issues involved in receiving people who are forced to move to developed countries. It considers subjects that the tools of economics can decipher and interconnect to inform public decision-making, such as international law, public policy, the behavior of populations in host countries, the impact on the labor market, and climate change, as well as NGOs, international institutions, and companies in the social economy. 

This course covers issues concerning the causes, processes, obstacles, and consequences of democratic transition in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia - three of the largest and the most populous countries of Southeast Asia. The specific issues to be covered include economic growth and stagnation, the middle class, capitalist rule, rural politics, political parties, military coups, corruption, electoral violence, gangsters, social movements, street protests, the monarchy, communal conflicts, and female politicians.

Relying on a multidisciplinary perspective, this course provides theoretical and empirical tools to understand contemporary Iran. It studies decisive historical events, figures, and ideologies to understand how Iran interacted and interacts with regional and global powers. It analyzes the Iranian political and religious model to understand continuities and discontinuities in Iranian domestic policies (institutional and political structure, state ideology) as well as the evolution of alliances and balances of powers (regionally and internationally). The course encourage reading and familiarization with the global academic literature to develop critical thinking and methodological skills.

The course introduces and critically analyzes the major IR theoretical traditions. Because of the complexity of world politics, assumptions (i.e., criteria for thinking about what and how to study world politics) to guide our study are needed. The different traditions – or "-isms" – provide these assumptions and offer a set of different lenses through which to explore world politics. The course, through practical application of theories, explores the ways in which the main theoretical traditions compare and contrast.

This course provides an overview of the main thematic areas in international political economy. The course combines mainstream and critical approaches, addressing topics from State-level politics to those at the economic and cultural levels. The course provides the opportunity to engage and interpret international events using the field’s theoretical tools. It discusses various approaches to ongoing events and underlying political, economic, and cultural reasons for them and identifies the main issues in international political economy and analyzes them critically.

This course examines terrorism both in Spain and globally. Topics include: terrorism in Spain; victims of terrorism; psychological consequences of terrorist attacks on the victims; secondary vicitimization, violence of terrorist persecution and their psychological consequences; comprehensive care for victims of terrorism.

This course builds students’ understanding of the causal mechanics underlying conflicts across a variety of settings and periods, the character of the violence in these conflicts, and the prospects for resolution. Drawing on major theoretical approaches to the explanation of violence, students apply these theoretical frameworks to an empirical examination of political violence in a range of periods and settings, including Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Syria, Ireland, Sierra Leone, and others. Students explore how and to what extent the major approaches in the scholarship explain the reality of conflict in different regional, cultural, and historical contexts.