Political Science

The course covers inter-religious relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from a variety of thematic and interdisciplinary perspectives. The content provides an understanding of the historical roots and contemporary effects of the relations between the three religions. The basics of inter-religious relations are learned and analyzed. Themes covered include gender and sexuality, eschatology and apocalypticism, the intersection of religious and civil law in Western societies, and the challenges of maintaining individual and community identity in a shifting cultural, social, and political landscape.

The course shows how social research can shed light on topical social and political debates. Students are given opportunities to reflect critically on the ways in which evidence is used in debate about public policy. This course illustrates how social research can shed light on topical social and political debates. The specific aims are to understand how academic enquiry can be used to understand public political debates and public policy to understand how evidence informs debates, and how it is sometimes distorted and misused in these debates; to understand how social and political theory can be brought to bear on understanding topical debates; and to develop the skills of engaging in topical debates in a rational and evidence-based way while also taking account of the important role of ideology and emotion. 

Students examine the legal standards that govern the state’s power to control, coerce, and punish those suspected (or proven) to have committed crimes. Students also explore how these laws are exercised by legal actors, including police, prosecutors and judges in their routine decisions and practices. The course speaks directly to the real-world issues and controversies encountered by criminal justice systems in many developed democracies today – racial injustices, abuses of police power, mass incarceration, penal populism, law’s potential to reform organizations, to name but a few.

We focus on themes including the historical review of transatlantic relations, distinct functional modules in policies and interactions encompassing their overall and regional strategies, security, economics, technology, digital, global governance and economic models from the beginning of the 21st century to the present.
Students are expected to achieve three major goals: (1) to better understand the evolution of the transatlantic alliance; (2) to discover the causes of cooperation and divergences on different issues among US, Europe and China; (3) to learn about how Chinese academia views the US and Europe.

This course consists of a survey and understanding of contemporary theories of justice. It engages with key texts as well as contemporary cases that reveal the key concepts and stakes of theorizing and practicing justice. Perspectives of Utilitarianism, Political Liberalism, Libertarianism, Communitarianism, Liberal Egalitarianism, Multiculturalism, Republicanism, and Feminism are covered. Students learn diverse approaches to justice and their theoretical foundations; learn how to analyze, understand, and critique contemporary political life through the lens of theories of justice and learn how to analytically and critically write argumentative essays on the topic of justice.

Drawing on a historical, institutionalist, and policy perspective the course examines comparatively changes in the political and economic domains in relation to Spain, Greece, and Portugal in the process of EU integration in their post-dictatorship period and beyond. The course traces processes of economic restructuring as crisis management strategies adopted in the 1980s to deal with the political and economic crisis of the 1970s. Drawing on these institutional legacies, the consolidation of the Eurozone in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the unravelling of the North Atlantic financial crisis in 2008, the course seeks to understand the unfolding of the financial crisis in Southern European Countries, the adopted political and policy solutions, and the ensuing political crises. 

This undergraduate lecture course is designed to survey major topics of the international relations of the People’s Republic of China with a specific focus on Chinese perspective. With a brief introduction of major theoretical perspective on foreign policy studies, the main body of the course is organized around special topics of Chinese foreign policies, including the Chinese historical legacy and its impact on China’s foreign policy, nationalism and public opinion in contemporary China, mechanism of China’s foreign-policy decision-making, leaders and their styles, China’s attitudes towards global governance, the economic dimension of China’s interactions with the outside world, public diplomacy and China’s soft power and China’s policy towards peripheral countries, (in particular, the Northeast Asia and the South China Sea). This course pays attention to the application of different international relations theories to the problems under study. The course aims to acquaint students with knowledge of China’s involvement in world affairs in historical and contemporary perspectives and train them with an analytical understanding of the dynamics of China’s foreign policy.

The field of international relations and political science has given little attention to organized crime and corruption, which has become a focus of interest within these disciplines only recently. From an international relations perspective, it is worth investigating how organized crime is embedded in a larger political context, how politics interconnects with criminality on national and international level and how globalization affects internationalization of crime and corruption. The course covers definitional and conceptual issues related with organized crime, corruption, and terrorism; the impact of globalization on the internationalization of organized crime; the nexus and interaction between crime, corruption, and terrorism; variations in crime-terror nexus across different parts of the world; the anti-crime and anti-terrorism policies, and other issues.

Why do people move from one country to another, and what are the economic and political implications of the movement of people? This course introduces students to the economics of immigration; how and why people decide to migrate; what the impacts of migration are on labor markets, public services, and other aspects of the countries to which they move; and what drives public attitudes and political decisions on immigration management and control. It also examines the evolution of "free movement" within the EU, its impact on the Brexit referendum, and where next for UK immigration policy. This course is primarily empirical (covering the causes and effects of immigration and of attitudes to immigration) rather than normative (ethical questions about the desirability or undesirability of immigration from a philosophical perspective).