Political Science

This course discusses the issues European migration policies seek to address, from curbing irregular migration and increasing migrant returns, to attracting talents and making asylum systems work. It explores the range of actors who shape this agenda and how policies at EU and EU Member State levels are intertwined. The course critically assesses the main migration issues in Europe, examines the trade-offs faced by European policymakers, analyzes how migration policies are designed and implemented, and outlines the effects European migration policies have on countries of origin and transit.

This course is an introduction to the study of religion in the social sciences. It examines what people do with religion and what religion does to people. The guiding thread of this course is to investigate how “religion” itself as a category is debated and contested, what counts as religion, and who gets to decide. The course is divided into three parts. The first part explores the definitions of religion that have been provided by classical authors. The second part analyzes the intersections of religion with other social categories such as class, gender, and race. The third part interrogates the politics of religion and how States, international organizations, political actors, and citizens grapple with religion, seek to regulate it, or use it to further political ends. The course is interdisciplinary and exposes students to various approaches of religion rooted in political science, sociology, history, and anthropology. It provides the theoretical and methodological tools to best appraise the place of religion in contemporary societies and discuss such complex and debated issues as secularism, fundamentalism, religious freedom, and religious discrimination.

This course asks and answers the question "what are data, and how do they come to be?" The story of data reveals the moral and political values that shape human practices of counting, measuring, and labelling reality, and helps us better understand the growing power of data in today's world. Designed to engage students across the disciplines, this introductory course offers a foundational integration of basic concepts and methods of data science with the historical and philosophical context that reveals their ethical and political dimensions as inseparable from their scientific value. The course draws from the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, history, mathematics, computer science, and the design arts to build up a more comprehensive picture of how data are constructed, interpreted, shared, and used for a growing range of scientific, commercial, public and creative purposes.

This course examines debates across the field of global ethics. It introduces students to frameworks for thinking about global moral questions concerning for example the global distribution of wealth, the appropriate meaning of human rights in a multicultural world, environmental sustainability, migration, development aid, conflict resolution, and transitional justice. Students are expected to evaluate different approaches to ethical judgment and apply them to real-world dilemmas.

This course uses the lens of the category of small states to critically think about key concepts in political science, such as sovereignty, independence/dependence, security, and power. It first introduces the concept of small states, its historical development, and the field of small state studies. It then discusses common characteristics and challenges of, as well as the heterogeneity among, small and microstates. Finally, it turns to specific issues of importance to small states, including their role in international organizations such as the United Nations or the European Union, security and defense, climate change, and economic development.

This course offers a study of international relations and trends in the evolution and development of events and processes of global and national significance. It examines the most probable courses of action as well as their implications and consequences. Based on this, students generate, design, and propose timely and appropriate measures, policies and actions.

The course equips students with the skills necessary to understand, critically assess, and undertake the research design process relevant to their degree. Students gain a good grasp of the behavioral assumptions in social science research, knowledge of a range of data collection methods (and how to assess the appropriateness of each), as well as the steps within a successful research project design. More specifically students learn how to choose a topic, formulate a research question and hypotheses, select cases, navigate measurement issues, and undertake a range of data collection methods.

The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe brought democracy to the region for the first time in over forty years. Academics now had a new wave of democratization and intense political change to study. This provided scholars with an almost unique opportunity to apply existing methods of political analysis to newly established democratic states. Even so, no country can escape its past and previous experience and structures can continue to exert an influence long after they have been officially swept away. Now, after more than two decades of democratic rule in the region institutions and practices have been established and are ripe for study. What can existing theories of party development, electoral behavior and executive-legislative relations tell us about politics in Central and Eastern Europe? Have the specific democratic trajectories of countries in the region generated new or modified theories for political science? Are there similarities in comparative political developments across the region that lead us to believe there is a peculiarly "Central and East European political science"?

This course provides the fundamental keys to understanding the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf region. It offers an overview of the region through a double prism: economy and strategy. It demonstrates how fundamental this region is to global energy flows and, hence, how many powers seek to control the Persian Gulf. The course also includes a simulation module for international negotiations to allow a more practical approach of the subject and its stakes, as well as practice international negotiations, public speaking, and to solicit the knowledge acquired in the course. In view of the breadth of the theme and the area covered, the teaching involves many disciplines, such as history, geography, economics, and international law, with a predominance of international relations and strategic studies.

This course examines the dynamics of political economy in the contemporary Middle East. There is a focus on how political actors and social forces influence, and in turn are influenced, by political economy structures and development strategies. In particular, the effects of state institutions, international actors, social classes, and new groups such as private sector businesspeople are assessed, and their roles considered in the context of political economy theoretical approaches. Particular case studies focus on recent trends in the region, especially: the growth of Islamic models of economic development; the processes and outcomes of economic reform; the impacts of globalization and foreign penetration of the region; and the ways in which new industries and technologies are shaping the political economies of the region.