Political Science

This course provides a Law and Politics study on current issues of "Democracy in Crisis" from the perspective of comparative law. The course also covers what the rule of law might mean to democracy and how these two fundamental political ideas play a mutually complementary role for each other in practice and in theory. Students explore the foundations of democracy vis a vis reasons why this political regime is still important to - and conceived as pivotal in - civil society today.  

Topics include Weakening of Referee Institutions in India, Democracy in Crisis in Southeast Asia, State Capacity and Accountability in Low-Income States, Democratic Backsliding and the Politicization of Public Employment; Nationalist Passion, Economic Interest, and the Moral Economy of the Hungarian Civic Right: 2002-2010, Election Administration and Democratic Fragility in the USA, Post-Communist Democracy, Civil Society, and the Problem of Accountability, Civil Society Resistance to Democratic Backsliding, Social Media, Disinformation, and Resilience of Democracy, and Security Imperative and Right Nationalist Politics in Contemporary Europe and USA.   

The course designs the composition and content of lectures based on the actual situation of top experts in relevant fields. Leaders, experts and scholars from Chinese government departments, international organizations, institutions and embassies in China, non-governmental organizations and well-known schools home and abroad will be eligible to be invited to give lectures this course. Students have the opportunity to engage with lecturers in an in-depth discussion of practices and challenges in the field of sustainable development. This course is mainly based on classroom lectures. The Office of International Exchange and Cooperation and the Teaching Office of Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management will jointly organize and identify relevant lectures. Students are required to attend no less than 16 hours of lectures after selecting the course, and submit course papers to complete the course study.

The course offers a critical reading of the work undertaken by all international criminal courts and tribunals. Throughout the course, the basic tenets of Criminal Justice and their application at the international level to discover the fragility of the international legal system, its interplay with global, regional, and local politics, and the challenges of reconciling justice with the interest of states are studied. Topics covered include the selection of cases at the international level, the relation of courts with states (participants and by-standers), the setting of goals and the measuring results of courts, determining the societal impact that courts have in the international community, determining the impact courts have on individuals (end-users) such as victims and accused, the role of international criminal courts in the writing/re-writing of history, the effectiveness of courts in responding to ever-growing international criminality and the alternatives available to address the same. The course presents challenging debates regarding the state of international criminality and justice, tests criticisms in the field with real-life practice, and sparks debates regarding solutions or alternatives to all the limitations of the international criminal justice system.

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.