Political Science

The course explores the geopolitics of borders in today's world. Topics include: defining, drawing, and managing borders; borders of the Spanish state.

This course focuses on international security with a constructivist approach. It relates the security sector's response to the 9/11 attacks in the United States and studies the international security framework that has been centered on anti-terrorism against Al Quaeda and Daech, from 2001 to 2011 (ending at the death of Bin Laden), through films and TV shows. The course draws on the theoretical apparatus of the aesthetic turn and recent work on fictional representation and its impact on public space, as well as on security policies themselves. Fiction is not just a matter of a more or less realistic representation of reality, but an increasingly influential and even central element in defining the repository for security policies.

This course provides an introduction to contemporary philosophical debates about core concepts of justice, liberty, equality, community, and democracy in modern liberal-democratic societies. Students become familiar with the work of some of the leading political philosophers of today, like Thomas Hobbes, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Rawls, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Frantz Fanon, Martha Nussbaum, and Achille Mbembe. Since conceptual analysis is the core business of philosophy, students learn to analyze concepts, clarify moral ideas, and how tensions between moral ideas can be made explicit. They also learn how to apply these concepts in current political debate and practice.

The course provides students with a grasp of the main conceptual approaches, schools, methods, and sub-disciplines in Politics. All the course contents are framed and taught with reference to contemporary European politics and political systems. The course gives students the toolkit and ability to problematize and reflect critically on common-sense assumptions and understandings of political institutions and processes.

What does it mean to exert, obey, resist, or think power? How does political power relate to violence and authority? What is the relationship between secular and religious notions of power? In inviting students to reflect upon these questions through a wide range of texts and classroom dynamics, this course explores the concept of political power and its multiple forms of expression, thus introducing critical theory, political thinking, and the global humanities. Topics include imperialism and colonialism; democracy; sovereignty; the relationship between intellectuals and power; feminist and revolutionary perspectives on power; critical, pedagogical, and aesthetic approaches to political power relations. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides advanced knowledge on US foreign policy from 1945 until the election of Donald Trump. Examining the role of the United States within the international system, at the end of the course students are able to: describe the different historical phases of US foreign policy; detect the multiple political, geopolitical, and economic factors that have affected the development of US foreign policy; analyze the transitional moments and the turning points in the evolution of US foreign policy; and understand the link between domestic and foreign policy. The course examines the history of United States foreign relations – broadly defined – from the end of second world war to the election of Donald Trump. Examining the US role and place in the world, specific questions are raised and discussed, including: what triggered the American hegemonic rise; how do we conceptualize the response to the deployment of America’s multifaceted global power; and how do we investigate the connection between domestic politics and foreign policy choices? The course considers the impact of the political, geopolitical, and economic transformations of the past century on the foreign policy choices and particular attention is paid to specific turning points and transition moments (i.e.: the modernization policy of the Sixties, the crisis of the Seventies, the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the war on terrorism). After a broad introductory lecture on the origins of United States foreign policy, the course follows a chronological pattern. Historiographical debates and issues are also thoroughly discussed and examined, starting from the current debate on the end of the American century.

This course engages with some of the large theoretical debates in the study of social movements, reading both empirical treatments of particular movements and theoretical treatments of key issues. It is particularly concerned with the social and political context of protest, focusing on basic questions, such as under what circumstances do social movements emerge? How do dissidents choose political tactics and strategies? How do movements affect social and political change?

The key question of this course is how freedom is compatible with the authority of the state. During the course, students look at some classical responses to this question as well as to the related questions of how to organize statehood in a way that balances concerns for liberty, equality, and community. In exploring the theoretical foundations of today’s debates on these issues, students initially focus on a selection of historical thinkers from the pre-Enlightenment period onwards, later bringing the debate more up to date with scholarship by more modern thinkers.

This course surveys a number of key debates in the very broad literature on electoral and political behavior in democratic states.  Topics include how citizens think about parties, politically salient groups and political issues, including how citizens make vote choices, the mechanisms behind differences in turnout and participation across different individuals and over time and levels in political knowledge.  The course provides a comparative examination of political behavior in democratic contexts, but because of the historical development of the research literature in this area, there is greater weight placed on the US relative to other countries. 

This course examines the purpose and application of theoretical paradigms in international relations. Theories provide frameworks to understand the behavior of actors in a complex and dynamic global environment. Distinct theoretical paradigms make central assumptions about primary factors that drive human action with implications for how we understand, explain, and predict issues and interactions in the international arena. Such factors range from scarcity and a drive for control (e.g., classical realism, neorealism, game theory); to a drive to cooperate for absolute gains (e.g., neoliberal institutionalism, liberalism), constructed identities based on historically-contingent meanings and values (e.g., constructivism), and unequal power relations that underpin a drive for autonomy, agency, and empowerment. (e.g., critical theories, feminist theory). The course teaches all theoretical paradigms with a focus on how they can be applied to better understand political issues and challenges in the contemporary global environment.