Political Science

The course provides students with an understanding of contemporary societal and policy debates around key energy policy challenges in the context of the transition towards sustainable and lower carbon energy systems. The course will take a distinctive Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies (STIS) approach which equips students with the analytical tools necessary to critically evaluate key energy technology and policy debates in the UK, Europe, and globally.

Science and technology (S&T) permeate everyday international exchange and increasingly drive change in international relations in complex ways. The criticality of competition in S&T at all levels of international interactions warrants systematic study from social science perspectives. This graduate seminar studies key aspects in S&T affecting the broad notion of International Political Economy, with China being an actor and factor, in the contemporary world. The substantive focus of this course is on how S&T manifests in diplomacy, international laws and norms, economic growth, trade, sustainable development and geopolitical risk assessments. The course invites students to appreciate and analyze these complexities through situating the role of S&T in examples include environment, health, manufacturing technology, energy, and AI. The course draws heavily on recent research to showcase how social scientists and policy-makers have evaluated and navigated debates over the interplay between S&T and international relations.

Prior knowledge about a particular topic covered in the syllabus is not required. The course will introduce basic concepts required for understanding the issues covered. The load of required readings is deliberately kept low to incentivize comprehension and questioning before the class meeting so that students from diverse backgrounds can have as much of a common plate to relate with each other during class.

Upon completing the course, participants can expect to have enriched knowledge base and appreciation for the scientific and technological dimensions of the broader issues they are interested in. The main objective is to enable students to produce research on current topics by practicing critical thinking.

This course examines environmental change as a problem of governance. It scrutinizes major governance dimensions - such as actors, institutions, and problem structures - at multiple levels and across domains. This includes the interplay of government, market, and civil society in efforts to mitigate and adapt to environmental change. The course critically approaches the changing institutional architecture of environmental governance, including the rise of alternative forms of governance beyond the state. Actors like regions, cities, international organizations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and social movements are studied. Cases of environmental governance on various levels are contrasted and compared, together with overlaps between environmental issues and other domains like trade and security. The course allows reflecting on these cases in relation to central political scientific concepts like democracy, justice, legitimacy, and effectiveness.

This course examines the principal debates, features, and manifestations of Middle East politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. The course also contextualizes the Middle East as a region of the world that continually impacts on the wider international order. This course situates the Middle East, not as a single unitary manifestation of politics, but as a wider diverse and dynamic region. Political dimensions of the Middle East such as the legacy of colonialism, the democracy deficit, political economy, and contemporary conflict, as well as the role of civil society, feature as topics in the course.

This course examines a range of contemporary issues in international politics across a number of areas of economics and politics, which include events that are occurring in contemporary world politics that have significant interests for students and layperson alike.  Students get out into the real world, thinking about the wider meanings of the events that they have witnessed and are witnessing in world politics. Students question what is the relationship between IR (as a body of knowledge) and international politics (as the subject of that knowledge)? Do the IR theories make sense in terms of contemporary developments, do they shift in line with these developments or do they lag behind politics? Whilst issues form the foreground, this question forms the background to the course. 

This course provides a comprehensive insight into all things AI. It is not intended for those who wish to learn the mathematical underpinnings of the computer science or coding aspect of AI. It is for those who wish to explore how AI is affecting our world, from labor markets to politics, from business models to us as humans.

This course examines what governments do or choose not to do. It explores how public policy is formulated, implemented and evaluated, and what governance processes are typically followed. It also covers circumstances under which governments may choose to abstain from taking policy action. It approaches the study of public policy in both theory and practice and in the context of national and international politics, with both an Australian and comparative focus.

The course introduces game theory and its applications in political science to students. Topics include How to Think about Strategic Games, Games with Sequential Moves, Simultaneous-Move Games, Combining Sequential and Simultaneous Moves, Strategic Moves, Uncertainty and Information, The Prisoners' Dilemma and Repeated Games, Collective-Action Games, and Applications to Specific Strategic Situations.

This course is an undergraduate-level seminar on politics of contemporary China. Understanding politics, economy, society, and their complex relations of our neighbor, People’s Republic of China becomes indispensable for everyone no matter what you study and pursue in this globalized era. In this vein, surveying politics of China would be a priority. We try to systematically (not randomly) analyze and understand those objects through applying some theoretical frameworks of political science such as regime type, political institution, participation, contentious politics, clientelism, developmentalism, nationalism, and interactions between domestic and international politics, to them. More specifically, this course aims at (1) understanding basic political history of contemporary China; (2) theoretically and empirically exposing students to major issues and debates in the study of reform-era Chinese politics and helping students understand major characteristics of the Chinese Communist Party regime; (3) In addition to the conventional contents of “Chinese Politics” course, letting students do a “problem-solving” project from creative and multi-disciplinary perspectives of political interactions as well as politics of things; (4) and finally, encouraging students to pursue their own agendas related to contemporary China in further studies in schools and job market (and beyond).

This course is designed to familiarize students with important concepts and theories of international security studies as well as prominent security issues in the contemporary world. The first part of the course introduces the basic analytical concepts and theoretical frameworks as regards direct and indirect use of force in international politics; the second part explores strategic policy during the Cold War and the lessons that scholars have drawn from that historical period; the third part examines several security challenges at the dawn of the 21st century such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism and insurgency, and the security implications of technological change; the last part focuses on the rise of China and international security, with particular attention paid to the relationship between China and the United States, the Taiwan issue, and maritime disputes in East Asia. It is worth noting that the course will not touch upon most non-traditional security issues such as energy security, climate change, food safety, etc.