Political Science

This course aims to help students acquire the basic knowledge of the development and functioning of the EU. Additionally, students are expected to analyze the EU’s role in various sectoral policies and its relationships with selected partners.

This course consists of three parts. The first part covers the basics of the EU, including major theories of European integration, its core institutions, decision-making procedures, and legal order. In the second part, this course explores the major bilateral relations between the EU and third parties in the second part. The last part focuses on selected policy areas critical to the EU’s internal stability and external posture. 

This course examines the political relationship between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous peoples of Australia as an instance of wider global relations among indigenous societies, colonial powers and contemporary national and international regimes and institutions. Students will gain an understanding of government policies and the responses to these practices by Indigenous peoples by critically evaluating the political frameworks and policy responses used to deal with Indigenous-settler relations. The course will consider - among other topics - land, citizenship and identity, self-determination, constitutional recognition, and the governance of Indigenous organizations.

The history of modern China is deeply intertwined with international law. Starting from the early 19th century, the European-originated international law made its way to the China-centered East Asian tributary system through military conquests and treaties. Over the past two centuries, international law has profoundly shaped the transformation of China in terms of building of a modern state and the national identity. The more recent decades have seen China’s increasingly active engagement with international law in terms of dispute settlement and treaty negotiation. Yet international law is still underappreciated in understanding China’s foreign relations, often being reduced to no more than legalistic cover for realpolitik by international relations scholars. Academic research on China’s foreign policy is largely devoid of serious legal analysis into China’s engagement with international law. This course sits at the intersection of international law and international relations and bears four goals in mind. First of all, the course prepares the students for understanding the fundamental concepts of international law. The second objective is to examine China’s initial encounter with the Eurocentric concepts and practices of international law and its lingering legacy. Third, it aims for surveying China’s contemporary engagement with various international legal regimes in a historical and contextualized way. Rather than highlighting China’s uniqueness in the international legal system, the course encourages comparative inquiries into China’s position on and practices of international law. Last, the course invites the students to empirically re-examine popular impressionistic discourses about China and international law by making extensive use of primary sources and incorporating competing perspectives.

This course examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge, and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this course examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels, and video games. It also engages students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals. 

This course covers keystone technologies from bioweapons to killer robots to provide insight into pressing political questions such as: What role does technology play in warfare and in international security? How have the tools of war changed – and what do those changes mean for the laws, norms, ethics, conduct, and strategy of conflict? How can we combat the national and international security risks of emerging technologies?

This course examines five security concepts and their relevance to security in the Asia-Pacific region. These concepts are order/hierarchy, alliances, polarity/balance of power, international reputation ("credibility"), and historical memory. It covers these concepts through case studies such as the Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises, the history (and future) of alliances in Asia, the Vietnam War, the Sino-U.S. rapprochement, the post-war order, and territorial disputes.

This course explores the right to truth from an interdisciplinary perspective. It critically engages with truth as a right in transitional justice scenarios, focusing on the exploration of the construction of truth through law and its relation to justice. Through the foundational tenets of memory, reconciliation, and punishment, the course enquires into the assumed exceptionality of the right to truth in transitions, examining if and how it operates in ordinary settings. Simultaneously, the course offers an overarching view of the consolidation of the right to truth in the framework of international human rights, and the specific obligations it entails for states. Drawing on a broad variety of cases of ongoing and past transitional justice processes in the Global South, the course fosters challenging and critical perspectives on the right to truth as a legal claim.

This course examines the main issues of Southeast Asian security, giving due attention to traditional concerns with interstate conflict as well as non-traditional themes like the economy and the quality of democratic governance. It also provides a grounding in the Cold War-era conflicts that shaped the region as we know it today. The central focus, however, is on contemporary internal armed conflict rooted in processes of state formation and state decay (for instance, ethnic conflict in Myanmar, separatist violence in Indonesia or the attempts to create an autonomous region in Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines). Key internal conflicts affecting the human security of millions of Southeast Asians, as well as near neighbors like Australia, will be analyzed in their unique historical and cultural context, and related to cross-cutting questions with broad inter-disciplinary significance negotiating views from above and below, from inside and outside. 

This course explores key topics in understanding British electoral behavior, election campaigning, and political communications, in particular the changing role and influence of public opinion on politics and vice versa. Topics covered include the nature and measurement of public opinion; theories of electoral behavior, and an introduction to the use of quantitative methods in political science; the nature, operation and impact on politics of the British electoral system; influence of the media on public opinion and politicians' attempts to communicate with the public through the media; the tension between "image" and "substance" in modern democratic decision making; and the democratic implications of modern trends including falling turnouts, lower engagement with politics and the parties' adoption of a political marketing philosophy. Each of these issues is set in context by examining their contribution to explaining the significance and/or outcome of various key elections in Britain since the 1930s.

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 deals with topics concerning the methodology of socio-political empirical research and addresses statistical data analysis techniques. Students who have completed this course are able to: a) examine the pros and cons of the main data collection designs; b) explore quantitative data and interpret empirical results; c) analyze quantitative datasets resorting to statistical software; and d) define a research problem, formulate research questions, collect data, test research hypotheses empirically, draw conclusions, and communicate research results. Particularly, the course explores the foundations and process of social science research and familiarizes students with basic techniques and principles of statistical reasoning. The course comprises a lecture introducing a topic/statistical tool, and a lab/seminar showing its practical application.