Political Science

This course is designed specifically for international students. It focuses on the history of France and its Presidents.

This course introduces the history of political thought and state-building in the Middle East from the end of the Ottoman empire (1923) to present days. From the creation of the “Middle East” area by British and French mandatory administrations, this course analyzes how various political ideologies (Kemalism, Zionism, Nasserism, Khomeynism, Ba'athism, and Islamism) have influenced state-building processes in Iran, Turkey, Israel, and in the Near East. By providing methodology and tools based on historical sources, this course addresses the spread of nationalism in the Middle East to encourage a reflection on a question raised by Henry Laurens in 2019: will the 21st century witness the “end of the Middle East?”

This course introduces concepts from psychology (e.g. beliefs, emotions, or personality) to better understand politics (e.g. elite decision-making, voting behavior, or popular uprisings). Topics are structured around three types of methods that are frequently applied in psychology: experiments, surveys, and interviews. Students gain first-hand research experience by working in small teams to evaluate primary data on a topic of their choice (e.g. right-wing voting, state decisions to go to war, or emotional effects of terror attacks). 

The course introduces a variety of concepts and theories to analyze global governance, with a focus on organizations and institutions including international and regional organizations, firms, and NGOs. Course materials discuss topics from international relations, political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Substantively, the course covers diverse issues such as security, development, and science.   

Drawing on the seminar style, the course requires each person to contribute through discussion, presentation, and a written research proposal on topics of their choice.   

This course develops a broad analysis of the history of human rights and democracy in Brazil. It begins by discussing how the idea itself of human rights appeared in history worldwide to stablish a critical approach of the topic, considering the historical experiences of the country’s invasion, slavery, torture, and dictatorships of the past. The agenda of memory, truth, justice, and reparation in the reconstruction of democracy is foundational. The course considers how memory affects society, its culture, and the political system, and the frame of rights of the Constitution of 1988. The course treats crucial topics about human rights in the country, its limitations, and challenges.

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.