Political Science

This course introduces student government and politics of America, including its major elected offices (president, senators, congress persons and state governors), nomination process (caucuses and primaries), political parties and candidates, campaign issues and financing, and the general election. The course also analyzes the cleavages that divide American societies, seeking to understand how race, ethnicity, gender, religion, region, and sexual orientation affect people’s support for political parties and voting behavior.  In addition, there will be discussion on American foreign policy.  

This course provides an introduction to the theory and practices of economic policy-making. To understand economic policy-making, students take an economic as well as a political perspective. Students focus on the rationale behind economic policies, and seek to understand major changes in economic policy, and variation in policies across countries. Students also look at individual preferences for these policies, and their implications for the policy-making process. In the process, the course covers areas such as economic liberalization, financial regulation, labor market policies, and policies of poverty reduction and social insurance. The course takes an empirical and comparative approach, and its focus is generic, though most of the literature is concerned with policy-making in EU and OECD countries. 

This course presents a broad picture of international migration in recent history and a detailed picture of its recent trends. It introduces the analytical and empirical tools that are necessary to evaluate its impact on the host countries.

At an empirical level, this course provides a solid knowledge in Lebanese history, mainly in the major violent episodes of its trajectory: the civil war (1975-1990), Israeli occupation (1982-2000), and Hezbollah's intervention in Syria (since 2013). It also presents a specific understanding of a practice of power far removed from what can be observed in Western democracies. Without being an authoritarian regime, the Lebanese political staff has always had a particular definition of ruling, a special understanding of democracy, that goes beyond the usual features shared by consociational systems everywhere else in the world (Switzerland, Belgium, Bosnia). This course is hence thought-provoking in political science, as it introduces models of ruling usually unfamiliar, models that are more frequent than typically imagined. By doing so, the course also triggers a shared reflection on theoretical concepts of political science, and a questioning of the universality of some of what Western political sociology sees as basic elementary truths and rules of the game in politics-in-practice. The course addresses Lebanese contemporary history; the notion of militancy in contexts of violence; a critical notion of foreign intervention, peacemaking, peacebuilding, state building, reconciliation, and transitional justice; and a good command of a particular case of consociational politics.

Set as a new objective of the European Union (EU) by the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) has since proven to be one of the most dynamic EU policy-making domains. It now encompasses key individual policies addressing fundamental concerns of European citizens: police cooperation, judicial cooperation in criminal and civil matters, border management, visa and asylum policies etc. This course analyzes the progressive development of the AFSJ by providing insights on three main considerations: who are the individual and collective actors contributing to that policy domain; which theories and concepts help us to understand the creation and evolutions of the AFSJ; and what are the key reforms, debates, and controversies of the individual AFSJ policies. 

This course examines concepts and debates relating to public health, health inequalities, and health policy in a global context. It enables students to understand the policy making process, to analyze the roles of key health policy actors, and to consider the relationship between evidence and policy in relation to health.

This course discusses the issues European migration policies seek to address, from curbing irregular migration and increasing migrant returns, to attracting talents and making asylum systems work. It explores the range of actors who shape this agenda and how policies at EU and EU Member State levels are intertwined. The course critically assesses the main migration issues in Europe, examines the trade-offs faced by European policymakers, analyzes how migration policies are designed and implemented, and outlines the effects European migration policies have on countries of origin and transit.

This course is an introduction to the study of religion in the social sciences. It examines what people do with religion and what religion does to people. The guiding thread of this course is to investigate how “religion” itself as a category is debated and contested, what counts as religion, and who gets to decide. The course is divided into three parts. The first part explores the definitions of religion that have been provided by classical authors. The second part analyzes the intersections of religion with other social categories such as class, gender, and race. The third part interrogates the politics of religion and how States, international organizations, political actors, and citizens grapple with religion, seek to regulate it, or use it to further political ends. The course is interdisciplinary and exposes students to various approaches of religion rooted in political science, sociology, history, and anthropology. It provides the theoretical and methodological tools to best appraise the place of religion in contemporary societies and discuss such complex and debated issues as secularism, fundamentalism, religious freedom, and religious discrimination.

This course asks and answers the question "what are data, and how do they come to be?" The story of data reveals the moral and political values that shape human practices of counting, measuring, and labelling reality, and helps us better understand the growing power of data in today's world. Designed to engage students across the disciplines, this introductory course offers a foundational integration of basic concepts and methods of data science with the historical and philosophical context that reveals their ethical and political dimensions as inseparable from their scientific value. The course draws from the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, history, mathematics, computer science, and the design arts to build up a more comprehensive picture of how data are constructed, interpreted, shared, and used for a growing range of scientific, commercial, public and creative purposes.

This course examines debates across the field of global ethics. It introduces students to frameworks for thinking about global moral questions concerning for example the global distribution of wealth, the appropriate meaning of human rights in a multicultural world, environmental sustainability, migration, development aid, conflict resolution, and transitional justice. Students are expected to evaluate different approaches to ethical judgment and apply them to real-world dilemmas.