Political Science

The course provides an introduction to the politics and economics of European integration. It draws upon theories of international relations, political economy, and governance to assess the origins of the European project and the politics of market integration after 1945. Students analyze the EU’s evolving institutional framework by charting the constitution-building process and mapping the distribution of executive, legislative, administrative, and judicial functions over time. The course then explores the expansion of EU power and legal competence in key policy fields over the past two decades. It begins by considering the history and theory of economic and monetary union, as well as the causes and consequences of the Eurozone crisis. The course also explains the rapid development of the EU as an internal and external security actor in the post-Cold War era through cooperation in asylum and immigration policy, and foreign, and defense policy. It ends by reflecting on the scale and pace of the EU enlargement process and the wider political implications of the EU’s democratic deficit. 

This course approaches the economics of refugees as a theme in its own right within the economics of migration. It provides a comprehensive overview of the contemporary issues involved in receiving people who are forced to move to developed countries. It considers subjects that the tools of economics can decipher and interconnect to inform public decision-making, such as international law, public policy, the behavior of populations in host countries, the impact on the labor market, and climate change, as well as NGOs, international institutions, and companies in the social economy. 

This course covers issues concerning the causes, processes, obstacles, and consequences of democratic transition in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia - three of the largest and the most populous countries of Southeast Asia. The specific issues to be covered include economic growth and stagnation, the middle class, capitalist rule, rural politics, political parties, military coups, corruption, electoral violence, gangsters, social movements, street protests, the monarchy, communal conflicts, and female politicians.

Relying on a multidisciplinary perspective, this course provides theoretical and empirical tools to understand contemporary Iran. It studies decisive historical events, figures, and ideologies to understand how Iran interacted and interacts with regional and global powers. It analyzes the Iranian political and religious model to understand continuities and discontinuities in Iranian domestic policies (institutional and political structure, state ideology) as well as the evolution of alliances and balances of powers (regionally and internationally). The course encourage reading and familiarization with the global academic literature to develop critical thinking and methodological skills.

The course introduces and critically analyzes the major IR theoretical traditions. Because of the complexity of world politics, assumptions (i.e., criteria for thinking about what and how to study world politics) to guide our study are needed. The different traditions – or "-isms" – provide these assumptions and offer a set of different lenses through which to explore world politics. The course, through practical application of theories, explores the ways in which the main theoretical traditions compare and contrast.

This course presents the main principles of International Political Economy (or Global Political Economy), which studies globalization, i.e. the reciprocal interaction between international relations, economics, and politics by gathering knowledge from history, international relations, politics, economics, and sociology in an innovative way. The course provides a broad overview of the frameworks of analysis, actors, institutions, issues, and processes responsible for international relations, the causes of war, inter-state economic competition, and the structural configuration of power in the global context. Therefore, it tries to analyze global affairs into a three-dimensional perspective: statist logic, market logic, and institutional logic. It also provides both academic skills and applies these skills for professional outcomes. The course relies on readings, class debates, and the study of factual cases.

This course examines terrorism both in Spain and globally. Topics include: terrorism in Spain; victims of terrorism; psychological consequences of terrorist attacks on the victims; secondary vicitimization, violence of terrorist persecution and their psychological consequences; comprehensive care for victims of terrorism.

This course builds students’ understanding of the causal mechanics underlying conflicts across a variety of settings and periods, the character of the violence in these conflicts, and the prospects for resolution. Drawing on major theoretical approaches to the explanation of violence, students apply these theoretical frameworks to an empirical examination of political violence in a range of periods and settings, including Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Syria, Ireland, Sierra Leone, and others. Students explore how and to what extent the major approaches in the scholarship explain the reality of conflict in different regional, cultural, and historical contexts.

This course discusses and develops critical social-scientific perspectives on citizenship, belonging, and difference in contemporary, late-capitalist societies. In a world characterized by flux and the transgression of geographic and symbolic boundaries, a great deal of effort is invested in fixing and freezing identities and controlling and regulating borders. This dialectic of flow and closure is examined from a critical perspective that places contemporary social and cultural dynamics in the historical context of the rise of modern capitalism and nationalism while taking into account 19th and 20th-century experiences of colonialism, authoritarianism, and fascism. The first part of the course focuses on theories of modernity, citizenship, and differences in the political and social sciences, political philosophy, and the humanities. In the second part, several contemporary issues, including (the rise of) new forms of nationalism and the far right; debates about religious diversity and secularism; gender and sexuality; race and racism; and the transformation & politics of identity in neoliberal societies are the focus. The course brings together perspectives from various fields, while especially focusing on perspectives from the global south and from (relatively) marginalized academic fields, like queer studies, critical race perspectives, and postcolonial studies. Students develop and undertake a small research project on identity, based on which they write a final paper.