Political Science

Liberalism aspires to the greatest possible freedom constrained only by a system of mutually compatible individual rights and the intrinsic value of individuals. Thus its core value is freedom, and its outlook individualist. Recently, liberalism has been challenged by a left-leaning “identity politics” that gives precedence to groups (especially understood in terms of race, religion, and sex/“gender”) over individuals; to “safe spaces” and the protection against alleged “psychological harms” and “offense” over freedom of speech; and to equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. The latter point is due to the fact that “identity politics” can only conceive of significant statistical group differences in terms of achievements in certain fields as the result of one group ”discriminating” against the other instead of as the natural effect of culturally (let alone biologically) mediated differences in average preferences and abilities playing themselves out in a free society. This course will critically evaluate the relative philosophical, moral, and political merits of liberalism as compared to “identity politics.”

This course looks at the ideas, issues, and actions that shape our contemporary world.  It asks how we understand the world, how we might understand it differently and why certain issues dominate global politics while others are ignored.  It also examines the capacity for people, organizations, and nations to co-operate in search of solutions to today’s pressing problems. In doing so, this course is broken up into two key sections: Global Visions; and Conflict and Co-operation. The first section looks at different approaches to thinking about international relations and world politics and introduces students to the key actors, agents, institutions and ideas that dominate the world today. The second section, ‘Crisis and Co-operation’ looks at the sources of international tensions, and the possibilities for global co-operation around major issues such as transnational conflict, international political economy, global environmental management, and human and social rights. In each theme this course examines the history of these major areas of contemporary international relations and the competing debates and agendas within them. It then focuses upon causes and consequences of a contemporary crisis and examines the possibilities of global co-operation in its resolution.

This course studies the history of the 20th century global movement before World War II, which influenced global politics. Students are expected to examine a historical case of a local movement crossing over to global politics. 
 

This course introduces the study of human rights in political science. It discusses how the ideas of and discourses about human rights have been structured and discussed in the context of domestic and international politics.  The course also explores how actual human rights norms are acknowledged or rejected, observed, or ignored, and promoted or withdrawn at the domestic as well as international level. 

This course is organized into two parts. The first half of the course begins with an overview of the concepts and theoretical issues in human rights studies. The second half focuses on the explanations of different human rights practices across countries, looking at various topics related to human rights; it considers the conditions favorable for better human rights practices and processes that bring actual changes in human rights practices. 

By the end of the course, students are expected to have become an expert on at least one human rights issue. Small group case study research and presentations are also expected throughout this course. 

This course considers the characteristics and political dynamics of the unprecedented geographical construction of the European Union. It is based on the interactive pedagogy of the flipped classroom: students appropriate resources and facts during the week and mobilize them in group work workshops during the course sessions. Students prepare and present serious simulation games.

This course provides a historical, financial, political, and institutional overview of international financial architecture. The first part of the course reviews the progressive construction of the multilateral system over the last few centuries, with a specific focus on the main UN organizations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and multilateral development banks. In the second part, the course focuses on the limits of the current architecture in the face of the multiplicity of new global challenges (the fight against poverty and inequality, global warming and the protection of biodiversity, food and energy security, the response to pandemics). The course concludes with a reflection on possible ways forward for the current architecture, in an increasingly volatile economic, financial, and geopolitical context. 

This course investigates the concepts of liberty, equality, and reconciliation. The course approaches these concepts by studying a sequence of authors including Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, Betham, Mill, Nozick, and Rawls. Students also explore important considerations of class, gender, and race, with readings from Marx and Engels, MacKinnon, and Delaney.

This course takes a comprehensive look at the challenges and dynamics of "Arctic" issues and relations. The course is structured in four thematic parts: what’s going on and the Arctic now and then; ways of analyzing what’s going on in the Arctic; what the Arctic is a region of; and global issues/arctic particulars. While the first part establishes the basics in terms of geography, states, institutions, and current political developments in an empirical way, the remaining three parts use theoretical approaches from international relations and neighboring disciplines to look at these political dynamics. The second part applies concepts and approaches from core international relations theories such as security dilemma, deterrence, interdependence, norms and rules, and securitization, while the third part deconstructs the idea of the Arctic as a region and understands how it is instrumentalized for a number of purposes, drawing on constructivism, post-structuralist, and critical geopolitics. The last part takes a cross-cutting look at three globally relevant and salient issues – post-colonialism and decolonization, feminism and gender, and climate change and the Anthropocene – to understand their relevance and particularity in the Arctic in a way that seeks to go beyond the state-focused approaches. As such, this course critically applies previous international relations theories and knowledge, but the final part also steps outside these theoretical approaches, and through the empirics of the course, ventures into texts and approaches from neighboring disciplines to gain other perspectives on the top of the world. The course necessitates curiosity about issues and concepts spanning military and strategic studies to post-colonialism and the notion than non-humans can also be analytically central.         

The course explores the nature of civil society and the political role of civil society actors - at local, national, and global levels. Civil society's traditional role as a third sector between the state and the market is critically examined by considering both theories of civil society and empirical case studies of democratic activism and social change. The course covers the contested meaning of "civil society," attending to its historical and cultural variation. Empirical case studies consider a variety of social movements and, where possible, include meetings with activists and other practitioners. The course enables students to critically evaluate the changing role of contemporary civil society and develops a practical understanding of how civil society actors pursue social change, along with why they fail and why they succeed. 

This course highlights the political and intellectual bases of the European project since the 19th century to better understand the current transformations.