Course Offerings by term

This course examines key analytical and normative challenges of the present: global rebalancing and the emergence or reemergence of postcolonial states, uneven development, the role of culture in world politics, the future of the nation state, the global environmental imperative, mass forced and free migrations, the new landscape of armed conflict, the sources and implications of sharpening social divides, and the challenges to liberal-democratic theory and practice.

Political philosophy forms that branch of philosophy that reflects on the specificity of the political. Why are humans, as Aristotle argued, political animals? How are they political? What are the means and ends of the political, and how best does one organize the political with such questions in mind? The course offers a topic-oriented approach to the fundamental problems underlying political theory and practice.

This course introduces students to the comparative study of politics, focusing on political behavior and the structures and practices that political systems have in common and those that distinguish them. We study different forms of democratic and authoritarian rule, state-society relationships, and key issues of political economy like development and welfare states. While the emphasis is on domestic features, we also analyze the impacts of globalization on national politics.

This course analyses the basic setting, structure and dynamics of world politics with emphasis on current global problems, practices and processes. In doing so, it introduces the major theoretical approaches to international politics, and uses theory as a methodological tool for analyzing sources of change and causes of conflict and/or cooperation in the global arena.