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Over the past century, an intertwined web of legal institutions has emerged at the international level to regulate government conduct across a wide range of issue areas, including global trade, environmental sustainability, warfare, and human rights protection. This proliferation of international legal agreements and organizations has provoked contentious debates among scholars and policymakers alike regarding the function and efficacy of international law in driving national-level decision-making. This course will explore those debates while surveying the contemporary international legal landscape. We will examine questions that are central to assessing the contributions of international law and the future of global governance, for example: What is the relationship between political power and judicial authority in constructing international legal outcomes? Whose voices and interests are reflected in international legal institutions, and whose voices and interests are elided in those institutions? Under what conditions can international law substantively constrain state behavior

This course explores the impact of the rise of political leaders around the world who base their power on their direct connection to 'the People' and who criticize elites and others. In particular we will focus on the rise of right wing populist in Europe and North America and left wing populist in Latin America.

Conversations about Islam and its relationship to politics often ask the wrong questions, assuming monolithic positions and clear-cut prescriptions where there are none. This course focuses on how Muslim answers to “political” questions are generated and contested; how disagreement is mediated (or not) within the Islamic tradition; and how notions of the political, the religious, and the secular do or do not make sense outside of the (non-Muslim) European contexts in which they were conceived.

In the international community, state sovereignty is the primary mechanism through which political actors gain the power to govern and enact foreign policy. International law recognizes self-determination as a right not only belonging to states, but to individuals and people groups. As such, there are inherent tensions undermining the realization of self-determination in a state system that is characterized by borders drawn by colonization and great power subordination of historically marginalized groups. This course interrogates the extent to which privileging state sovereignty as the hallmark of legitimate agency in the international system empowers and constrains the right to self-determination

This course delves into the intricate relationship between the structuring of urban spaces and the dynamics of political power. How do political ideologies, competition, and governance shape the layout of city planning, architecture, and public spaces? In turn, how does urban space play its role in the relationship between the state and society? Case studies range from 19th-century France to today’s China. Topics include legibility, demolition, and gentrification, and other relevant themes.