COURSE DESCRIPTION
Required Courses
1- Advanced Research Methods
This course examines the meaning and stages of scientific inquiry and the relationship between theory and empirical data. It covers four broad topics: (i) the foundations of social science, (ii) research design, (iii) data collection, and (iv) data analysis. Precisely this course gives students skills (a) to read and understand a variety of empirical research papers using different techniques, so as to develop awareness of possible solutions to problems (in terms of both literature and statistical packages) that the students may encounter as independent researchers in the future (b) to formulate a research question and translate it into an empirical step-by-step approach for working with data (c) to practice the presentation of the results of statistical work in such a way as to be comprehensible to both those people skilled in statistical techniques and to those that are less versed in quantitative methods. All in all, by the end of the course, students should be able to formulate good research questions and design appropriate research; to collect their own data using a variety of methods; to analyze both qualitative and quantitative data using computer-based skills and to critically evaluate research of other social scientists. All in all, it concentrates on the methods of studying politics scientifically delving into the problems of ‘method’ and ‘logic’ of studying political science. It explains ways of data collection and methods of empirical data analysis. It familiarizes students with methods of hypothesis verification and the relation between theoretical and empirical research. The course is concerned with the design, collection and analysis of behavioral information using various sociological methods, with main emphasis on the social survey. It specifically focuses on sources of survey variation: sampling, survey mode (telephone, mail, personal), questionnaire format, question framing, interviewing, coding and statistical analysis. Alternative measurement approaches and basic multivariate analysis strategies are also examined.
2- Comparative Politics
This course benefits from basic methods of comparison used in social sciences to indicate similarities, dissimilarities, contrasts, continuities, ruptures and discontinuities across space and over time in understanding state politics and influential corporate entities. It looks into development of comparative politics to identify epistemological and philosophical issues that may be effective in comparative political analysis. Political system, state and society, political culture, rational choice, institutionalism, political economy, development, democracy and democratic transitions are among the major theories to be referred in addition to methodological tools of comparison.
3- Contemporary Political Theory
This course focuses on key concepts including, but not limited to, power, authority, legitimacy, sovereignty, state, society, individual, nation and nationalism to identify and explore current conceptual problems and thematics in contemporary political theory. The course refers to influential contemporary theorists (mainly from modernism, post-modernism, post-structuralism) to identify in what ways they challenge “critical” tradition that ranges from classical Marxism to early Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse). The course, however, is not limited to a contradiction between Habermas and Foucault and elaborates diverse challenges also addressed by Benhabib, Baudrillard, Jameson and others.
4- Globalization and World Politics
This course defines globalization as increasing interactions between economic, cultural, political and social structures to explore how it channels shifts in World Politics and results in new opportunities and challenges. Issues to be explored are chosen from local, regional, national and trans-national levels of analyses. The course, within this perspective, does not only look at globalization of world politics, but also explores responses and reactions from world politics vis-à-vis new issues and challenges.
Elective Courses
1- Advances in Political Philosophy
This course transcends ancient, medieval modern and postmodern political philosophy to deepen analyses on concepts, theories and political philosophers. Issues to be discussed include continuities and discontinuities in political philosophy from Ancient Greek, to Critical Thinking, from Critical thinking and Habermasian modernism to post-modernism (with a special emphasis on Foucault’s understanding of history as well as the very idiosyncratic conceptualization of scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari).
2- American Foreign Policy and Government
This course is an introduction to government through the American experience. It concentrates on analysis of the institutions of government and politics as mechanisms of social control in the US. As America is marked by multiple traditions and identities reflected in its foreign policies, which this course specifically addresses. As well, this course focuses on political campaigns, a central feature of American democracy. It examines how they work and the conditions under which they affect citizens’ decisions. It then looks at campaign strategies and attributes of candidates, as well as how and whether they affect key outcomes such as the decision to turn out, who to vote for, and whether to spend money and volunteer time helping favored candidates win.
3- BRIC in World Politics
This course is an examination of politics in the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russian Federation, India and China covering also the development side of these rising powers. Firstly, Brazil has changed its political systems to embrace global capitalism. It appears as a nation that has the capacity to hold incredible promise and growth. Prioritizing international cooperation Brazil has formed the logical commodity suppliers internationally. Secondly, it concentrates on the Russian Federation since the collapse of Soviet communism, focusing on the factors promoting and impeding the development of a stable democratic regime. Topics include the general dynamics of political and economic transformation, leadership, institution building, political culture, regionalism and federalism, electoral and party politics, state-society relations and interest groups, and Russian nationalism and neo-imperialism. This course examines Russia as an indispensible global actor, and a regional power with its economic, political and energy-related potentials. Thirdly, India has quietly become a significant provider of development assistance to other less developed countries. In fact, current trends suggest that the country could become a net exporter of development assistance sometime in the next five years. Lastly, it concentrates on this transformation which is driven by India’s perception of itself as an emerging power, its competition with China for political influence and energy resources in developing countries, and the rapid growth of its domestic non-profit and private-consultancy sectors. It analyzes the new role of China in different forums of international cooperation. It concentrates on the political dilemmas of cooperation and economic rice of China in 21st century. The course creates an understanding of the emergence of China as and economic giant, its role in non-proliferation policy and in combating terrorism, as well as its relations to developing countries.
4- Citizenship and Identity Politics
This course starts from conceptual, social and political foundations of “citizenship” and is built on various types of identity politics encompassing a variety of roots including, but not limited to, race, culture, religion, gender and environment. It encompasses identity movements of 1970s in the USA, reaches current politics of identity with a special interest in how identity politics coalesced with the theoretical shift of the new left encompassing radical democratic movements.
5- Contemporary Issues in Turkish Politics
Contemporary Turkish Politics includes important changes and challenges and channels further developments. This course explores important actors and issues in order to come up with a detailed picture of Turkish Politics. It elaborates Turkey as a case not only because of its increasing significance in regional and global politics but also because of the theoretical sense the Turkish experience makes. The course aims at providing a conceptual background for Turkish case with regard to hot issues. Although the relations between the state, society and military will be attributed a special emphasis; the political culture, political parties, interest groups and civil society organizations will be important issues to be studied.
6- Contemporary Theories of International Relations
The course aims to provide students with a set of conceptual and analytical tools to enable them to acquire a deeper and more nuanced understanding of international relations through a survey of the principle schools of thought in modern international relations theory. A premise of the module is that a thorough knowledge of IR theory is necessary in order to comprehend the more empirical aspects of the subject which students encounter in other modules. It also provides a thorough conceptual and analytical background for eventual careers in fields (such as government, international organization, business and the media) which require articulate, clear, and independently minded individuals with a good grasp of contemporary international issues. Additionally, the module provides the theoretical framework through which we might more generally think about the important global issues of our age. The course stems from the early distinction between realism and liberalism, yet is mainly concerned with current articulation of diverse scholars with regard to English School, Critical Theory and Post-modernism. The course intends to elaborate links of these mainstream bodies with actual international political economy. It aims to explore the ways how contemporary scholars of international relations deviate from each other not only with regard to the use of concepts but also with regard to actual developments in world politics.
7- Energy Transitions and International Relations
This course elaborates energy and its security nexus with a special emphasis on issues that affect regional and global dynamics. It explores how transitions to coal, oil, nuclear, gas, renewables, and other selected fuels, affect the international system and characterizes international politics. Among the other issues to be explored are; the conceptual definition of energy security, its geopolitical meaning and the links of energy security with economy, development, environment and food; all with regard to similarities and dissimilarities between selected fuel type from carbons fuels to nuclear and renewable.
8- European Union Politics
The course examines the political process of European integration, its origins, dynamics and prospects within a rigorous theoretical and empirical framework. It also examines the social, economic and political transformations, which engendered the emergence of the modern nation state, and how it turned into a unique form of supranational body sharing national sovereignty in the form the European Union. It addresses key issues in European integration such as governance and policymaking, democratization, the development of the European identity, external relations, nationalism, and security. It provides an intensive knowledge of theory and practice of integration in Europe; political, historical, economic, social and legal aspects of integration; institutions of the EU, policy processes in the EU; impact of the EU on government systems in member states; implementation and enforcement of EU legislation; enlargement.
9- International Politics of the Middle East
International relations of the Middle East have long been dominated by uncertainty and conflict. External intervention, interstate war, political turmoil and interethnic violence have been compounded by the quarrels of oil politics and the claims of military, nationalist and religious movements. The purpose of this course is to set this region and its conflicts in context, providing on the one hand a historical introduction to its character and problems, and on the other, theoretical analysis of international relations of the region. This course provides a comprehensive analysis of Middle East international politics in the light of international relations theory. It assesses the historic formation of the regional state system, the role of external great powers, incorporation of the region into the international capitalist market and vice versa the impact of international penetration. It examines the consolidation of a sovereign state system and it analyses the impact of the foreign policy process in individual states.
10- Modern History of Turkish Politics
Shifts and continuities of the state, society, politics and institutions in Turkey lead to an important field of analysis. This course focuses on vicissitudes and ruptures from late Ottoman and Early republican eras to nowadays. It aims to highlight actors, institutions, organizations, identities, norms and the very political culture interrelated with these factors from a historical perspective. The course is built on three subsequent eras: 1- Late Ottoman Early Republican period; Post-Second World War to 1980s; and from 1980s to nowadays.
11- Non-Western Approaches to International Relations Theory
This course aims at analyzing international relations from a theoretical perspective remains outside of the so called Western World. The course moves on from Acharya’s and Buzan’s “existing criticisms that IR theory is Western-focused and therefore misrepresents and misunderstands much of world history” and explores non-Western IR tradition with a particular focus on Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Latin American scholars. The course therefore explores the gap beyond mainstream theories of international relations and defines international relations from a non-Western perspective to find out similarities, dissimilarities and contrasts between them.
12- Public Opinion Analysis
In democracies, the making of strategic commitments to foreign policy choices requires strong popular backing. The conventional wisdom suggests that maintaining public support is a compulsion in modern democracies because it serves as an indicator of people’s interests and desires that decision-makers inevitably must take into account. This course introduces students to the theoretical debates about the nature, significance and measurement of public opinion with specific focus on foreign policy decision-making. It provides them with the background knowledge and theoretical and practical skills needed to study and understand public opinion and politics connection. Given the theoretical and practical importance of studying public opinion in democratic systems, students learn the logic of inquiry on public opinion and domestic-foreign policy nexus, including case-specific and variable-oriented analyses. This course focuses on four major areas of the design and analysis of public opinion. Survey design and implementation, including sampling and the construction of the questionnaire; nature of the survey response, including the psychology of political attitude expressions, issues of question wording context, interviewer effects, and social desirability pressures; time permitting, the design of a new survey to measure environmental attitudes; and the analysis of an existing poll designed to measure attitudes on environmental issues.
13- Sustainable Development and Environmental Politics
Sustainable Development is a multi-disciplinary field which intersects economics with environment and ecology. This course refers to the political aspect of sustainable development and is concerned with how political parties, political movements, interest groups and civil society organizations conceive sustainable development differently with diverse expectations from environmental politics. The course, first of all, elaborates conceptual meaning of sustainable development with regard to economic, ecological, sociological and political aspects at individual, social, national, regional and global levels of analysis. It then identifies environmental politics to deepen the analysis on the link between politics and environment when it comes to sustainable development.
14- Theories of the State and Civil Society
This course elaborates theoretical and empirical issues of the state and civil society with regard to conceptual evolution of the state theories on the one hand, the way how the civil society emerged and channeled additional means of radical and egalitarian politics in developed and developing nations, on the other. The seminar explores theories of the state from classical to contemporary. It discusses to what extent relations between the state and civil society can be defined (in terms of having autonomy, relative power, absolute power) and looks into to what extent their relations can be characterized as antagonistic. This very last issue is of utmost significance since the contingent resurgence of the State (as Skocpol mentions) takes place with consolidation of civil societies in developed and developing nations, which may result in resurgence of some old and the birth of some new phenomena to be effective in theories of the state.
15- Turkish Foreign Policy
This course elaborates historical evolution of Turkish Foreign Policy with regard to dominant foreign policy pillars and analyzes the links with domestic politics, diplomacy, global dynamics, regional relations, regional problems and foreign trade. Continuities and discontinuities are explored in terms of foreign policy making under given conditions. Domestic and external factors that prove a certain degree of influence on national political outcomes are examined along with the scrutiny on decision making processes. The course, finally, aims at mapping well-defined foreign policy pillars within the IR theories.
16- Voting Behavior Research
This course underlines the election process and outcomes by understanding how and why voters made up their minds. Another major concern in voting research emphasizes changes in voting patterns over time, usually with an attempt to determine what the election results tell us about the direction in which politics is moving. In this case this course focuses on the dynamics of electoral behavior, especially in terms of present and future developments. These two concerns are complementary, not contradictory, but they do emphasize different sets of research questions. Therefore, this course provides a detailed basis for discussing key aspects of voting behavior
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