Teaching

Islam, Politics, and the Middle East

Student evaluations: 9.30/10 average (Bocconi faculty performance index).

Islam, Politics, and the Middle East surveys the modern Middle East and North Africa, beginning with the rise of Islam, the early caliphates, Ottoman rule, and European colonialism, then tracing state formation after World War I, Arab nationalism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second half of the course turns to contemporary politics: the persistence of authoritarianism, the Arab uprisings, political Islam, terrorism, gender, and migration and forced displacement, closing with the foreign policies of regional and outside powers in the region. No prior coursework on the Middle East is assumed.

Politics of Conflict

Student evaluations: 9.15/10 average (Bocconi faculty performance index).

Politics of Conflict examines why political conflict occurs and how institutions contain, prevent, or mitigate it. The course moves from interstate war — the roles of bargaining, regime type, and individual leaders — to intrastate conflict, including civil war onset, civilian victimization and mass killing, humanitarian intervention, and terrorism, before closing with a set of specialized topics: gender, climate change, migration, sports, and the ethics of conducting research on conflict. Each week pairs peer-reviewed political science readings with a current or historical case — the war in Ukraine, the Syrian civil war, the war in Gaza — and several sessions are structured as student debates on a contested claim about that case.

Migration Politics

The course introduces the main debates in migration politics and uses them to sharpen students' own research. We cover why people move, asylum and refugee decisions, effects on labor markets and public finances and crime, public attitudes and perceived impacts, electoral and policy consequences, integration and discrimination, national approaches to migration, border and enforcement choices, contact and exposure, and outcomes for sending countries. Alongside the readings, students present short pieces of their paper, circulate drafts before class, and give and receive focused comments. The result is a full draft and a better command of the literature.

Political Violence

Student evaluations: 9.83/10 (Bocconi faculty performance index).

A PhD seminar on writing publishable political violence research, built around each student producing, with the instructor, a full draft of a co-authored paper over the semester.