This seminar is aimed at students of the master's programmes of the Faculty of Economics, Law and Social Sciences. The language of instruction is English.

You can find more information about the course on the Moodle learning platform. Please enrol there using the university-wide enrolment key.

Dates:

Sessions: 19.10.2023 - 1.2.2024 Thursdays, 8-10 a.m., LG 1/332.

Oral examinations: 8.2.2024

Content

This seminar considers intelligence agencies as a part of world politics. From this perspective, we will look at the historical origins of modern intelligence agencies and study a number of different examples. Students will be introduced to intelligence studies as an academic field, including different theoretical and methodological debates. The question of how intelligence agencies are controlled and governed, how they function internally and as part of a governmental system, will be addressed. Consideration will be given to the role of domestic political monitoring within both democratic and authoritarian states. In short, this seminar addresses and queries the role and function of intelligence agencies in relation to modern statehood and modern international relations.

• Online Lecture on Academic Skills for International Relations

• Writing Strategies for Social Science

• Information on academic work at the Bremen Institute for Intercultural and International Studies

• How to Read Political Science: A Guide in Four Steps

How to write seminar papers and BA theses

Here you will also find some general advice on how I mark papers. I don't fill in the evaluation sheet every time I give a mark, but use it as a general reminder to consider all the individual criteria:

1. evaluation critera

2. assessment sheet for written work

• _{What are the consequences of the moralisation of the EU?}

Course Content

The modern Middle East has not just been shaped by but has indeed emerged from human mobility in all its forms: nomadism, labour migration, violent displacement through war and conflict, and due to environmental change. Throughout the 20th and 21st century, Middle Eastern societies have integrated, both temporarily and permanently, migrant communities from neighbouring countries and from further afield. Migration continues to play a huge role in Middle Eastern politics today, both domestically and as part of the region's international relations. This course offers a critical and compassionate introduction to the personal and political dramas - for if migration is always political, it is also always emotional in some form - in which human mobility expresses itself in the region and beyond.

Proceeding from different case studies focused on the Middle East, we will study the political and economic frameworks that shape human mobility today, both in the region and globally. We will look at the role of international refugee law and compare it with national frameworks for handling migrant communities. A critical discussion of nationalism as a basis of modern politics will improve our understanding of why and how border controls are becoming increasingly violent in the Middle East and Europe. We will look at both the oppression and the liberation that migration may result in and study the complex reasons that motivate people to move. Students who take this course will gain a good understanding of the key political, economic, humanitarian and academic debates surrounding migration in the Middle East today. The course is based on a wide variety of texts. Aside from academic analyses, we will learn from NGO reports, memoirs, fiction, newspaper clippings and films.