WHY DO WE STUDY CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL ANALYSIS

INTRODUCTION
Contemporary political analysis aims to examine the contemporary political analysis by looking at the various conceptual components involved with it. the course starts by discussing definitions of politics. it look at the nature of politics and how its very definition can underline the various possible approached to political analysis. From this initial discussion, contemporary political analysis spends two classes discussing classical and mainstream analytical approaches from which political analysis are made.
The course then examine the debate between structure and agency, which often shapes how explanations can focus on political actors, or their surrounding context, to understand a certain political event. Discussions, then, turn towards how analyses can be made on political changes. It discusses how explanations are built over transformative political changes, such as democratization.
An important relevant topic to political analysis is the notion of power. For this reason we study contemporary political analysis to examine the various conceptions of power, deriving from mainstream and non-mainstream research and their implications to the analysis of politics. From this discussion of power, we will turn to post-modern approach. Post-modern thought has created important challenges to social science in general. We examine these challenges and look at their effects on political analysis. From there, we then engage into discussions of the conceptual framework of materialism and idealism, examining the roles of ideas and material circumstances as determinant factors to understand political events.
The last two classes in contemporary political analysis are devoted to two non-mainstream contemporary approaches to political analysis. The first one, discourse analysis, takes discourse as a concept to understand how politics is possible in contemporary post-modern conditions. The second one focus on how sovereignty is maintained in contemporary world through the imposition of a global logic based on capital relations. Contemporary political analysis will compare and contrast these last two approaches, examining their claims and limitations.