Conflicts, political arrangements and legitimacy

The course intends to prepare students to engage with complex political issues and to enhance their analytical and argumentative skills. These core objectives are pursued by providing students with a comprehensive understanding of the key concepts, theories, and debates in political philosophy, which are meant to be useful tools for tackling controversial and publicly debated political questions. More specifically, the course focuses on political conflicts, their sources and their dynamics and on the relevant strategies and arrangements to deal with them. The latter are investigated comparatively in order to enable students to grasp their relative merits and shortcomings. Additionally, the course proposes to train students to apply theoretical categories and frameworks to real-world scenarios for better appreciating their potentiality to make sense of and assess political events and phenomena.

KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING:
Students are expected to acquire a comprehensive understanding of political conflicts and their relevance for both politics and political philosophy as well as a thorough knowledge of the available options and arrangements to tackle conflicts and their implications. More specifically, students are expected to be able to:
- define conflict and identify its primary causes;
- critically discuss the link between conflict and politics;
- argue for and against the idea that conflict can be politically fruitful;
- comparatively assess strategies aimed at supressing conflict with arrangements that are meant to manage - rather than to eliminate - conflict and with arrangements that acknowledge pluralism and its value;
- explain what political dissent is and why it characterizes even political societies that do not suppress conflict but rather embrace pluralism;
- illustrate the dissenting strategies available to political actors and to assess them by considering both their legitimacy and their effectiveness;
- clarify and evaluate the political options for accommodating dissenting positions.

APPLYING KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING:
Students are expected to be able to apply their acquired knowledge and competences to issues animating public debates. To this end, the course offers several occasions for in-depth class discussion, which will provide a suitable space for debating the relevance and import of the philosophical notions and approaches under examination with respect to more concrete matters and questions. Moreover, during classes, the theoretical notions and models under investigations will be illustrated with references to real-world cases of political conflict and their settlement.

MAKING JUDGEMENTS:
The structure of the course and the selected readings are expected to increase students' propensity for autonomous judgment. The course will address essays providing opposite arguments concerning, for instance, the role of conflict in politics or the strategies to manage it. Students will be therefore introduced to a plurality of perspectives, and this is expected to improve their capacity to adjudicate among competing arguments by autonomously assessing their relative merits and limits. The bulk of the course will consist in the analysis of philosophical arguments - of their premises and their internal structure - and, during both class discussions and presentations, students will be required to critically examine the arguments at stake, thus enhancing their capacity to autonomously judge their validity.

COMMUNICATION:
Through class discussions and presentations, students are expected to strengthen their communication skills. They will be required to summarize complex arguments in a clear and effective way, and they are expected to actively take part in discussions, by proposing critical insights on the topics under scrutiny and by engaging with arguments proposed by their classmates.