Applied Political Analytics. The comprehensive course on research methods tailored for students of multidisciplinary backgrounds introduces them to a wide range of political research techniques. The course will have a balanced focus on quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods and will follow the research process logic from formulating a research question, hypothesis testing, process tracing, and theory-generating. The course will cover the following topics ranging from research design to grounded theory formulation. The course will introduce students to quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research examples from all fields of political science and international relations ton illustrate each topic. The students will try using various software for the purposes of their research. The topics covered include but not limited to the following research methods. Research design, Quantitative methods - survey research, scaling techniques, data aggregation and processing. Quantitative methods – content analysis, social networks analysis. Statistical techniques – regression models. Qualitative methods – interviewing, ethnography, focus groups methodology, discourse analysis. Mixed methods research techniques – QCA and MMR. Special emphasis will be made on ethical considerations in research proposals, paradigm, theoretical framework, research approach, data collection and analysis.

Politics and security in post-soviet countries_The course aims to give to the student proper tools to understand the behavior of the political actors of the former Soviet area, by introducing a trans-national analysis approach and specific case studies related to the domestic policies of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, together with the study of bilateral and multilateral relationship among them.
At the end of the course, the student will be able to analyze the interactions of many factors (such as geography, history and common heritage, economic development, market economy and its resources, democracy and authoritarianism, political agenda and its challenges) and to critically understand bilateral and multilateral relations in the former Soviet area (including the integration plans). Students will be able to evaluate political and economic issues of that region and their evolution through XXI century by confronting them with the Russian ones. Therefore, students will obtain proper analytic skills to understand regional developments

Critical geopolitics. The course will provide knowledge and comprehension of various schools of geopolitical thought in a critical perspective. Students will analyze XX century world politics and the fundamental geopolitical schools, critically comment the main theories and concepts, evaluate XX century history through the geopolitical prism and confront the various interpretation of contemporary issues. The course will include the following topics:
• Origins of geopolitics
• Social Darwinism in geopolitics
• Realism and neo-realism in geopolitics; geographical determinism and revisionism
• Liberalism and neo-liberalism in geopolitics
• Postmodernism in geopolitics
• Russian geopolitical thought