This course examines the European Union’s pursuit of digital sovereignty by linking Europe’s historical trajectories of technological development with theoretical perspectives from security studies. The first part of the course focuses on Europe’s technological and industrial transformations from the Industrial Revolution to the postwar period. Drawing on this historical contextualization, students will analyze how the EU seeks to govern and secure the digital domain through policies such as the General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the emerging AI Act, and initiatives on cloud sovereignty.
In the twentieth century, Europe became a site of extreme and extensive forms of political violence. This course will explore the main typologies of violence––driven by political motives and exerted by state and non-state actors––that emerged in that period, from both a historical and a theoretical point of view. The main goal of the course is to think critically about a set of substantive questions such as how people transformed political adversaries into enemies to be physically harmed; why some conflicts resulted in the killing of massive numbers of civilians; what were the social consequences of violence; and whether it is possible to observe patterns to violence’s occurrence in modern Europe.
The course proposes a multi-disciplinary approach that bridges History, Political Science, Sociology, and other fields of study that investigate this phenomenon. The course will locate political violence within its specific historical, geographical, and cultural contexts; shed light on the dynamics of radicalization, escalation, and de-escalation; and examine perpetrators’ individual as well as collective experiences. In addition to interpretative frameworks, the course will discuss a number of empirical cases, including the Armenian genocide in Turkey, paramilitarism in Italy, the civil war in Spain, and terrorism in Ireland and Germany.