Issues in International Relations.pdf

This course examines issues in contemporary international politics and considers various ways of thinking about international politics. We will study current events and the recent history that has shaped how states and other actors interact with each other across national borders and survey majors topics in international relations to encourage further examination in more advanced classes. Using recent disputes from international law, international security, sovereignty, religious conflict, human rights, and international political economy, it examines both the cases and the conceptual framing that makes them possible. By the end of the class, students will be able to critique common academic and policy arguments about global affairs and will have acquired the tools to begin their own analyses.

2016

Why do countries go to war with each other and why do they cooperate? How do domestic institutions or individual leaders impact a country’s external behaviour? Do international laws and institutions have any influence in global affairs? These types of questions have been central to the study of international relations for centuries. In the 20th century, Western scholars continued this tradition and established International Relations (IR) as a social science. This introductory course will examine the major theories of international conflict and cooperation that have emerged from this body of scholarship, as well as critiques of the discipline through the lenses of gender, race, and non-Western identity. It will also cover thematic issues such as economic interdependence, global governance, nuclear weapons, transnational movements, and the rise of new powers. The course provides an introduction to IR theory and instances in which insights from IR can illuminate the dynamics of real-world phenomena.

2016

This chapter is about the relationship between globalization and international politics. The first section makes a presentation of the reciprocal influence that characterizes this relationship. The second section concentrates on the extension of the number and kinds of the international actors and on the appearance of non-state actors, like NGOs, in world politics. This change, caused by the process of globalization, is extremely important in the definition of the global political system and the agenda of the sustainable development. The third section analyses the agenda of the global system and the institutions and procedures supplied by the state system to the global system in order to deliver political regulation to the global problems. The last section informs about the reaction of the International Relations theorists to the challenge posed to the knowledge of international politics by the globalization process. It reviews two great groups of theories: the pluralist school, which has been the most responsive school to the perception of the change of the international life, and the school of international democracy, which covers the analysis of a wide spectrum of problems and answers to important transformations which are affecting politics at the state and inter-state level.