Syllabus - The United Nations & Other International Organizations

This seminar series accompanies Dr. Helene Thiollet’s lecture Introduction to World Politics. Compulsory reading assignments dovetail with the lectures. They are designed to enable students to further their understanding of world politics and develop analytical skills through three types of graded work, as detailed below. Classes will be partly discussion-based and will include moderated group debates and student oral presentations.

The Kosovo crisis was in the air for a long time, since the first protests of the Kosovar Albanians in 1981, after Tito's death continued to grow during the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation in the early 1990s. The intervention of the international community in the summer of 1999 whose legality was and is still questioned, apparently managed to end the war, but not animosities and ethnic discrimination between Serbs and Albanians. This paper seeks to find answers to several questions, including the effectiveness of the peacekeeping process and of international interventions in post-conflict areas and their contribution to a more stable peace. The objective of the research is to describe the peacekeeping activities deployed in the unstable region of Kosovo and to analyze their role played on the international security system and their effects on the civilian population from the province. This paper aims to initiate in the backstage of the phenomenon of peacekeeping, bringing the pros and cons in terms of efficiency of the KFOR troops in Kosovo.

The study of international relations is strongly influenced by the assumption of anarchy, i.e., that there is no central law enforcing authority in the international system. Absent such an authority, cooperation among states is hard. In anarchy, power, interests and the ever-present possibility of violent conflict are the defining principles of relations among states. From this perspective, international institutions such as the United Nations and international law play at best a secondary -if not entirely epiphenomenal -role.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the study of politics and government. It is designed the familiarize students of all social sciences with the major concepts and themes in the discipline of political science. To accomplish that objective, the course explores the discipline's major subfields (political theory, public policy, political behaviour, international politics), and delves into critical political phenomena such as political culture, political participation, political parties, and public opinion.