Australian National University

This course examines the rise of China and its implications for regional and global security. It critically examines the theory and practice of China's international relations, as well as explores the ways in which China's historical legacy has shaped its worldview and foreign policy. Drawing on key concepts of power, legitimacy, national identity and international status, the course examines China's evolving global role, with a particular emphasis on key relationships and security challenges in the Asia-Pacific. 

The 2020s have seen the rise of numerous strategic problems for Australia. There are giant states in fierce competition, such as the United States and China, and emerging giants in India and Indonesia. There are also problems from below, such as climate change, artificial intelligence, cyber security, and terrorism. This course examines the security challenges facing Australia and explores how Australia should approach its region. 

This course examines the body of law known as International Law or sometimes ‘Public International Law', as distinct from ‘Private International Law'. The field of International Law deals with many aspects of the functioning of the international community (including the relations of States with each other and with international organizations); it also affects many activities that occur within or across State boundaries (including the treatment by States of their citizens, environmental law, military operations, and many other areas). 

This course examines foundational international relations theories encompassing realist, liberal-internationalist and constructivist perspectives to ongoing and emerging political dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region. It complements comparative political perspectives on regional governance by applying state-centric and key sub-state based perspectives on understanding how the region ‘matters’ in a global context. Various perspectives on international political economics, foreign policy analysis, international security and regional/international institutions will supplement the theoretical perspectives that underwrite the subject’s conceptual approach.

This course examines he study of public policy. It provides an overview of the main theories of public policy processes and examples of their application in the scholarly literature. The course will review the key challenges facing public policy makers. The approach will blend theory and case studies.

This course, relying on economic frameworks, explores historical and contemporary Indigenous populations and these peoples’ participation in and marginalization from the contemporary Australian economy and society. Incorporating First Peoples ' diverse perspectives, we consider contemporary First Nations’ and other Indigenous peoples’ economic activities in an historical context. Students have the opportunity to develop insight into First Nations perspectives on economic development, wellbeing and prosperity. We explore First Peoples' innovative responses to contemporary challenges borne of the ongoing impacts of colonization and systemic bias. Topics change each year, and include the continuities of First Peoples’ practices in resource management and communal sustenance; innovative engagements with the settler and global economy; demographic and population change; land, water and sea rights; human capital development; income and wealth; participation in the labor market; and, entrepreneurship. 

This course examines gender, sex and sexuality across a range of cultural settings seeking, in the process, to question most of what we - including most theorists of sex/gender - take for granted about the gendered and sexed character of human identity and difference. Topics explored include: the saliency of the categories man and woman; the relationships between race and gender; the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in the representation of gender, sex and sexuality; the usefulness of the notion of oppression; the relationship between cultural conceptions of personhood and cultural conceptions of gender; and the ethnocentricity of the concepts of gender, sex and sexuality themselves. To assist these explorations we will make use of cross-cultural case studies in a number of areas including rape, prostitution, work and domesticity, the third sex and homosexuality.

This course examines the theoretical frameworks, empirical cases, policy instruments, and cutting-edge debates in the fields of international non-legal social norms and international law from an International Relations perspective. The course goes beyond the conventional moralistic and black-letter approaches, and instead focuses on the political contexts, causes, and consequences of norms and international law. The course is structured in three parts. First, we will focus on the different theoretical perspectives in International Relations for understanding norms and international law, such as realist, liberal, and constructivist approaches. Second, the course will examine the general issues of norms and international law, including the actors of norms and international law, the creation and sources of norms and international law, and the problem of compliance. Third, we will examine the interrelationships between norms and international law, on the one hand, and international politics, on the other hand, in several global issue areas, such as the use of force, human rights, international criminal justice, the environment, and/or trade. 

This course examines the theoretical and practical issues surrounding peace and conflict studies. It begins by exploring the range of different understandings of the roots of violence and the contemporary manifestations of conflict. It  then examines the key actors in conflicts such as elites, constituencies, civil society, soldiers, mercenaries, spoilers and outside actors. Turning to major debates in the field, it explores the question of whether it is ever 'just' to use violence for political ends; the concept of 'non-violence' in theory and practice; and debates over external intervention (including the R2P debate, various 'soft' and 'hard' power approaches and the role and efficacy of the UN). We then investigate key approaches in the field - such as conflict prevention, conflict management, conflict resolution and conflict transformation (and the relationship between these approaches). The role that human security, human rights and international law plays in such processes is also examined. The course then turns to the relationship that conflict resolution has to peacekeeping, peace-enforcing and post-conflict situations. Integral to these discussions is the application of theory to case-studies such as Israel-Palestine, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq East Timor, Sri Lanka and Rwanda. The final part of the course assesses the future of conflict and conflict prevention.

Recent events in global politics have forced the memory of empire into the public domain. Equally, changes in the international system have prompted analysts of various stripes in the public domain to refer to the US, China, Europe or Russia as ‘empire’. These changes have been reflected in political science with American Empire Debate, a turn toward history and critical voices calling for the decolonization of the discipline and a call for a recognition of the importance of empire in shaping global politics. A sub-discipline of comparative empire studies has emerged that overlaps history with IR and calls for ‘epistemic decolonization’ have arisen alongside scholarship which offers colonization as a viable policy option. With the disciplines of the social sciences being largely oriented around the state, this course takes as its focus empire as its referent object and asks: why has political science paid it so little attention? What is an empire and how do we theorize it and study it? What does the introduction of empire as a field of study mean for political science and how we understand the international system? This course takes empire as its object of inquiry and provides students with an interdisciplinary map for the various ways it has been theorized and understood. The aim of the course is to examine and assess in comparative frame the different kinds of analytical tools and methodological problems that might be applied to the study of empire. It will pose the theorization of empire as a problem which will be explored conceptually, methodologically and empirically. Finally, we explore what empire as a political form or category of analysis contributes to our understanding of global politics