University of Cambridge, Pembroke College

In 1800, two empires dominated the region of the Middle East: the Ottoman and Qajar Empires. Today, there are seventeen nation-states in the Middle East. How and why did this happen? This course serves as an introduction to the history of the modern Middle East with an emphasis on developing an understanding of how the region we call the Middle East came to take its current shape. Students explore the encounter with European modernity and subsequent European imperialism, modernisation efforts, responses to colonialism, the rise of new ideologies such as nationalism, and the role of religion in politics and political discourse. The course focuses on the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Turkey, and the Middle East in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This interactive course revolves around problem-solving and both playing and analyzing mathematical games. Throughout the course, students are given a sequence of carefully selected problems to solve individually. Students are given ample time to think about the questions - with hints from the instructors as needed - and they receive follow-up problems after each problem solved. Later in the course, the solutions and key learnings are presented by the instructors. Topics include mathematical games, graph theory, chapters from combinatorics, information theory, and invariants.

A research project that assigns students to expert professors in their proposed research topic. The course takes the students' research capabilities to a more professional level. This can be most closely compared to what is called a supervised research project in the USA.

The conflict environment in which peace mediators operate has changed considerably since the end of the Cold War. The discrete Cold War conflicts between a state and a major political rebel group, each backed by a Cold War power, have fragmented into localized, urbanized, and criminalized conflicts of the kind we see in Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, and South Sudan today. At the same time, peace mediation as a field has become increasingly professionalized and standardized through the international codification of peace mediation norms and techniques of peace process design. This course considers how the process design tools, concepts of conflict analysis, and norms underpinning "peace mediation" are evolving to negotiate peace in increasingly complex intra-state conflicts. The course begins by examining the traditional realist and liberal concepts of conflict analysis and techniques of peace process design developed to understand and manage conflict during the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War era. Using critiques from peace studies, comparative politics, global IR theory, sociology and post-colonial theory, the course highlights the weaknesses of these traditional IR approaches to peace mediation in the post 9/11 international security environment.