International Studies

This course covers advanced theories of International Relations. The course explores central questions of international politics by examining the different traditions of thought about the character and nature of "the international." The course goes beyond realist and liberal theories to explore a counter-history of the theory on international politics and covers topics such as Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism, international political sociology, migration, environmental studies, and critical approaches to the international order and its institutional structures. The course examines how "the international" was constructed as a field of study throughout capitalist modernity, and how these theories are connected to the practice of international relations. It ends by relating international theory to contemporary events, such as the global war on terror and the rise of the far-right.

This course examines the economic geography of developing countries through a Marxist theoretical lens, exploring how capitalism creates and maintains global and local inequalities through spatial processes. Students engage with foundational concepts including primitive accumulation, uneven development, world-systems theory, and the new international division of labor to understand how wealth extraction, labor exploitation, and environmental degradation operate across geographic scales. The course traces the historical development of coreperiphery relations from colonialism through contemporary neoliberal globalization, analyzing specific processes such as export processing zones, land grabbing, structural adjustment programs, and resource extraction in the Global South. Through critical examination of topics including urbanization and slums, gendered labor relations, social reproduction, and environmental crisis, students will develop analytical tools, including mapping, to understand how capitalism necessarily produces geographic inequality while also exploring forms of resistance, social movements, and alternative development strategies emerging from the Global South. Using learning circles and collaborative pedagogical approaches that embody democratic and egalitarian principles, the course connects theoretical analysis with contemporary struggles for social and environmental justice, preparing students to critically analyze and engage with questions of global development, spatial inequality, and transformative social change. 

Students will complete syllabus quizzes, mapping exercises using GIS, a midterm exam, and a final research paper. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This is an applied course on international development economics, organized around a few selected topics. The course offers the theoretical and analytical tools is to understand the different interpretations of social and economic development - in its evolving features - both at the country and at the international level. With the objective of providing the basic context for correctly framing the Sustainable Development Goals, the course focuses on issues such as poverty, hunger, inequality, migration, and unbalanced development. The experience of the so-called emerging countries is one of the points of view. Students acquire the ability to tackle the problems of economic development and competition in an applied and comparative perspective, with thematic in-depth applications.

This is an advanced and critical course on issues of international development in light of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The course covers the following topics, analyzing and comparing different positions: Poverty definitions and measures; Poverty statistical evidence; Economic inequality definitions and measures; The Kuznets curve relationship between income growth and inequality; The debate after Kuznets; World inequality recent trends; Inequality in income and wealth in the long run; World inequality recent trends; Climate change and development: who and what is causing it, climate change inequality; Assessing the consequences of climate change; How has the world economic order changed in the last two centuries; Where is the world heading: globalization and the current international economic order; International relations, the economic order and the new geography of world economic power.

This course enhances students' understanding of international dispute settlement and the achievement of global justice. Following a comparison of various methods and means of dispute settlement, the course focuses on the role of international law and international legal proceedings in settling international disputes and promoting global justice. This course looks specifically at important cases at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Students are asked to define and assess the role, potential, and limitations of international law and its institutions in international relations throughout the course. Students present a case study and produce a final paper. 

This advanced topics course covers international trade institutions, trade law, and trade policy. Students explore trade policies, how they are implemented by the United States and other countries, and how their use is constrained by international trade agreements.  

The Fall 2025 offering of this course covers fundamental principles of international trade rules established by the World Trade Organization (WTO), including the principles of non-discrimination, trade remedy measures, SPS, TBT, and exceptions to trade obligations. 

In addition, students examine newly emerging issues in trade, such as environmental concerns, digital trade and e-commerce, intellectual property rights, and trade in services, and delve into the most frequently used methods of dispute resolution: mediation, arbitration, and litigation. Through lectures, simulations, and student presentations, students learn the procedures and actual workings of these three methods at various settings such as WTO, WIPO, and LCIA, inter alia. 

Students should expect to present a substantial case study and produce a final paper.  

This course covers readings and analysis of ideas, theories, and contemporary issues in international relations. This course develops reading, analytical, and critical skills as well as improves the abilities to present, argue, write, and critique. Students classify Political Science concepts and theories, International Relations theories, and global and domestic political situations.

Building on USSCPOL23, this course offers a deeper understanding of the sub-discipline of International Relations, focusing on its main concepts, issues, theories, and approaches. The question that guides the course is: At a time of significant change and instability, what theoretical approaches to the study of international relations are helpful toward understanding current problems of global and regional order? In this course, the focus is on understanding the changing world order. Examine the problem of order through various theoretical lenses, from realism and liberalism to constructivism, Marxism, and beyond. Be challenged to employ these tools toward thinking about how global and regional structures, which help shape how states cooperate and compete, might be reimagined for a changing world. At least one of the following course modules must be completed: [UCSSCPOL23] International Relations: dimensions of world politics or [UCSSCPOL25] Political Economy of the Global South

This course introduces students to the scientific study of International Relations (IR). It explores the principles that shape international politics and illustrates these principles with examples drawn from history and contemporary international affairs. More specifically, the course aims to introduce students to the major concepts and key theories of IR, develop their skills to critically analyze and evaluate theoretical propositions, and generally increase their awareness and understanding of current international affairs. To achieve these goals, students (1) discuss the evolution of the study of cooperation and conflict, (2) acquire the necessary formal theoretical tools (e.g., spatial modeling, game theory) and empirical methods of analysis to systematically dissect the patterns of cooperation and conflict in IR, and (3) examine specific instances of cooperation and conflict in a variety of issue areas, i.e., study such phenomena as war, terrorism, trade, international investment and monetary relations, and the protection of human rights and the global environment.

Conventionally, the discipline of International Relations tends to either obliterate or ascribe race and racism as categories to a subsidiary role in the mainstream scholarships that organize, structure, and regulate the borders of its field of inquiry, which has deep implications on how we imagine and articulate political interventions. In such framework, IR reiterates a view of world politics and of the interstate system that privileges the perspective of the Western and Westernized dominant powers and reifies the historical and cultural subject position of white and ‘whitened’ groups, globally.  The course investigates world politics from the premise that the underlying condition of the international order, as we know it, and the (post)colonial geographies that it has historically been built upon is permanent racialized violence and multiple antiblack codes. Therefore, the aim is to explore the explanatory agency of race and racism as analytical categories in multiple international contexts and political conjunctures, drawing particularly from the African and Afrodiasporic scholarships, which also include the so-called Black studies. This epistemological and methodological move towards African and African diasporic intellectual traditions is premised upon the perceived need to question the persistent monopoly on author-hood over what can be said, known, and consequently done about the international, the global and the national time-spaces. 

Many countries rely heavily on voluntary organisations during crises, and their efforts are often crucial in reducing the social impact of a crisis. The course focuses on the phenomenon of volunteerism and discusses the role of volunteerism and voluntary organisations linked to crisis and war in Swedish society as political and empirical phenomena. The course inventories and discusses volunteerism and voluntary organisations and their formal and informal relationship to public organisations and authorities.