International Studies

This course studies the history of the 20th century global movement before World War II, which influenced global politics. Students are expected to examine a historical case of a local movement crossing over to global politics. 
 

This course provides a platform for new thinking about international legal and institutional arrangements in the world of an urgent need for responsibility for the future. It also presents what role the United States and Europe play in this process. It considers whether global governance - a dynamic process in which legal, political, and economical arrangements unleash interests, change the balance of force, and lead to further reinvention of the governance scheme itself - and wider responsibility are possible.

This course introduces the study of human rights in political science. It discusses how the ideas of and discourses about human rights have been structured and discussed in the context of domestic and international politics.  The course also explores how actual human rights norms are acknowledged or rejected, observed, or ignored, and promoted or withdrawn at the domestic as well as international level. 

This course is organized into two parts. The first half of the course begins with an overview of the concepts and theoretical issues in human rights studies. The second half focuses on the explanations of different human rights practices across countries, looking at various topics related to human rights; it considers the conditions favorable for better human rights practices and processes that bring actual changes in human rights practices. 

By the end of the course, students are expected to have become an expert on at least one human rights issue. Small group case study research and presentations are also expected throughout this course. 

This course offers an introduction to the most relevant concepts of economics and international relations to complement professional training for journalism students.

This course considers international law's dynamics in the modern world and delves into some of the pressing structural, institutional, and thematic challenges of the international legal order. It explores the potential and risks posed by evolving norms, new actors, and failing institutions. It also critically studies the capacity of international norms, international institutions, and judicial bodies to deal with global issues like climate change and environmental protection, the right to self-defense, peacekeeping, human rights and democracy, and international criminal justice. This course provides important legal knowledge, both in terms of concepts and methods, to hone analytical and problem-solving skills.

This course provides a historical, financial, political, and institutional overview of international financial architecture. The first part of the course reviews the progressive construction of the multilateral system over the last few centuries, with a specific focus on the main UN organizations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and multilateral development banks. In the second part, the course focuses on the limits of the current architecture in the face of the multiplicity of new global challenges (the fight against poverty and inequality, global warming and the protection of biodiversity, food and energy security, the response to pandemics). The course concludes with a reflection on possible ways forward for the current architecture, in an increasingly volatile economic, financial, and geopolitical context. 

This course offers an introduction to the fundamentals of political economy of international relations through the survey of international economic organizations and other global coordination attempts and development economics.
While reviewing all types of countries, it particularly focuses on least developed and transition economies, exploring the relationship between international economic organization mandates, policies, and economic development in
practice. The course does not require a significant background in economics but a fundamental understanding of micro- and macroeconomics is helpful. The course offers a review of theoretical and practical core knowledge and a systematic application through group case studies.

This course takes a comprehensive look at the challenges and dynamics of "Arctic" issues and relations. The course is structured in four thematic parts: what’s going on and the Arctic now and then; ways of analyzing what’s going on in the Arctic; what the Arctic is a region of; and global issues/arctic particulars. While the first part establishes the basics in terms of geography, states, institutions, and current political developments in an empirical way, the remaining three parts use theoretical approaches from international relations and neighboring disciplines to look at these political dynamics. The second part applies concepts and approaches from core international relations theories such as security dilemma, deterrence, interdependence, norms and rules, and securitization, while the third part deconstructs the idea of the Arctic as a region and understands how it is instrumentalized for a number of purposes, drawing on constructivism, post-structuralist, and critical geopolitics. The last part takes a cross-cutting look at three globally relevant and salient issues – post-colonialism and decolonization, feminism and gender, and climate change and the Anthropocene – to understand their relevance and particularity in the Arctic in a way that seeks to go beyond the state-focused approaches. As such, this course critically applies previous international relations theories and knowledge, but the final part also steps outside these theoretical approaches, and through the empirics of the course, ventures into texts and approaches from neighboring disciplines to gain other perspectives on the top of the world. The course necessitates curiosity about issues and concepts spanning military and strategic studies to post-colonialism and the notion than non-humans can also be analytically central.         

This course introduces both the fundamentals of child protection systems in Europe and the way international humanitarian work incorporates child protection mechanisms in developing countries. It covers how the supranational governance of humanitarian organizations, the EU, and states construct their child protection policies and set political agendas. The seminar combines conceptual tools, historical insights, and empirical evidence to investigate the evolution of child protection policies in the context of economic, environmental, and security crises and is divided in two parts: European child protection political agenda; and international humanitarian work and child protection policies in West Africa. Classes are partly discussion-based and include moderated group debates and student oral presentations. The course imparts practical skills and strategies to policy-related issues from first hand experiences in service delivery and policy-making.

This course, which focuses on China's Xi Jinping era, provides keys to understanding Chinese positions on the international stage. It compares official statements with the reality of Beijing's actions to understand the motives, modalities, and consequences of Chinese foreign policy.