International Studies

In this internship, students work closely with their host organization for up to 12 hours per week over the course of a semester. Final assessment is comprised of a mentor evaluation, a self-evaluation/reflection, and an organizational report.

This course surveys and analyzes the interaction between Europe and America since 1945 in the fields of politics, economics, and culture. Special emphasis is placed on the roles of the United States, Germany, and the European Union. The first part has a time-line approach, discussing cooperation and divergence of  interests before, during, and after the Cold War and after 9/11. During the second part, the course focus on issues of common concern for the U.S. and Europe today and on challenges facing the transatlantic partnership during the era of globalization with its challenges to the common values of the “West.” Current events are discussed whenever they become relevant. The course includes a guest speaker and a visit to the German Foreign Ministry for a talk on German-American relations.

The course first offers students an introduction to the discipline of International Relations to understand some of the key questions that scholars and policy makers have focused on, and how the field has been transformed as the world has changed around them. It then studies a series of pressing contemporary issues, including war, security, development, human rights, and terrorism. These cases and questions are analyzed through different theories including realism, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, and feminism.

The course provides a study of major school of thought, debates, and theoretical approaches in the discipline of international relations (IR). It discusses the main arguments and interventions of IR theories, the differences and similarities between them, and their accounts of such important concepts as state, anarchy, war, change, cooperation, capitalism, norms, identity, culture, order and justice and so on. It also puts IR theories into the intellectual context or the development of so-called ‘great debates’ since 1945.

This course examines the themes surrounding global organizational processes: how state systems work, where the desire for a global political order comes from, which institutions regulate global relations and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Are we on course for a global government, or will the rise of new centers of world power instead lead to greater fragmentation? The emphasis lies on the last hundred years, in particular on institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and other global governance organizations. Research is conducted into the motivations behind setting up these institutions, how the interests of various individual nations (or groups of nations) were represented, and which obstacles formed an impediment to decisive governance on global issues. Attention is devoted not only to political organizations, but also to economic and cultural institutions (IMF, the World Bank, ADB), to allow students to acquire a thorough understanding of the structure of the international order and the recent developments in an increasingly polycentric world.

This course is suitable for professionals and activists working in journalism or media-related fields as well as students from all backgrounds. It is a unique opportunity to benefit from the LSE’s outstanding research into modern journalism combined with talks by pioneering media professionals. Daily lectures and guest talks give students insights into contemporary cutting edge news media. Seminars encourage students to think and act like journalists facing all the dramatic ethical and technological challenges of reporting the complex and dangerous world we live in. Participants in this course emerge with a better understanding of the shifts taking place in the practices, forms, and processes within the news media and their consequences for the role of journalism in contemporary society.