International Studies

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.

This course provides a solid overview of the law of international security, a set of rules regulating the maintenance and restoration of international peace and security, within which States and other actors exercise their policies, adopt decisions, and form mutual relations on the international scene. It covers international legal norms and to applies them to concrete cases in the world politics. The course sheds light both on the centralized international and decentralized regional levels of collective security mechanisms. In addition to the prerogatives of the United Nations, the role of the NATO, European Union, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, African Union, Economic Community of West African States, and Organization of American States is covered. It focuses on diverse measures aimed at the protection of international security, both involving and not involving the use of force (economic embargoes, targeted sanctions, interruption of diplomatic relations and, finally, the recourse to military force).

This course critically examines notions of globalization, and in particular economic globalization. This course will allow students to develop an understanding of the global scale of human activity with a particular emphasis on the economic dimension, as well develop an understanding of how the world is shaped by the interaction between economic, political, social, and cultural processes operating at different, but connected, geographical scales, from the global through the national to the local.