International Studies

Why and how do resource use and other human footprints generate international governance challenges – and in what ways does the globalization of the world economy affect such challenges? How important are international institutions for the management of the world's petroleum resources? What is meant by ‘regime effectiveness’ – and what conditions can explain success or failure in efforts to establish or strengthen international cooperative arrangements on natural resources and the environment? This course offers an introduction to important characteristics of international environmental and resource politics and provides tools for explaining differences in international negotiation processes and their outputs, outcomes and impacts. The roles and significance of international institutions are central, with special attention to processes of formation, change and interplay as well as various conditions that can affect their operation and effectiveness. The course provides insight into the roles transnational companies and environmental organizations play in international environmental and resource negotiations and how the positions and influences of main actors such as the USA, the EU, and China are affected by domestic political and economic conditions. The course demonstrates how broader scholarly debates, like those between realists, liberalists, and constructivists, can illuminate processes and outcomes in international environmental and resource politics.

This course overviews the challenges and opportunities for the international community in contemporary Africa. Taught by a former ambassador with wide Africa experience, the course exposes students to the major themes in the world’s interactions with Africa, including humanitarian intervention, economic opportunity, struggles against terrorism and instability, and great power competition. The course is intended for future practitioners in diplomacy, business, or media with an interest in Africa, and more widely for those seeking to understand global engagement with a great continent.

This course explores human rights as embedded in specific historical circumstances, and looks at their codification in international law as the product of heated political debates. The first part of the course examines the topic from a historical perspective. Students trace the genealogy of the concept paying particular attention to its continuity or discontinuity with respect to the notion of natural law, and focus on the birth of the “human rights regime.” The second part of the course involves the examination of specific case studies. In the third and final part of the course students look at critical readings of human rights as possibly an instrument for “Western hegemony,” or as inadequate in other ways.

This course deals with concepts, theories, and practices of global governance. Its central focus is on the understanding and analysis of discourses and policies created by international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, or the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) in interaction with different state and non-state actors. the course covers how international legal regimes take form, operate, and influence actors at various institutional levels. Through case studies, the course analyzes practices of global governance specifically oriented towards solving societal, political, economic, and environmental challenges that require global collective action. Specifically, it explores how power relations and inequalities affect the practice of global governance. This course presents students with knowledge of global mechanisms (institutions, discourses, policies) created to address and manage the rising societal, political, economic, and environmental challenges of a global nature, with a particular focus on the Sustainable Development Goals formulated by the UN.

The course teaches students about the function of intelligence in the 20th and 21st centuries, and promotes reflection on the nature of scholarly work. The connection between scholars and the spies is not just a fanciful one dreamed up by novelists. During the world wars and the Cold War, academics swelled the ranks of Anglo-American intelligence organizations. Early pioneers of intelligence theory and practice, were also distinguished scholars. By learning about the problems of gathering evidence, interpretation, analysis, presentation and distribution of intelligence, students also learn to be better War Studies students.