International Studies

From a political science perspective, this course investigates the stark material inequalities that exist between countries and world regions. It covers the transnational political-economy processes that shape inequalities within and between countries, including perspectives on the winners and losers of global trade, the deregulation of global finance, the precarity created along global production chains, tax evasion of multinational companies, migration, and the rise of global tech companies. The course reflects on the consequences of these processes for areas such as democracy, gender relations, and climate change.

This course focuses on the influence of Islam in Southeast Asia. It examines how Islam as a religion, and a political one at that, has played a role in the development of countries such as Indonesia, Birma, the Philippines, and Thailand.

The course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course offers a multifaceted portrait of a world in deep transition. Students are expected to become familiar with a truly comparative and global approach to the complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century." The course highlights constitutional issues, structures, and models of education, the construction of nation states and empires in a comparative perspective, as well as the relationships between human beings and nature and gender relations. The focus of the course is food history, which has provided stimulating perspectives on the global history of the long 19th Century.

This course provides students with an understanding of the logistics and substance of public international law, that is, the law that applies to how states relate to other states and some non-state actors in global politics. It asks what laws exist in the global political arena and how those laws affect the structure, content, and outcomes of global political, social, and economic interactions. As such, the course explores both what international law is (how it comes to be, and when and how it matters), as well as various places in which international law might matter in the international arena (both in terms of the structure of the international arena and issues that arise in contemporary international relations).

This course introduces students to security policy and strategic thinking and to gives a thorough familiarity with the key concepts within this field. It combines theory and case studies and also covers the main actors and institutions in security governance (NATO, UN, US). The course opens with a theoretical focus on the scope of security studies and on approaches to its study. The scope then narrows to military security issues (security and defense proper), discussing the two types of conflicts, conventional and asymmetric. It seeks to streamline a theoretically focused approach to the empirical material, revisiting theory towards the end of the course. It also has a case on African conflicts and one on Norwegian security policy.