Courses

Senior Thesis

Senior Thesis writers enroll in INTL4951 (Prof. Hiroshi Nakazato)
** Your first semester of INTL4952 will count as an elective in your concentration; the second semester will fulfill your senior project requirement.

Senior Seminars:

Spring 2024:Critical Appropaches to Development 
Prof. Joseph Getzoff 
INTL4941.01
Thursdays 3:00 - 5:20pm

Development, since World War II, reigns as the mandate for addressing inequality in the Global South. Development’s promise has been to equalize the uneven relations between the former colonized and colonizers. And yet, many post-colonial states face continued poverty, exploitation, and environmental degradation, what some call neo-colonial relations. Students will engage with interdisciplinary scholarship that spans many engagements with development, including Third Worldist critiques, postcolonial theory, environmental issues, the politics of expertise, social justice, biopolitics, and case studies of developmental efforts in the present. Our goal, as a class, will be to reimagine development for the challenges facing not only the Global South, but for the North as well. 

Geopolitics, Religion & Security
Prof. Elizabeth Prodromou
INTL4941.02
Mondays 1:30-3:50pm 

What is geopolitics? This seminar explores geopolitics as a way of making sense of territorial (classicalgeopolitics) and identity (critical geopolitics) geographies and their implications for politics, in order tounderstand international relations as a geopolitical contest for hegemony waged by state and non-stateactors. The seminar analyzes the significance of religion for defining geographies, for competitivestruggles, and for affecting security. Introducing country, regional, and transregional case studiesprimarily drawn from Eurasia, the seminar uses cross-disciplinary literatures and presentations by guestexperts with diverse professional expertise at the intersections of religion and security in historical andcurrent geopolitics.

Fall 2023:

Rethinking Security  
Prof. Hiroshi Nakazato
INTL 4941.01
Mondays 3:00 - 5:20pm (Stokes 111S) 

It is a given in IR Theories that states pursue their national interest, and for many theorists and policymakers, it is equally clear that a state’s security is the uppermost concern. But how is the national interest determined, by whom, and for what purposes? This seminar begins with a traditional approach to unpacking the concept of national interest and national security, before delving into critical approaches and broader conceptions of what “security” can encompass. Among the questions considered are: which discourses and practices do actors use, and which logics of security do they relate to? What explains the success of populist and authoritarian parties in many countries? Is it possible to justify closed borders and increased security control from a normative point of view, and if so how? How does discourse about human security matter for activists and policymakers?

 

Human Rights in East Asia

Prof. Ingu Hwang
INTL4941.02
Tuesdays 3:00-5:25 (Gasson 308)

This course introduces students to the post–1945 development of global human rights talk, activism, and politics from an East Asian perspective. Through an examination of specific conflicts over self-determination and sovereignty, economic development and disparity, democratization, the legacies of decolonization, and global justice, the course delves into how and why actors in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and North Korea translated local struggles into international human rights agendas that gained attention on the global stage. In exploring this process of translation and appropriation, we will also analyze how these local conflicts transformed international human rights issues.