PSCI 202
World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations Spring 2023 (also offered Fall 2022)
Division II

World politics is often taken to be an arena of human interaction unto itself, where the concepts that serve us well in understanding domestic politics and our everyday public lives–democracy, law, institutions, morality, authority–are displaced by their opposites–rule by the strong, use of force, raison d’etat, anarchy. In particular, the discipline of International Relations claims special responsibility for analyzing and explaining this arena. But how different is world politics? We live in a world in which resolutions of the United Nations Security Council carry the aura of law and authority; human rights are held up as universal moral standards; international treaties regularly restrain supposedly sovereign states in regulating their domestic economies; culture, wealth and information surge transnationally, and the vast majority of wars are now ‘civil’ ones. This course is about politics at the world scale and the myriad ways in which scholars and practitioners interpret and explain it. We start by covering international relations theories, and then turn to the international politics of war and peace, trade and globalization, human rights and climate change.