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 unique 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. The discipline of International Relations claims special authority in 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; governments and people hold up human rights as a universal moral standard; 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’ or transnational ones, not ones between two independent states. 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.