International Relations: Themes and Theories

Full course description

The first part of the course discusses several mainstream International Relations (IR) theories and issues including neoliberalism, neorealism and debates about the liberal world system. Moreoever the concepts and ideas of security, power, interest, cooperation and cheating will be discussed. In this part, we will not go through the world history, contemporary history, main international institutions or the history of nation-states. We will immediately start studying contemporary IR. If you think you do not know much about the contemporary world history, please study it before taking the course.  

Then the course will cover less mainstream approaches, some ‘new’ theories and some neglected issues about the ‘other’ side of world politics. In this part normative and ideational structures, environmental issues, problems of the developing world, gendered-biases, economic inequalities, the construction of partial knowledge, the legitimization of power politics, the representation of images, establishment of stereotypes and the reproduction of hegemony will be studied critically. Moreover, new IR approaches like Queer theory and Asian IR approaches will be briefly discussed. In this part, we aim at asking important questions and try to find reflective answers about the role of power and hegemony, how to make IR more green, how to de-colonialise knowledge about the world, how to make IR and politics more gender-sensitive.  

It is important that students become aware of the theoretical richness of the discipline, and that there is not a single ‘right’ way to answer questions about what is happening around us in the world. Students are given a chance to dicuss and to apply those theories to different and more specific cases and issues. For this reason, this course is an opportunity to learn and apply international relations theories, concepts and models to the daily news and real time developments in the world. Case studies or specific issues are provided by the course literature. Thus, the course is based on active student participation. Moreover, we expect our students to read the news every day!