Introduction to International Relations

2024/2025

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

4

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs

Course type:

Compulsory course

When:

2 year, 3, 4 module

Course Syllabus

Abstract

Students of this course are bound to ask the question – what exactly is International Relations (IR)? What distinguishes this subject from history or law, economics or comparative politics? When did ‘IR’ emerge as an academic subject? How has it changed over time in the West and in Russia? What does IR contribute to the sum of human knowledge? And why has it become one of the most popular twenty–first century social sciences despite the fact that – as students will discover fairly early on – IR scholars around the world spend more time than most defending and defining their ‘discipline’? The purpose of this course is to try and answer these questions while providing students with a foundation in the theory and practice of international relations and world politics and an introduction to more specialised topics that they may choose to study in more depth in the future. This course does not presuppose a specialised knowledge of international affairs. On the other hand, it does assume that students will have a genuine interest in world politics in addition to a willingness to expand their knowledge of geography, policy issues and events of international history. The course shall touch on the whole modern period of international relations, from the birth of the European state system in the early 15th century to the present day. But most of our focus will be on the last hundred years or so, a period marked by the quickening pace of globalisation, the search for a lasting, post–war international order and comparable events of international crisis associated with this collective enterprise.This course is therefore a roadmap and guide to the complex issues in an increasingly globalised context of world politics. Rather than trying to be exhaustive, it seeks to introduce students to a wide range of issues and problems, linked in some shape or form to changes brought about by political, cultural and economic aspects of globalisation; developments that have preoccupied scholars and policymakers alike around the world since the origins of ‘IR’ as a professional field of inquiry. Instead of arguing in favour of a specific approach or pointing to an absolute truth in IR, this course will ask students to think about the origins and dynamics to events and challenges in world politics in a clear and (where appropriate) critical fashion, coming to well–reasoned conclusions based on a combination of empirical observation and theoretical rigour. The aim, in other words, is to inform and stimulate and, in so doing, get all the students who take this course to ask questions and consider research puzzles about the international relations of the past and the present which they may never have thought of before.