POL1025: Global Politics

Global politics is complex, fast-paced, and often confusing. This introductory course explores both the enduring challenges of international politics as well as more recent transformative trends. The course introduces theoretical traditions, but its focus is on making sense of real-world problems, both today and in the past. Why is the world organized into states, and what implications does the states system have for indigenous populations globally? Why and when do states go to war and use military force? Why do they sign international agreements and treaties, on matters from arms control to investment? In what ways do existing systems of international law and trade exacerbate or mitigate global inequities? Why has human rights emerged as a central problem in world politics? What are the prospects for international cooperation to address climate change? How have inequities and prejudices, along the lines of race and other categorical identities, shaped our world - from the practice of global security to the structures of the international political economy? These are among the pressing real-world questions that this course in Global Politics will address and that it will give you the tools to answer - though particular instructors will naturally emphasize different topics and questions. But the course will also highlight how our answers to these questions are changing along with the deep power structures of global politics - as US dominance wanes and others, most notably China, rise; as core ideas and discourses underpinning the international system, such as sovereignty, come under assault; as institutions, such as those governing international law, thicken; and as attention grows to the structuring effects of race and other ascriptive categories. Global Politics is an essential guide to our increasingly globalized world.

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