Claim OwnershipINTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 2012
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Description
The purpose of this course is to help students advance along the lines of their specific interests in the policy issues of International Relations. These issues include, among others, conflict-resolution, regional cooperation, poverty-reduction, and environmental protection. Equally important for students, however, is the establishment of firm theoretical footings. As in many other policy-related fields of inquiry, theories in International Relations are not context-free. The constraints of time often dictate theory formulation as they profoundly influence the theorists’ normative commitments. Given these, the course consists of three major components. 1) A firm historical background, a common prerequisite for all issue-specific perspectives. 2) Critical examinations of selected empirical and normative theories. 3) Examinations of specific policy issues in light of normative perspectives. The course fuses these three major components into a narrative flow moving from “High Politics” to “Low Politics.” Along the way, the course discusses a new framework for defining policy issues in need of solution, Human Security.
14 Episodes
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What are the desciplinary alternative to international relations that helps solve the "problems" in global governance?
Human security can be recognized only through its absence. This is one of the oft-quoted observations. How so, is the major concern this week. As a mental exercise, we will reconstruct a profile of a few selected countries by using data available in the following documents, and highlights the epistemological problems associated with the macro (aggregate) data in identifying specific issues.
Since “Human Development Report, 1994,” a new sort of language has emerged as a way of highlighting the policy issues that most directly affect the lives of people in the world. Human security, as the condition entailing “freedom from threats and freedom from want,” has gradually occupied many organizations, GO and NGO alike, dealing with a broad range of policy issues. Where does this new perspective come from and take us? We will examine the normative foundation of human security.
The criticisms of economic development have their roots not only in the perceived income-gap among the nations, but also in other pressing issues that are accompanying policies of economic development. What are the adjustments by the proponents of economic growth policies?
One of the key issues involved in what appears to be a perpetual experimentation with economic development is the widening gap between the rich and the poor. To what extent, the widening gap discredit the claims of the Bretton Woods System and the current World Trade Organization? How should we evaluate the roles of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund?
An engine of economic development, the Bretton Woods System, before its tenure expired, is claimed to have enriched the world and installed the basic “infrastructure” for the production and distribution of global wealth by non-violent means. Taking it at face values, what have this system and the ensuing World Trade Organization accomplished?
An examination of changes in economic development theories reveals a number of assumptions that are needed for their hypotheses to work. These are the assumptions which make most of the development theories unrealistic against the backdrops of former colonies. Nonetheless, the attempts at economic development have never been halted. Why?
Are there innovative way(s) of reconstructing the issues of “national security” to meet the need of post-Cold War era? What could be “national security” issues when nation-states are no longer the most dominant actors in International Relations?
A postwar invention, the notion of national security, nonetheless, established itself quickly as the underlying theme for any nation’s external contact. However, a twin questions of what is to be “secured” and from what it is to be “secured” turn the notion practically emptied of manageable contents. As a result, anything could be justified as long as it comes under the promotion of “national security.” Only after mid-1970s, some theorists began questioning the primacy of “national security” in dictating the relations among the nations.
As misleading as it is powerful, the notion of a “proxy” dominated much of the decision-makers in the United States throughout the Cold War period. There is no other theater of conflict than Vietnam where this notion served to distort strategic thinking of the Western bloc.
Undoubtedly under the immense influence of the bipolarization, the regions outside the North-Atlantic region, nonetheless, had their own policy agenda. De-colonization process needs to be examined in light of its own forces
The focus here is the normative background which helped promote the tenets of the “Realist” school of International Relations. Though professing to be rooted in the human nature, the realist school in fact represents more of the sense of uncertainty surrounding the rise of the Soviet power since the 1930s.
A historical survey of the beginnings and the closing of the Cold War should help students identify the origins and changes in the policy issues of their choosing. The points should be made that the Cold War itself is a uniquely North-Atlantic phenomenon, and that the conflicts at its peripheries need to be examined accordingly.
Introduction to International Relations offers a general perspective on how the course will evolve throughout the semester. Week 1 also offers certain film (video) footage on key issues in International Relations.
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