Pre-registration for seminars is not permitted. Instructor permission is required before registration. Please see here for detailed seminar registration guidelines.

Section 001: Foreign Policy & Decision Making
Professor Barbara Farnham
How can we account for the foreign policies of states in the international system? Why do they behave the way they do? This seminar focuses on a critical examination of the major explanations for foreign policy outcomes. Our main emphasis is on decision-making. However, we will begin with explanations operating at other levels of analysis, such as the international system and domestic politics. We then explore decision-making explanations, including those derived from cognitive and social psychology, theories of motivation and personality, the impact of the political context, and the role of group dynamics. Throughout, we will be looking at these different approaches in the light of actual episodes taken largely, but not exclusively, from American foreign policy.

Section 002: Contemporary Issues in International Security
Professor Jack Snyder
This course examines central issues in contemporary international security policy (American hegemony, multilateralism, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, civil war, genocide, ethnic conflict, the promotion of democratization and human rights, the problem of Iraq, etc.) and key concepts in the academic study of international relations (e.g., realist and liberal approaches; deterrence theory).

Section 003: Dilemmas of Security in the Middle East
Professor Naomi Weinberger
This course focuses on the regional level of analysis in studying ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.  Regional rivalries exacerbate domestic instability, even as impulses toward regional integration and ideological or religious solidarities foster cooperative alignments.  Both superpowers cultivated regional clients during the Cold War, after which America's dominant influence has been increasingly challenged by Iran, a rising regional power.  Multilateral initiatives to advance regional stability have included traditional United Nations peace operations, US-led coalitions of the willing, and advocacy of security sector reform with enhanced local ownership.  After clarifying the conceptual framework, the course highlights three subregional zones of conflict: competing national visions in Israel/Palestine; interveners in civil conflict in Lebanon; and America's vital interests in the Gulf.  Students will analyze a common set of readings and engage in a semester-long research project.

Section 004: Globalization & International Politics
Professor Pablo Pinto
Prerequisites: POLS V1601 or the equivalent, and instructor's permission.  Globalization involves the increasing integration of economic, social and political processes across international borders.  Workers in Bangalore man telephones in the middle of the night to provide technical support to customers in the US and Europe.  Farmers in Chiapas and college students in Nice demonstrate against the World Bank.  Multinational corporations and backyard business clamor for greater access to markets.  Governments in Asia find that they are beholden to panic by investors a world away.

To some degree, these processes (or ones like them) have always been with us.  However, international politics, which has traditionally been organized around the physical control of geography by sovereign governments, increasingly poses tensions or contradictions as the scope of the world that defies boundaries increases.  While globalization means many things to many different people, this course will begin to map some of the most obvious examples where sovereignty and the global society collide.  Globalization defies easy definition in part because these processes are dynamic and ongoing.  We will explore the economics, politics and conflict processes  ssociated with a globalizing world.

Fall - 2009