Course Description:

Why does the world look the way it does? Who shapes the world, and how? Who benefits from the existing world order? In a world fraught with wars and conflicts, these are fundamental questions of global politics. This course on Global Politics provides avenues to explore answers to these questions. In this course, the foundational concepts of international relations are introduced and addressed through debates that mirror contemporary global concerns.

The course asks the central question: How is global order created, maintained, institutionalised, and contested? The course, therefore, attempts to imagine international relations not only as the study of states, but also as the study of how power is produced, narrated, justified, institutionalised, and contested across global political life. The course is titled Global Politics rather than International Politics because it moves beyond an exclusive focus on relations between sovereign nation-states, as well as capturing the interconnected and transnational nature of contemporary political life. The course critically evaluates state-centricity and the centrality of power politics, while not entirely displacing them from the contemporary discourse of global politics. Alongside nation-states and their relations, the course also delves into the exclusions and omissions of race, gender, and class dynamics through critical and reflective perspectives.

This course does not engage in a chronological and exhaustive reproduction of major “global” events; instead, events such as World War II, the Cold War, the establishment of the United Nations, and 9/11 are used to contextualise how politics takes place.

The course broadly covers four themes. First, in dealing with the history and narrative of the discipline of international relations, the course concerns itself with the production of knowledge about the existing world order. Second, focusing on the centrality of power politics, the course tries to decipher how this world order is maintained without a central authority or world government. Third, focusing on international institutions and governance, the course explores how the world order is justified and institutionalised through regulatory governance. Finally, the course reflects on critical questions about the existing world order, keeping in mind that it does not serve all its stakeholders equitably. These themes are theoretically and empirically addressed through modules organised around the key conceptual anchors of the discipline—history and narratives, power politics, international institutions, and political economy.