| States, Politics and The Global World Order

This course builds upon the core political science courses and the theoretical questions around state and politics that they have raised. This course would be geared towards understanding concepts like states, power, sovereignty from the perspective of international relations.

The course is designed to initiate students into basic concerns of international politics— war, security, economy and migration and open each of these concepts up to different theoretical lens in international politics. While the course looks at mainstream theories like Realism and Liberalism, it also makes use of alternate paradigms of understanding international politics. The course is a reading intensive course which would expect students to closely engage with the texts.

The course would be based on lectures and classroom discussions.

The first module ‘Why International Politics’ discusses why we need a separate lens to understand familiar concepts of state, sovereignty and politics in the context of international politics. While the concepts remain the same, in the field of international politics, they are differently deployed.

The second module ‘When is War’ discusses one of the most primary concerns of international relations-War. It looks at War from different theoretical lens to familiarise students to the complex discussion around war, its necessity and alternative approaches. It also intends students to introduce students to the reigning concern of security in international politics and the critical ways of approaching the question. Deeply concerned with concepts like state and sovereignty, it looks at the different ways in which security studies have been primarily understood within the field of international relations.

The third module looks at the emergence of international society. While global politics has been driven by territorial wars over sovereignty, global politics can also be seen through the lens of the emergence of an inernational society based on cooperation. In fact, it is this understanding that forms the premise of international law.

The fourth module explores the aspect of economy as an an important actor in international politics. As world politics and economic globalisation has gone hand in hand, it has become commonsensical today that global economy and world politics are deeply linked. This module understands the ways in which increasing interconnectedness has shaped global politics.

The fifth module locates India in the milieu of international politics trying to understand how India has been shaped as a country. It takes a historical view of India’s evolution in the realm of global politics. Theoretically as well, Indian voices on the need to relook at IR from a global south perspective has been an important concern.

The sixth module focuses on ‘Borders, Citizenship and Migration’, concerns which are only increasingly becoming more and more relevant. The figure of the ‘refugee’ produced by forced migration through wars and now increasingly climate change, has led to rethinking around questions around borders and their sovereignty, citizenship and its modes.