Course Catalogue

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This course, which is compulsory for all junior honours students on the International Relations programme, is designed to help students develop the analytical and critical thinking skills to make sense of complex events, processes, and institutions in global politics. It does this through a survey of core concepts that have been key to the development of the academic study of International Relations (IR), through the lenses of traditional, critical, and contemporary IR theories.

This course may not be running this year. For further information please check the Politics Moodle page or contact the subject directly.

Students must have completed all pre-Honours courses in Politics and International Relations.

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An essay of 2,000-2,500 words (50%), and a two-hour exam (50%).

Reassessments are normally available for all courses, except those which contribute to the Honours classification. Where, exceptionally, reassessment on Honours courses is required to satisfy professional/accreditation requirements, only the overall course grade achieved at the first attempt will contribute to the Honours classification. For non-Honours courses, students are offered reassessment in all or any of the components of assessment if the satisfactory (threshold) grade for the overall course is not achieved at the first attempt. This is normally grade D3 for undergraduate students and grade C3 for postgraduate students. Exceptionally it may not be possible to offer reassessment of some coursework items, in which case the mark achieved at the first attempt will be counted towards the final course grade. Any such exceptions for this course are described below. 

This course, which is compulsory for all junior honours students on the International Relations programme, is designed to help students develop the analytical and critical thinking skills to make sense of complex events, processes, and institutions in global politics. It builds on the knowledge and skills that students have developed at pre-honours level, in order to develop a more advanced knowledge of the range of competing and complementary conceptual and theoretical approaches to the study of international relations. To this end, the course will:

    build on knowledge gained at the pre-honours level in order to develop more advanced conceptual and theoretical understandings of the discipline of IR;

    critically examine the various contested perspectives of historically significant and contemporary relevant concepts of IR;

    facilitate students' understanding of the range of competing and complementary conceptual and theoretical approaches to the study of international relations, thereby fostering awareness of the contested character of enquiry in the discipline;

    support the development of critical evaluative skills in relation to competing interpretations and explanations of past and contemporary empirical cases.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Apply multiple International Relations theories and concepts to the study of global politics

■ Evaluate convergences and divergences between different approaches to the study of International Relations

■ Reflect on the contestability of International Relations concepts

■ Critically analyse debates about core IR concepts among scholarly authorities

■ Advance reasoned arguments in writing 

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.