International Relations (IR) is the study of the changing ways in which the world is organised and the interaction between the different communities, institutions and organisations which make up the world. Traditionally, IR had been mainly concerned with how states interact with each other, so classical concerns tended to be with the causes and consequences of war and peace, the making of international treaties including trade agreements and human rights conventions, and with the numerous international organisations that have sprung up particularly over the last one hundred and fifty years. However IR is much more than that. If we want to understand the incidence of hunger and famine, for example, we need to have an understanding of global agri-industry and agricultural markets. That’s where an international or global political economy comes in. If we want to understand the frequency of wars in Palestine-Israel today then we need an international history which pays attention to nineteenth century European nationalism, revolutionary republicanism, Ottoman imperial administration, inter-imperial rivalry, and the multi-religious and multi-ethnic composition of historical Palestine, as well as numerous other considerations. If we want to understand emergence of international package holidays we need an international sociology of tourism, consumer culture, airline technologies and global development. And so on.

In this introductory course we’ll take five different sets of issues or high political moments and try to examine the IR behind these moments. In this way we’ll be able to see how moments which are often reduced to simple slogans in the popular and mass media are actually the outcome of numerous interacting processes and forces, as well as the ‘decisions’ of individual politicians and governments. We’ll need to bring in understandings of international law, international economics, global environmental studies, sociology, social history, war studies, development studies, philosophy and much more.

The five issues that make up this introductory course of ‘Issues in Global Politics’ are,

Seminar 1 (5th & 12th October)        'Refuge and asylum in international politics.'

Seminar 2 (19th & 26th October)       ‘Brexit, sovereignty and international law.’

Seminar 3 (2nd & 9th November)      ‘Ukraine, war and alliances.’

Seminar 4 (16th & 23rd November)          ‘Palestine, Israel, nationalism and imperialism.’

Seminar 5 (30th October & 7th December)             ‘Climate change, local and global collapse’ 

(Dates of sessions/seminars in Leverburgh and Tarbert respectively)