International Relations Theory Course

Course Overview

International Relations theory is the intellectual foundation of the discipline. It asks not merely what happens in world politics but why it happens, through what mechanisms, and whether those mechanisms can be understood objectively or are always interpreted through frameworks that carry their own assumptions, interests, and blind spots. This course introduces students to the major theoretical traditions that have shaped how scholars and practitioners conceptualise global politics: realism, liberalism, the English School, constructivism, Marxism and critical political economy, post-structuralism, postcolonial IR, and feminist IR. It also engages green theory and foreign policy analysis as sites where theoretical debates intersect with urgent practical questions.

The course proceeds on the conviction that theory is not an optional supplement to the study of world politics but its precondition. Every analytical claim about international relations rests on assumptions about what kinds of actors matter, what motivates them, how knowledge is produced, and what counts as an adequate explanation. Making those assumptions explicit and subjecting them to critical scrutiny is the central intellectual task of the course.

Teaching combines seminar discussion, applied analytical exercises, discourse analysis, structured debates, and a multilateral simulation. Students are expected to engage seriously with both the theoretical arguments and the historical and contemporary cases through which those arguments are tested and challenged.

Learning Outcomes

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

• Explain and critically evaluate the major theoretical traditions in IR, including realism, liberalism, the English School, constructivism, Marxism, post-structuralism, postcolonial theory, and feminist IR.
• Identify and articulate the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions underlying each theoretical tradition.
• Apply IR theoretical frameworks to analyse concrete historical and contemporary cases, specifying what each framework explains well and what it systematically forecloses.
• Engage with the meta-theoretical debates that divide positivist and post-positivist approaches to the study of international politics.
• Critically assess the relationship between IR theory and political practice, including the normative and political stakes of theoretical choice.
• Conduct close readings of primary theoretical texts alongside policy documents and empirical case material.
• Construct independent, evidence-based analytical arguments in written and oral forms, demonstrating command of the theoretical literature and its application to specific problems in world politics.
• Develop well-reasoned analytical positions on contested theoretical questions and defend them in structured seminar debate.

Assessment

Seminar Participation and Engagement — 20%
Active, substantive participation is an intellectual and professional expectation, not an optional supplement to the written work. Students are assessed on the quality of their contributions across the semester: the rigour of their arguments, their engagement with the theoretical frameworks under discussion, their willingness to challenge and build on the ideas of others, and the consistency of their preparation. Students who attend but do not contribute meaningfully will not score well on this component. Students who lead discussions, introduce evidence from primary sources, and connect weekly debates to wider meta-theoretical questions will be recognised accordingly.

Theoretical Analysis Essay — 20%
A structured analytical essay of 1,500 to 2,000 words comparing two or more IR theoretical traditions in their treatment of a specified analytical problem (sovereignty, security, cooperation, or international order). Students select their problem from a provided list and evaluate how competing theoretical frameworks conceptualise, explain, and respond to it, identifying the assumptions that produce convergence and divergence. The essay should demonstrate command of the theoretical literature, precision in the use of concepts, and clarity of argument. It is submitted at the end of Week 5.

Policy Application Brief — 20%
A policy brief of 1,000 to 1,500 words addressed to a specified decision-making audience. Students identify a current international political challenge, select the theoretical framework they judge most analytically productive for understanding it, and use that framework to construct a policy recommendation with explicit attention to the assumptions, risks, and normative trade-offs involved. The brief should demonstrate both theoretical self-awareness and policy clarity. It is submitted at the end of Week 9.

Simulation Exercise and Presentation — 10%
A structured multilateral negotiation simulation held in Weeks 10 and 11, in which students represent states, international organisations, or non-state actors in a climate governance negotiation. Each student prepares a position paper (500 words) in advance, setting out the theoretical assumptions and interests of their assigned actor, and participates in the negotiation. Assessment focuses on preparation quality, strategic coherence during the simulation, and a brief reflective presentation (five minutes) delivered afterwards examining how theory shaped the practice of the negotiation. Detailed instructions and role assignments are distributed at the end of Week 8.

Final Research Essay — 30%
An extended research essay of 3,000 to 4,000 words advancing an original analytical argument on a question in IR theory or its application to a specific problem in world politics. Students may develop an argument arising from any area of the course, provided they situate it clearly within the relevant theoretical debate, engage critically with primary and secondary sources, and advance a claim that goes beyond description and summary. A one-page essay proposal is submitted at the end of Week 8 for feedback before the final deadline in Week 13.

Literature

• Roach, S. C., Barder, A. D., & Griffiths, M. (2024). International relations: The key concepts (4th ed.). Routledge.
• Sandel, M. J. (2010). Justice: What’s the right thing to do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Sørensen, G., & Møller, J. (2025). Introduction to international relations & global politics (9th ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Weber, C. (2020). International relations theory: A critical introduction (5th ed.). Routledge.

Students are expected to work across three categories of source material:

• Academic literature provides theoretical frameworks, meta-theoretical arguments, and empirical analyses across the major traditions the course examines.
• Primary theoretical texts (the foundational works of each tradition within the discipline) should be read directly and not only through secondary interpretation. Learning to engage with original theoretical arguments, identify their internal assumptions, and trace their implications is itself a core analytical skill of the course.
• Policy documents, official statements, diplomatic records, and international legal instruments provide the empirical material through which theoretical claims are tested against political practice, and through which the assumptions embedded in statecraft can be critically examined.

Learning to read across all three, and to identify the assumptions, interests, and limitations embedded in each, is itself a core intellectual skill of the course.

Research articles do not appear in the bibliography above. This is intentional. Each week, students are expected to identify a peer-reviewed article relevant to that week’s topic, bring it to the seminar, and share it with the group. The lecturer contributes selections alongside the class. This practice develops independent literature-searching habits, exposes the seminar to a wider range of scholarly perspectives than any fixed reading list could provide, and keeps the course in sustained contact with current debates in the field.

Structure

Week 1 — What is International Relations, and how should we theorise global politics?

International Relations is a discipline that has never fully settled its own identity. It began as a project of peace — a response to the devastation of the First World War — and has since developed into a plural, contested field examining war, cooperation, identity, economy, justice, and the conditions of world order. Yet the foundational questions remain unresolved: what are the proper units of analysis, what methods are appropriate, and what is the purpose of theory itself? This week establishes the analytical and epistemological foundations of the course, distinguishing between explaining and understanding in world politics, mapping the major theoretical traditions, and examining why the choice of theory is never politically neutral. Students leave this week with a working map of the theoretical terrain they will navigate across the semester.

Key Themes

• The origins of IR as an academic discipline and the interwar idealist project
• Theory, meta-theory, and the distinction between positivist and post-positivist approaches
• Ontology, epistemology, and methodology in IR
• The purpose and limits of IR theory: explanation, understanding, and critique
• Mapping the theoretical landscape: mainstream, critical, and post-positivist traditions

Case Studies

• The League of Nations and the failure of interwar idealism
• The Carr–idealism debate: the origins of the realist–liberal tension in IR

Seminar Exercise

• Mapping exercise: students position the major IR theories along the axes of positivism and post-positivism on one dimension, and state-centrism and non-state perspectives on another. Groups discuss what methodological assumptions each position entails, what kinds of questions each can and cannot ask, and how the map itself reflects particular assumptions about the discipline.

Analytical Focus

• Introduction to theoretical pluralism; understanding meta-theoretical debates; distinguishing explanation from interpretation.

Week 2 — Why does realism continue to dominate explanations of world politics?

Realism is the oldest and most influential tradition in IR theory, and its persistence is itself an analytical puzzle. From Thucydides to Morgenthau to Waltz, realist thinkers have argued that the defining features of international politics — anarchy, self-help, the pursuit of power and security — are not contingent historical constructions but enduring structural conditions. Neorealism systematised these claims, producing a parsimonious theory of state behaviour grounded in the structure of the international system rather than human nature. Yet realism has also attracted sustained criticism: for its state-centrism, its pessimism, its neglect of domestic politics and international institutions, and its apparent inability to explain significant episodes of cooperation, normative change, and peaceful transformation. This week examines realism in its classical, structural, and neoclassical variants, and asks what it explains well and what it systematically obscures.

Key Themes

• Classical realism: human nature, power, and the national interest
• Structural realism: anarchy, polarity, and the balance of power
• Neoclassical realism: domestic variables and foreign policy
• Security dilemmas and the logic of self-help in the international system
• Critiques of realism: state-centrism, historical limitations, normative blindness

Case Studies

• The Melian Dialogue: realist logic in the Peloponnesian War
• The Cold War balance of power: bipolarity, deterrence, and strategic competition
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: realist interpretations and their limits

Seminar Exercise

• Theoretical application debate: students apply structural realist logic to a contemporary case and then identify the specific empirical anomalies or normative omissions the framework cannot account for. Those gaps are used to motivate the engagement with alternative theories that follows in subsequent weeks.

Analytical Focus

• Applying structural realist logic to case studies; identifying explanatory strengths and systematic blind spots.

Week 3 — Can liberalism explain cooperation in an anarchic international system?

Liberalism offers a fundamental challenge to realist pessimism. Where realists see anarchy as a permanent condition generating insecurity and competition, liberals argue that interdependence, institutions, and shared democratic values create conditions under which states can reliably cooperate and constrain their pursuit of relative gains. The democratic peace thesis — the empirical claim that liberal democracies rarely go to war with one another — became one of the most discussed findings in IR. Institutionalism argued that international organisations reduce transaction costs, foster transparency, and create focal points for coordination. Liberal approaches gained significant policy influence as the framework underlying international economic governance, multilateral security institutions, and the post-1945 liberal international order. This week examines the theoretical foundations of liberalism, its major variants, and the challenge it now faces from great power competition, democratic backsliding, and the fragmentation of multilateral institutions.

Key Themes

• Classical liberalism: Kant, commercial peace, and republican international order
• Complex interdependence and regime theory
• The democratic peace thesis: evidence, mechanisms, and contested implications
• Liberal institutionalism and the design of international organisations
• The crisis of the liberal international order: causes, extent, and implications

Case Studies

• The European Union as a liberal peace project and its internal tensions
• WTO dispute settlement: institutionalism and its limits under great power competition
• Democratic backsliding and its implications for the democratic peace

Seminar Exercise

• Structured comparison: students compare liberal and realist explanations of the same international episode (to be selected by the seminar leader), identifying where the frameworks agree, where they diverge, and what evidence would help adjudicate between them.

Analytical Focus

• Evaluating institutionalist arguments; comparing theoretical explanations of cooperation; assessing the democratic peace as an empirical and normative claim.

Week 4 — What is international society, and how does it differ from international system thinking?

The English School occupies a distinctive position between realism and liberal institutionalism, refusing the reductionism of both while engaging seriously with the sociological dimensions of international order. Where realists describe an international system governed by power and neoliberals focus on institutional incentives, the English School argues that states constitute an international society: they share norms, rules, and institutions that give international order a social character irreducible to material power. Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society remains the foundational text, but the tradition has developed substantially to engage questions of global governance, humanitarian intervention, world society, and the tension between order and justice. This week examines the core concepts of the English School, its methodological commitments, and the analytical contribution it makes to debates about intervention, legitimacy, and the changing contours of international order.

Key Themes

• International system versus international society: the foundational conceptual distinction
• The pluralist–solidarist debate: sovereign order versus cosmopolitan justice
• Institutions of international society: diplomacy, sovereignty, the balance of power, international law, and great power management
• World society and the role of non-state actors and global civil society
• Humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect as normative contestation

Case Studies

• The UN Security Council as an institution of international society under strain
• The Responsibility to Protect: solidarist ambition and pluralist resistance
• Recognition, legitimacy, and contested statehood in contemporary international order

Seminar Exercise

• Concept application: students examine a specific instance of normative contestation in international politics — intervention, targeted sanctions, or contested recognition — using the pluralist–solidarist distinction, and assess which conception of international society the actors themselves appear to invoke and why.

Analytical Focus

• Distinguishing systemic from societal analysis; applying English School concepts to normative debates about intervention, sovereignty, and order.

Week 5 — Is International Political Economy a theory of capitalism, power, or inequality?

International Political Economy emerged as a sub-field in the 1970s in response to the perceived failure of IR and economics to explain the political dimensions of global economic relations. The challenge from Marxist and critical traditions was fundamental: the global economy is not a neutral arrangement of exchange but a structured system of power, accumulation, and inequality that reproduces hierarchies between states and within them. World-systems theory identified a structural division between core, semi-periphery, and periphery that disciplines the developmental possibilities of subordinate states. Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony was adapted to explain the ideological and institutional architecture through which dominant powers maintain global economic order. Dependency theory traced the mechanisms by which integration into the global economy perpetuates rather than resolves underdevelopment. This week examines these critical approaches, placing them in dialogue with realist and liberal IPE and asking what they illuminate that mainstream frameworks do not.

Key Themes

• Marxist IR: historical materialism and the capitalist world system
• World-systems theory and the core–periphery hierarchy
• Gramscian IR: hegemony, historic blocs, and counter-hegemony
• Dependency theory and underdevelopment in the Global South
• The political economy of global financial institutions and structural adjustment

Case Studies

• IMF structural adjustment and its developmental consequences in sub-Saharan Africa
• China’s rise and the question of hegemonic transition in the global economy
• Global value chains and the geography of labour exploitation

Seminar Exercise

• Critical reading workshop: students read extracts from a mainstream IPE text and a critical IPE text examining the same phenomenon, identify the assumptions embedded in each, and construct a comparison of the political and ideological stakes of the two analytical approaches. The workshop also asks students to consider which framework their own intuitions about global economic order most closely resemble, and why.

Analytical Focus

• Identifying the political assumptions embedded in economic theories; applying materialist and structural frameworks to global economic order.

Theoretical Analysis Essay due at the end of this week.

Week 6 — Does constructivism change what we think power actually is?

Constructivism challenged both realism and liberalism at their foundations by questioning the ontological status of the actors and interests those theories take for granted. Alexander Wendt’s claim that anarchy is what states make of it encapsulated a broader argument: the identities and interests of states are not fixed by material conditions but are socially constructed through interaction, practice, and normative context. This insight opened space for a sociology of international relations capable of explaining normative change, the diffusion of norms and practices across the international system, and the conditions under which actors reconstitute their identities and interests over time. Constructivism’s influence on IR has been substantial: it reshaped debates on security culture, international norms, and foreign policy analysis. Yet it has also attracted criticism for its idealist tendencies, its neglect of material power, and its analytical proximity to the mainstream it sought to challenge.

Key Themes

• Social construction and the critique of rationalist assumptions about identity and interest
• Identity, interests, and the logic of appropriateness versus the logic of consequences
• Norm dynamics: norm emergence, entrepreneurship, diffusion, and internalisation
• Securitisation theory and the social construction of threats
• Limits and critiques of constructivism: where does agency stop and structure begin?

Case Studies

• The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and the power of normative change in international politics
• NATO expansion and the social construction of European security identity after 1991
• The securitisation of migration in European political discourse

Seminar Exercise

• Norm-tracing exercise: students trace the emergence and institutionalisation of a specific international norm (to be assigned), using constructivist frameworks to identify the actors, discourses, and turning points that shaped its diffusion, and assessing where material interests complicate the normative explanation.

Analytical Focus

• Applying constructivist concepts to norm change and identity formation; distinguishing constructivist from rationalist explanations of international behaviour.

Week 7 — Do post-structuralist approaches dissolve the possibility of objective IR knowledge?

Post-structuralism entered IR in the late 1980s, drawing on the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan to challenge the epistemological and ontological foundations of mainstream theory. Where positivist IR assumed that the discipline could produce objective knowledge about an independent social reality, post-structuralist approaches argued that all knowledge is situated, produced through relations of power, and constituted by the very categories and discourses it claims merely to describe. The state, sovereignty, anarchy, and security are not neutral analytical concepts but historically specific constructions that normalise particular political arrangements and render others unintelligible or threatening. If IR theory does not simply describe the world but actively constitutes the objects it studies, then the choice of theoretical framework is itself a political act. This week examines post-structuralism as both an epistemological challenge to mainstream IR and an analytical toolkit for reading international politics differently.

Key Themes

• Foucault, discourse, and power/knowledge in international relations
• Deconstruction and the critique of sovereign identity and territorial boundedness
• The inside/outside distinction and the constitution of political community
• Critical security studies and the politics of threat construction
• The ethics of post-structuralist critique: can radical scepticism ground political commitments?

Case Studies

• The discourse of the War on Terror: constructing enemies, states of exception, and legal limits
• Refugee representation and the politics of humanitarian discourse
• Sovereignty discourse and the legitimation of external intervention

Seminar Exercise

• Discourse analysis exercise: students analyse a specific political text — a governmental speech, a UN resolution, or a strategic doctrine document — using Foucauldian discourse analysis, identifying the assumptions, exclusions, and power relations the text normalises, and examining what alternative framings the text forecloses.

Analytical Focus

• Introduction to discourse analysis as a method; identifying the political stakes of representational choices in international politics.

Week 8 — How do postcolonial perspectives reframe the origins of world order?

Postcolonial IR begins from a deceptively simple observation: the discipline of International Relations was constructed by scholars working in the imperial metropoles of Europe and North America, and it has systematically marginalised the experiences, perspectives, and theoretical contributions of scholars and states from the Global South. The institutions of modern international order — sovereignty, self-determination, the state system — emerged from, and were shaped by, the history of European colonialism in ways that mainstream IR theory does not adequately interrogate. Scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and more recently Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni have argued that decolonising knowledge requires not merely adding new cases to existing frameworks but challenging the epistemic foundations on which those frameworks rest. This week examines postcolonial theory as an analytical and political intervention in IR, asking what it reveals about the genealogy of international order and the conditions of epistemic justice.

Key Themes

• Eurocentrism and the colonial foundations of IR theory
• Colonialism, sovereignty, and the standard of civilisation in nineteenth-century international order
• Epistemic freedom and the decolonisation of knowledge in IR
• Pan-Africanism and Third World internationalism as alternative IR frameworks
• Postcolonial states, structural dependency, and the politics of recognition

Case Studies

• The Bandung Conference and the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement
• Africa in the international system: from colonial subjects to sovereign actors and back
• The International Criminal Court and international criminal justice as contested postcolonial terrain

Seminar Exercise

• Comparative reading: students read a mainstream IR account and a postcolonial account of the same historical episode, analyse the differences in framing, evidence, and normative orientation, and articulate what the postcolonial account illuminates that the mainstream account forecloses. The seminar concludes by asking what it would mean to take the postcolonial critique seriously as a methodological commitment, not merely as an additional perspective.

Analytical Focus

• Engaging with postcolonial critiques of IR’s theoretical canon; connecting colonial history to the constitution of contemporary international order.

Final essay proposal (one page) due at the end of this week.

Week 9 — What does feminist IR reveal that mainstream theory ignores?

Feminist IR entered the discipline in the 1980s and 1990s, asking where the women were in international politics — in the armies, the diplomatic services, the border zones, and the theories. The question was not merely empirical but methodological: feminist scholars argued that the categories through which IR analyses global politics — the state, security, rationality, the public/private divide — are themselves gendered in ways that render women’s experiences invisible and naturalise masculine norms of statecraft. Ann Tickner’s critical engagement with Morgenthau’s principles of political realism became a landmark moment in IR’s self-examination. Since then, feminist IR has diversified considerably, encompassing liberal, standpoint, postcolonial, and queer perspectives, each offering distinct critical frameworks for examining the gendering of war, diplomacy, development, and political economy. This week examines these traditions and asks what they reveal that mainstream theory structurally cannot see.

Key Themes

• The gendered foundations of IR theory: state, sovereignty, and the politics of security
• Liberal feminism and the politics of inclusion and representation
• Standpoint feminism and the epistemology of marginality
• Postcolonial feminism and the intersection of race, gender, and empire
• Queer IR: heteronormativity, recognition, and the politics of international order

Case Studies

• Women, peace, and security: UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and its implementation gap
• Sexual violence as a weapon of war: accountability, justice, and institutional silence
• Feminist critiques of humanitarian intervention and the gendered politics of protection

Seminar Exercise

• Conceptual reframing exercise: students take a canonical IR concept — security, sovereignty, power, or anarchy — and reconstruct its analytical content using feminist frameworks, then assess what changes in the analysis and what implications follow for understanding a concrete political case.

Analytical Focus

• Feminist methodology and standpoint epistemology; applying gender analysis to IR concepts and case studies; evaluating the relationship between knowledge claims and political position.

Policy Application Brief due at the end of this week.

Week 10 — Can green theory fundamentally reorient international relations around planetary limits?

Green theory poses a fundamental challenge to the state-centric and anthropocentric assumptions of mainstream IR. The international system, as constituted by sovereign states competing for power and pursuing economic growth, has presided over systematic degradation of the biosphere. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and the approaching of planetary boundaries are not simply policy problems to be managed within existing institutional frameworks; they are, for green theorists, symptoms of a deeper structural crisis rooted in the logic of the sovereign state and the capitalist world economy. Green IR draws on ecology, political philosophy, and critical theory to argue that a genuinely sustainable international order requires rethinking the ontological foundations of international politics, not merely reforming its institutions. This week examines green theory as a theoretical intervention in IR, while also engaging the practical politics of global climate governance and the limits of multilateral environmental cooperation.

Key Themes

• Ecological thought and the critique of IR’s anthropocentrism and state-centrism
• Environmental security and the securitisation of ecological threats
• The commons problem and global environmental governance
• Climate justice and the global equity dimension of ecological crisis
• Degrowth, planetary boundaries, and the political economy of sustainability

Case Studies

• The Paris Agreement: institutional architecture and the emissions implementation gap
• Small island developing states and climate vulnerability as an existential security challenge
• The Amazon: sovereign development rights versus global ecological commons

Seminar Exercise

• Multilateral negotiation simulation (Part One): students represent assigned actors in a structured climate governance negotiation, advancing the interests and normative positions of their assigned actor and engaging with competing proposals. Each student has submitted a position paper in advance setting out the theoretical assumptions their actor embodies.

Analytical Focus

• Environmental security analysis; engaging with the tension between state sovereignty and transboundary ecological interdependence; evaluating the explanatory limits of state-centric IR frameworks.

Week 11 — How do IR theories explain concrete global issues: terrorism, development, and globalisation?

A theory of international relations that cannot make sense of the world it claims to explain is merely an exercise in intellectual architecture. This week bridges the theoretical traditions examined across the course and three of the most consequential issue-areas of contemporary world politics: terrorism and political violence, global development and inequality, and the politics of globalisation. Each issue-area is examined through multiple theoretical lenses, demonstrating both the explanatory power of theoretical pluralism and the practical stakes of theoretical choice. The way an actor conceptualises terrorism — as a security threat, a political grievance, a product of imperial history, or a symptom of systemic marginalisation — determines the policy responses deemed appropriate. The same holds for development and globalisation. Theory is not merely academic; it is the framework through which political actors construct problems and justify responses.

Key Themes

• Terrorism: realist, liberal, constructivist, and postcolonial interpretations and their policy implications
• Development: liberal modernisation, dependency, and capability approaches
• Globalisation: hyperglobalist, sceptical, and transformationalist perspectives
• The politics of knowledge: who defines problems, who determines solutions, and whose experiences count
• Theory and policy: the feedback between academic frameworks and political practice

Case Studies

• The Global War on Terror: theoretical diagnosis and its strategic consequences
• The Sustainable Development Goals: liberal governance, measurement, and its critics
• Global value chains and the politics of development in East and Southeast Asia

Seminar Exercise

• Multilateral negotiation simulation (Part Two) and reflective presentation: students continue the simulation from Week 10, reaching or failing to reach negotiated outcomes, and then deliver brief individual reflective presentations examining the theoretical assumptions their assigned actor embodied, what those assumptions determined in the negotiation, and what they foreclosed.

Analytical Focus

• Integrating theory and issue-area analysis; evaluating the policy implications of competing theoretical frameworks; connecting theoretical traditions to practical political dilemmas.

Week 12 — Is the world moving towards order, fragmentation, or systemic transformation?

The final week asks students to apply the full repertoire of theoretical frameworks examined across the course to the question that may define the twenty-first century: what is happening to international order, and what analytical resources are available for making sense of it? Hegemonic stability theory, power transition theory, and world-systems theory offer competing accounts of what the relative decline of American primacy and the rise of China mean for the future of international order. Constructivist and English School perspectives focus on the normative and institutional dimensions of order, asking whether existing institutions can absorb the pressures of great power competition, democratic backsliding, and transboundary crises. Critical and postcolonial traditions ask whether what is framed in Western scholarship as a crisis of order is, for the Global South, simply the continuation of structural conditions that have defined the international system since decolonisation. Strategic forecasting requires holding these frameworks in tension and asking which combinations of variables are most likely to determine which futures.

Key Themes

• Hegemonic stability, power transition, and the politics of order change
• The return of great power competition: realist, liberal, and constructivist interpretations
• Democratic recession and the challenge to liberal international norms and institutions
• Transboundary crises and the structural inadequacy of state-centric responses
• Strategic forecasting: methods, assumptions, and the ethics of political prediction

Case Studies

• US–China strategic competition: theoretical interpretations and policy implications
• The fragmentation of multilateral institutions: WTO, UN Security Council, and ICC
• The Global South and multipolarity: agency, non-alignment, and structural constraint

Seminar Exercise

• Scenario synthesis workshop: students work in teams to construct two contrasting scenarios for the international order in 2050, grounding each scenario in a coherent theoretical framework and specifying the key variables, driving forces, and normative implications. Teams present their scenarios to the full seminar and respond to critical questioning. The workshop serves as a synthesis of the analytical frameworks developed across the course and an opportunity to examine what each tradition implies for the future of world politics.

Analytical Focus

• Strategic forecasting and scenario construction; synthesising theoretical frameworks across the course; evaluating the relationship between academic analysis and political responsibility.

Final Research Essay due in Week 13.

*** This course is designed to be adaptable. The weekly structure, assessment components, and reading load can be adjusted to suit the requirements of a particular higher education institution or the context of individual tutoring, and can be scaled to meet the demands of bachelor’s and master’s degree students alike. The analytical framework and intellectual ambitions of the course remain constant; the format is a starting point, not a constraint.