3.0

credits

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The only academic discipline which has as its central focus the ‘international’ is International Relations (IR). In that discipline, the international is conceived primarily as a space of strategic interaction between sovereign states. In Raymond Aron’s view, it is populated mainly by diplomats, soldiers and businesspeople. Even when IR scholars add other actors like NGOs, IGOs, and MNCs, or norms and principles that encourage cooperation among states, the international remains a relatively spare or thin social space in comparison to domestic societies. This course begins from the opposite presumption, that the global is a thick space of social co-constitution. The course centers global phenomena such as capitalism, imperialism, race and ecology; situates them in historical and sociological perspective; and approaches them as productive of international orders and of the entities—states, societies, empires, colonies, and others—which populate it. Whereas IR focuses on the problem of anarchy among formally equal sovereigns, for global politics the central problematic is that of hierarchies of power, wealth and race. Arguably, this re-problematization returns the field to some of its originating concerns. This course draws on wider scholarship in the humanities and social sciences to reconceive the study of world politics.