The senior seminar is the culmination of the degree program and is designed to encourage students to combine their skilled analysis of the political in a challenging new context. While topics cover all three track concentrations, the goal of the seminar is to foster a sense of intellectual autonomy, to facilitate the ability to assess paradigms, and to provide a platform for a professional oral presentation of research results, as well as the incorporation of original research in a written thesis. Recent seminar topics include: Sovereignty, International Criminal Law, and Democracy.
This course explores changing patterns of power and organization in the modern world system – from the modern nation-state, the Industrial Revolution and nineteenth century European global expansion to the current turbulent phase of globalization. It examines and theorizes key analytical and normative challenges of the present: global rebalancing and the emergence or reemergence of postcolonial states, uneven development, the role of culture in world politics, the future of the nation state, the global environmental imperative, mass forced and free migrations, the new landscape of armed conflict, the sources and implications of sharpening social divides, and the challenges to liberal-democratic theory and practice. Drawing, like Foundations of Modern Politics, on the social sciences and political philosophy, the course operates through a mix of theory and empirical study. Students will thus become acquainted to the essential frameworks and methods of social scientific enquiry while working on concrete objects of analysis. A core objective is to discover and grasp how major theoretical approaches differ in their interpretation and explanation of world politics, as well as in the normative models and demands that they advance. Students are expected to participate actively in debate during class.