Course Schedule

Course Schedule

Start > Leuphana Bachelor (B.A./B.Eng./B.Sc./LL.B.) -> Major Politikwissenschaft (bis WiSe 15/16) -> Vertiefung: Internationale Beziehungen

Lehrveranstaltungen

Autokratien in Internationalen Beziehungen (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Pavel Satra

Termin:
wöchentlich | Dienstag | 10:15 - 11:45 | 15.10.2018 - 01.02.2019 | C 12.102 Seminarraum

Inhalt: The discipline of International Relations has devoted more attention to democracies although autocracies actively shape every international policy field. The course strives to account for such a lack and explores autocracies’ international behavior. Autocracies are understood as non-democracies that cumulate power instead of introducing political competition in their domestic settings. The course analyzes autocracies’ international behavior through the constructivist and liberal theoretical approaches. The classes survey 3 policy fields: War & Peace, Economy, and Human Rights & Democracy. Students cope with research papers that reflect the following sets of questions: 1. Why do autocracies fight more wars than democracies do and which authoritarian regime type fights more frequently 2. How autocracies support each other financially, why some autocracies trade more than other and how autocracies engage with global liberal financial institutions 3. What norms autocracies use to legitimize domestic repression, how autocracies localize liberal human rights norms, and how liberal human rights institutions help decrease repression levels in autocracies. Along such questions, students will be incentivized to develop analytical skills required for writing a scientific text.

Internationale Beziehungen und der Nahe Osten und Nordafrika (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Nicolas Fromm

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 14:15 - 15:45 | 15.10.2018 - 01.02.2019 | C 14.103 Seminarraum

Inhalt: We rarely see a day without headlines on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the ‘international news’ sections of ‘Western’ media outlets. The MENA region as a ‘subsystem’ of international relations seems to be particularly prone to conflicts that are complicated by the involvement of a multitude of regional and external actors and factors such as natural resources and religion. But do international relations in the MENA region really follow their own laws – or can we understand and explain regional structures, processes, and problems from an International Relations (IR) perspective? Acting upon the assumption that this is at least worth a try, this seminar seeks to apply different concepts and theories borrowed form IR scholarship to the systematic analysis of selected empirical cases of international relations and regional politics in the MENA. After a couple of introductory sessions, the first part of the seminar is dedicated to the conceptual and theoretical bases of analysing international relations in the MENA region. Drawing on the introductory module to IR, we review the basic tenets of ‘classic’ IR theories; relate and if necessary adapt them to the realities in the MENA region; and study Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) as an additional approach. This section aims at developing an analytical ‘toolbox’ for studying international politics in the MENA region with regard to different research questions. The second part of the seminar is then dedicated to applying this ‘toolbox’ to the study of a limited number of empirical cases, e.g. the Middle East (Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian) conflict and the politics of the Gulf region (e.g. cooperation in the Gulf-Cooperation Council, Saudi-Iranian rivalry, and related conflicts in Yemen and Syria). Working with textbook chapters, state-of-the-art research articles, and other sources, we use the concepts and theories to sort empirical information and systematically analyse structures, processes, and problems with the aim of (better) understanding and explaining international relations in the MENA region. Throughout the seminar, we identify and discuss the main steps of designing and conducting empirical-analytical research (research question, literature review, conceptual/theoretical framework, methodology and case selection) as well as standards of academic writing with a view to writing an analytical seminar paper.

Internationale Beziehungen und der Nahe Osten und Nordafrika II (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Nicolas Fromm