graduate instruction
The world is currently beset with a number of crises: global climate change, human rights violations, the COVID-19 pandemic. These are issues that do not abide by borders; they are truly global in scope. To address these challenges, create stability in global relations, and further collective interests, states and other actors construct, revise, and enforce elaborate architectures of global governance. This seminar thus explores global governance – the rules that are intended to govern the world. Rather than taking those rules as given, however, we will interrogate the ways in which governance is supported by a particular international order. We will attempt to understand how governance and international order are related, and whether governance arrangements that are meant to solve the problems that pervade global politics distribute the benefits and costs of doing so fairly. Access the Winter 2023 syllabus here.
Global Governance, Rights, & Norms
Ethics of International Politics
Ethical questions pervade international politics. Do affluent states have an obligation to make economic sacrifices to mitigate the progression of global warming? Are human rights universal? Should states waive the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies to enable global access to vaccines? Can military intervention be justified despite its breach of sovereignty? Despite the frequent invocation of normative language in global politics, scholars of international relations have only recently started to turn their attention toward studying ethics as an important political phenomena. This marks a shift away from considering ethics as epiphenomena to interests and power. This seminar explores the role of ethics in international relations, both in theory and in practice. It draws on readings from normative international relations theory and political philosophy to take up ethical dilemmas encountered in world affairs in the context of debates about the environment, humanitarian intervention, nuclear weapons, development, and global health. Here is the Spring 2023 syllabus.