Programme

Traditionally, International Relations (IR) has focused on the study of interstate relationships. As with Political Science in general, a major theme concerns the distribution of power and authority, as well as the analysis of conflicts and patterns of cooperation. Central questions in this regard are, for example: How can we understand the global war on terror? Why do nation-states go to war? How is international order established in the absence of a world government? Why is international cooperation so difficult and global inequality so persistent? How can we explain the current global financial crisis, and how should we deal with other transnational problems like global warming, HIV/Aids and migration? What does globalisation have to do with all of this, and is it really such a new development in world history?

In the context of these questions, research in IR has widened its focus to include a wide range of actors influential in world politics. In addition to the traditional focus on states as the main drivers of international politics, IR scholars now examine international organisations, multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations, as well as individuals that can have a decisive impact on the course of international politics. This not only concerns usual suspects as Barack Obama or Ban Ki Moon as the Secretary-General of the United Nations, but could also be NGO’s like Amnesty International, or private persons like Eleanor Roosevelt (who played a major role in the establishment of the human rights regime). How can we understand and analyse the role of these players in the international political game? And what does this mean for the analysis of power as it is traditionally understood?

In order to analyse these issues in a systematic way, IR as an academic discipline consists of a wide array of theoretical perspectives that each provide a particular lens to try and understand the complex world around us. And as that complex world does not always easily fit our academic categories, as for instance the increasing blurring of domestic politics and foreign policy testifies, theorising often includes combining political analysis with economic, legal and historical insights from related disciplines. In this context also the boundaries between IR and other subfields of Political Science, such as Comparative Politics and Political Theory, are becoming less strict. But in general one could distinguish between the Comparative Politics as being focused on international comparison between a variety of national political systems (e.g. the parliamentary system of the Netherlands as compared to that of Germany, France and the UK), whereas IR focuses on analysing the dynamics of international politics itself and the relationship between the variety of actors engaged in it.

By linking empirical cases to theoretical perspectives, students learn what a theory ‘does’, and vice versa, what it does not provide. In this context, IR also includes a fundamental debate on philosophy of science: How can we study social events? Does what we see depend on where we stand? What basis is there for our truth claims? Together, this makes IR a vibrant and challenging field of study, which encourages students to critically examine the information distributed by the media and engage with the world they themselves are part of.

Information on courses and time-tables can be found in the e-Prospectus