Subject Area: International Relations

International Relations: Conventions and Challenges (ARTS 1810) is a first year compulsory core course in the International Studies program at UNSW. It is designed to provide a broad historical and conceptual introduction to the study of global politics. The course begins with an introduction to the discipline of International Relations and its origins. We then move on to discuss the formation of the modern state system and the conceptualisation of the state that informs much contemporary theory and practice in global politics. The course focuses on some of the significant developments that shaped 20th century world politics and the discipline of International Relations, including the two major wars (1914-18, 1939-45), the formation of the United Nations, changes in the management of the global political economy, the so-called ‘Cold War’ and European integration. The primary aims of this course are both to introduce students to some of the main issues of global politics and to make students familiar with different ways to conceptualise and analyse these issues. This means that a substantial part of this module is devoted to the introduction of the main traditional theories of International Relations and the concepts they use. Although not everyone's interest in studying international politics is theoretical, one of the central messages of the course is that different theoretical approaches generate different images of the world that build on particular assumptions. Therefore, while people may think they know what the current problems of global politics are and how to solve them, one of the aims of this course is to alert students to other ways of seeing things. This should allow students to make a more confident decision about their own stance towards particular issues and to analyse these issues more thoroughly, but it should also make graduates question both their own and others’ representations of the world.