The course is divided into three sections: international order, security challenges, and political economy. You must also sign up for a discussion section: IAFF 1005.30-45. Registration restricted to degree seeking ESIA students only.
It also will focus on some domestic organized crime groups both to provide a depth of understanding of the operations of organized criminal activity in different countries, as well as to show how inroads might be made into domestic markets if done in cooperation with local groups. IAFF 6186 Who Will Rule the 21st Century?
The course is designed to equip students with lasting skills to interpret defense and foreign policies of past, present, and future U.S. administrations. Instructor signature required to register. This course is restricted to students in the ESIA Dean’s Scholars Program.
The primary objective of IAFF 6504 is to develop professional language skills for international affairs students and to train students to read and discuss international and cultural issues in French. The emphasis of the course is on reading comprehension and conversation skills.
Students will be assigned a pilot research study as a part of the course requirement to be a means of practicing the concepts and research skills they learn throughout the course.
The Course provides a broad survey of East Asia, focusing on China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. There is emphasis on modern history and salient contemporary political, economic, security and cultural-intellectual issues and developments
First-Year Experience assists students in developing their personal, academic, and career goals.
Asia, perhaps the world’s most dynamic region, is currently in a state of flux and high uncertainty. This course analyzes major aspects of international relations of Asia, by specifically focusing on both the evolution and the current state of regional order and patterns of intra-regional interaction in terms of both cooperation and competition. After reviewing key concepts and critical historical developments, the course first focuses on major regional actors, such as China, Japan, ASEAN, and India, and assesses their respective policy preferences and approaches toward regional order, governance and community-building. It then examines existing regional institutions and coordination networks, both formal and informal, in various issue areas, including trade and finance, human rights, environment, and popular culture production. One unique feature of this course is that students will have a rare opportunity to interact with prominent guest lecturers who will share their expertise and experience regarding concrete regional actors and contemporary policy issues. In addition to developing the knowledge and analytical tools for discerning the current state of regional order, students will undertake focused research to write a major paper on their chosen subject pertaining to some aspect of emerging order and community-building in Asia.
The course assesses the political, economic, social, military and foreign policy priorities of China’s leaders. It focuses on the period following Mao Zedong (d. 1976), and examines the political, economic, social, military and foreign policy changes and reforms that have made China a great power in Asian and world affairs. It assesses the implications of these developments for China and its neighbors and other concerned powers, U.S. relations with China and U.S. interests in Asian and world affairs.
This course focuses on modern Turkey and its current relationship with the Arab states, the Caucasus, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, Central Asia, and the United States. It will reinforce ideas and concepts that impact Turkey's domestic, regional, and international dynamics. The course will also analyze the driving factors behind Turkey’s interest in expanding its soft and hard power beyond the Greater Middle East. The first part of the course will focus on Turkey’s evolving domestic dynamic while the second part will focus on Turkey’s changing foreign and defense policy as well as its international relations challenges.
Global Inquiries is the first of three one-credit courses that comprise one of the requirements for completion of GW’s Global Bachelor’s Program (GBP). GBP provides students with three international learning experiences to enhance their understanding of the impacts of globalization, to improve their adaptability to different cultures, and to increase their global networks. The goals of this pre-departure course are two-fold. First is to improve students' international learning experiences by creating appropriate expectations and introducing them to important concepts for understanding their experiences. Second, the course will give students the opportunity to select an important Global Challenge and to develop an Essential Question of Inquiry (EQI) related to this challenge that will guide their international experiences throughout the program.
The combined effects of such transnational security issues as drug, weapons, and human trafficking, piracy, acts of terrorism, infectious diseases, and deliberate environmental destruction, along with such critical enablers as corruption, and money movements, are not strangers on the world stage. What is new is their global reach and destructive potential. As a result, these issues have made policy makers consider different conceptions of security and, at times, to move beyond sole considerations of state sovereignty into the realm of human security.
program in Security Policy Studies is designed to help students analyze, assess, and make judgments about security policies. Policies are statements of intent or commitments to act made by governments and other actors; they involve decisions about the priorities and values to pursue and the resources and tools that will be devoted to that enterprise. Every policy decision could have been made differently. The course examines how social scientific concepts, methods and research techniques are used to identify security threats, risks and challenges, and develop effective responses to them. Students will analyze how security policies are formulated; how policy options are developed and how to choose between them; how to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of different policy tools; and how data and research influences security policy, or not.
A broad, complex, and multidimensional set of factors contribute to the ability of states to use science and technology to advance their national security. This course examines how effectively states, and the United States in particular, develop policies designed to translate science and technology into strategic advantage. To assess these factors the course addresses a range of issues including innovation, revolutions in military affairs, globalization and international economic integration, technology transfer and export controls, changing global security dynamics, and the impact of emerging technologies on defense industries and military power. Major themes addressed throughout the course would form parts of any integrative framework for understanding the interplay between science, technology, and national security policy.
Russia’s “hybrid warfare” has become one of the most effective military strategies in recent history. Russia’s blend of offensive cyber intrusions, information warfare, covert actions, special operations forces, and traditional Soviet-era combat tactics has the world on its heels.
In 2016, the United Nation’s Grand Bargain articulated a vision that humanitarian action should be “as local as possible, as international as necessary.” Localization refers to putting local actors and crisis- and conflict-affected populations at the center of humanitarian action. Localization is a cross-cutting issue that affects humanitarian policy, coordination and financing, and practices such as accountability, capacity-building and participation in humanitarian action. Despite a stated commitment to the goal of localization, institutional, political, and practical factors hinder its full policy implementation. In this course, we will examine the multi-dimensional nature of localization, analyze factors that impede its full realization, unpack assumptions and biases about local actors and localized response, and explore the effectiveness of localization in cases where localized aid delivery has been piloted. Our approach will be to examine humanitarian action from the bottom-up, by considering the roles, responsibilities, and effectiveness of local actors, such as refugee-led organizations, and regional actors such as Africa CDC and area-based humanitarian coordination hubs. Students will work on a research project that analyzes and assesses how localization has been implemented in COVID-19 responses.
This course aims to consider the importance of US government strategic national security planning, including having a grand national strategy and strategic planning that flows from it, and to provide background and analytical skills on process and content. We will consider strategic planning from a conceptual and practical point of view. The course will offer a variety of possible alternatives for grand national strategy in the early 21st century, providing different lenses through which to view strategic planning and the choices that ensue. Historical and current situations will add to the richness of reading and discussion about strategic planning. We will also compare government strategic planning with practices in the wider business environment.
The political risk analysis (PRA) graduate course will examine frameworks and methodologies that measure and mitigate political risk in a range of environments at the macro (national and international) and at the micro (local and regional) levels. Approaches will combine research from the international relations and political risk areas together with risk analysis derived from psychology to provide students with an array of approaches to understand the critical aspects of evaluating risks. Emphasis is placed on the interchangeable connection between theory, research and practice, as well as the integration of various approaches towards political risk analysis in an organized framework. Political risk analysis is a multidisciplinary field of study which analyzes, measures, manages and mitigates the impact of political risk to foreign and domestic businesses and investments, organizations, and individuals. Political risk emanates from the (in) actions or reactions of stakeholders within a political system to events.