Course Offerings by term

The senior seminar is the culmination of the degree program and is designed to encourage students to combine their skilled analysis of the political in a challenging new context. While topics cover all three track concentrations, the goal of the seminar is to foster a sense of intellectual autonomy, to facilitate the ability to assess paradigms, and to provide a platform for a professional oral presentation of research results, as well as the incorporation of original research in a written thesis. Recent seminar topics include: Sovereignty, International Criminal Law, and Democracy.

A Senior Project is an independent study representing a Major Capstone Project that needs to be registered using the Senior Project registration form.
(Download: https://www.aup.edu/sites/default/files/download/Academics/academic-reso...)

The module topics change each semester and are taught by working professionals in the fields of international affairs, conflict resolution and civil society development. Each semester four or more different modules are offered.

Articulated within the emergence of the European nation-state and born in the context of the First World War and its aftermath, the discursive field of International Relations is organized around the constitutive concepts of conflict, anarchy, power, system, rule, law, and justice, and the practices of civil society and political economy. These concepts and practices organize, in turn, both the major schools of International Relations theory and contemporary methodological pluralism. This course interrogates these founding concepts from a philosophical perspective within the historical and discursive context of each major school: 1) from classical liberalism to international liberalism; 2) from classical realism to modern realism; 3) the ‘English School’ of IR theory (Bull); 4) Marxist tenets within international relations (from Karl Marx to international political economy); 5) Modern and Contemporary Critical Liberalism (Polanyi and Held); 6) The philosophical grounds of contemporary Constructivism.