Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, (a) a penalty for lateness will apply – two (2) marks out of 100 will be deducted per day for assignments submitted after the due date – and (b) no assignment will be accepted more than seven (7) days (incl. weekends) after the original submission deadline. No late submissions will be accepted for timed assessments – e.g. quizzes, online tests.

Note also that the convenor does not grant extension to any assessment based on special considerations (for example, illness). All requests for extension need to go through the Special Consideration procedure (see Special Consideration Policy under Policies and Procedures below).

More information about each assessment task is available on the iLearn page.

Teaching Methods/Mode of Delivery

There will be two hour lecture and one hour tutorial every week. Students will present in the tutorial hour.

Prerequisites and Preparation

Students taking this unit inevitably come from a wide range of academic backgrounds. Some students will already have been introduced to the study of IR, and IR theory, at the undergraduate level. For others, this unit will be their first experience of the subject, or of the more general field of political studies, of which IR is a part. For those with little or no previous background in the study of politics and IR, it is essential that you do some extra reading and preparation for the unit. Even if you have done some politics and IR before, you will benefit from some revision.

Textbooks and Sources:  The core text for IRPG841 is: International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, edited by Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, Steve Smith, Oxford University Press. Each chapter is written by a leading theorist who is working on the theory which she or he is writing about. The texts are thus coming from the actual theorists-practitioners.

It should be available to be purchased at the co-op book store. Most of the required readings for each week’s topic will come from the textbook. The required reading for week 12 "Foreign Policy analysis" comes from  Chapter 10, Introduction to International Relations: Theories and Approaches by Robert Jackson and Georg Sørensen, Oxford University Press, the Fifth edition. This should be available online in due course.

There will be also additional readings which are optional. Some of them, including videos, were provided by the previous convenor Dr Keane. 

In a few lecture sessions, the slides from the previous convenor of this unit, Dr Conor Keane are also available. These slides provide interesting illustrations - which I left in the context of his own lecture slides.

The list of topics will be available on the iLearn page.