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.”

In all your assessment tasks,  you are obliged to avoid  unacceptable academic activities including plagiarism and contract-cheating. See Policies and Procedures, below Academic Integrity Policy, Part B Unacceptable academic activities. Students' alleged ingorance of the University Academic Integrity Policy is not accepted as an excuse for engaging in unacceptable academic activities.

The unit convenor does not grant extensions to any assessment tasks. For the procedure see below Policies and Procedures, Special Consideration Policy. 

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 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-practiotioners.

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, 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 following are topics of lecture sessions by the week (teaching):

1. Introduction to IR Theory

2. Normative International Relations Theory

3. Realism: Classical

4. Realism: Structural

5. Liberalism and Neoliberalism

6. International Society approach (the English School)

7. Constructivism

8. Marxism and Critical Theory

9. Reading week - Essay Preparation

10. Post-structuralism, Post-Colonialism and Feminism

11. Green Theory and Globalization

12. Foreign Policy Analysis: Individual Actors and Bureaucracies

13. IR Theory: One and Many

This is a newly designed unit which thematically (as expected) overlaps with the previous unit.