Global Studies: Risks and Threats in International Relations

Syllabus

• Week 1

  Twelve Challenges to the current order

  • Introduction

    Foreword, methodology and introduction to Week 1

  • Concepts and problems

    Democracy is neither spreading nor improving, just stagnating. Shameless brute force is rearing its ugly head, even against civilians. Nationalism is making a comeback. The world remains unstable, unequal and dangerous.

  • National Challenges

    Authority erodes in places where hierarchy characterizes relations between people (state, parties, unions, media, universities, schools, firms, sports clubs, armies). And protest is a side effect of this trend.

  • International challenges

    Policy-makers need to know that the crises they face are no longer a temporary affair and people can no longer be indifferent to the fate of others, or believe they are safe.

  • Regional challenges

    We are going back to the world as it was before globalization: each major region is subject to local crises that add to the global challenges. Some overcome them better than others. Oceania, absent here, has a bright future.

• Week 2

  Three major issues in Geopolitics

  • How hard is it to communicate with others?

    Relations between people and peoples are made up of incomprehension, insinuations, accusations, misconceptions and misunderstandings. It is difficult to adjust to the small differences that lead to marked disparities.

  • Instability of norms and rules in politics and business

    Constitutions that last, laws that resist change, structured markets: be they politicians or entrepreneurs, those who have to deal with foreign rules prefer imperfect stability to an unstable quest for a better world.

  • Social uprising and citizens’ anger

    Citizens believe that their representatives, be they insufficiently or too authoritarian, lack efficiency, and are rather corrupt, disconnected from reality: so, all of a sudden they rebel, without necessarily changing everything.

• Week 3

  Three most pressing risks and threats today

  • A point of no return: environmental, climate, and energy traps

    Mankind will soon reach a threshold beyond which it will become impossible to control nature, or nature will no longer suffice for its needs: one year’s worth of reserves run out earlier and earlier (currently July).

  • Spreading threats

    Many human origin threats render state sovereignty illusory: viruses, real or virtual, play with borders; as do refugees, victims of mass crimes or those in search of a better life.

  • Security threats on the rise

    The number of countries capable of projecting their robotic or special forces and whose leaders are determined to make use of them is growing each year. Controlling technology is difficult.

• Week 4

  Twelve high stakes and how to face them

  • The transformations of war 

    War is changing: there is a lot of equipment, few soldiers, very few deaths, but more foreigners aside us. We fight for information, for scarce resources, or for others’ well being even when they don’t ask for help.

  • New polarity, new powers

    Many countries are vying for the top spot. When one of them takes power, others lose ground. This race requires good negotiators, thus states with a true diplomatic heritage.

  • New norms, new practices

    By negotiating, diplomats acquire a global culture and adopt its language, its uses, its practices and its modes of conflict resolution. "Best practices" and the standards they obey are crucial.

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