My Courses

The course Introduction to International Relations (Intro.IR) is designed to give you a broad overview of international relations. We will cover the primary theoretical models of international relations, primarily in the security and economic fields. By the end of the course, you should have a strong understanding of international relations and how they are studied, and you should be prepared to take upper-division courses in this field. Furthermore, this course is writing-intensive. The writing component should help you improve your writing skills and prepare for research papers in your upper-division classes—the target Audiences are BA students.

The course Foreign Policy Decision-Making (FPDM) seeks to prepare students to specialize in the international arena. During this course, we will learn to analyze foreign policy decision-making to influence future outcomes. The goal is to move beyond the passive attitude of achieving possible results to an active action that would substantially improve the vital national interests in the international arena—the target audiences are BA, MA, and doctoral students.

The course Schools of Thought in International Relations (STIR) seeks to present to graduate students in International Relations the leading theoretical perspectives in the IR field. The course will discuss eight fundamental approaches in international relations or schools. Moreover, the course seeks to identify and map the connections between these approaches, critiques of reciprocity, and launch areas of similarity and differences between them and their applied fields. The course's main objective is to introduce to the students the central academic, intellectual, and political debates taking place in recent decades about the theory of international relations. Other purposes of the course are developing students’ critical ability, promoting their expression and writing ability, and preparing them to write excellent research academic papers in the field. Prerequisite: the course Introduction to International Relations—the target Audiences are MA and Doctoral students.

The course Introduction to the Complexity of International Relations (ICIR) seeks to introduce international relations graduate students to the complexity of international relations. The challenges faced nowadays, and those to be faced in the future, require us to adopt new ways of thinking about the complexity of the political world, and the interrelationships between its components. The insights we gain from studying complex systems will help us expand our thinking in directions that will allow us to better cope with the future. Complexity arises when many variables depend on other variables independently and unexpectedly. During the course, we will understand the complexity and develop the tools to deal with and influence how it behaves—the target audiences are advanced BA, MA, and Doctorate students.