Courses
The International Studies program offers a diverse range of classes that allow students to explore global issues from multiple perspectives. Courses cover topics such as human rights, economic development, international law, peacebuilding, and climate change, while also incorporating insights from Africana studies, communication, economics, geography, history, political science, sociology, and peace and conflict studies. This multidisciplinary approach equips students with a broad understanding of international problems and the skills needed to make an impact in a variety of global contexts.
Courses Taught by Professor Andrew Barnes
INTS 30001: “True Facts”: Making Sense of Your World
How can you find a reliable answer to a question you are curious about? How could you convince someone your answer was reasonable if they didn’t already agree with you? This course is the place to think about how to find good answers to important questions. In a world with numerous sources of misinformation and numerous opportunities for our biases to be confirmed, it is essential to think critically about how we seek information, how we assess it, and what conclusions we draw from it.
INTS 30101: Worlds of Wealth & Power
How do street orphans survive and profiteers thrive in wartime? What happens after the war? Do illegal, semi-legal, and legal transnational businesses look fundamentally similar or different? What is the role of law in creating wealth and inequality? How do gangs acquire and distribute wealth? How about individual gang members? How and why do the rich hide their wealth?
This course takes a multidisciplinary approach to answering these and other questions, building on scholarship and insights from a wide range of fields. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how multiple forms of wealth intersect with various forms of power to shape the worlds we inhabit, from the local to the global. Throughout, we will also explore how we can make a positive impact on those worlds.
INTS 40095: Special Topics: Ukraine, Russia, & Their Many Neighbors
This course explores wealth, power, order, resistance, security, and meaning in the vast geographical expanse of “Eurasia.” Students will find answers to questions they have long wondered about and uncover new ones they didn’t even know they had!
Courses Taught by Professor Josh Stacher
INTS 10450: The New Pangaea
Students in this course will be introduced to how individuals both encounter and are shielded from the global community each day through various forms of violence, including state, environmental, economic, educational, civil, sexual, health, and interpersonal violence, as well as self-harm. Students will examine how these forces operate in daily life and consider the central question: How can you and we understand and manage to live in such a violent world? Through reflective journal entries and scholarly inquiry, students will become more informed, critical consumers of information while developing greater personal agency and resilience to meet these challenges.
INTS 30501: Order/Resistance
This course’s journey reflects on the central conversation between state officials and the people they govern. This course tries to understand how a society pressures for political change and how state violence affects both the authorities and resistance movements. We will listen to a diverse group of theoretical arguments, view data, and linger in the close study of different cases. We shall consider important themes such as social and historical structures, cultural framing, and transnational economic relationships that affect the struggle for regular folks to win civil and political rights. To achieve our aims, this course considers two case studies from the United States and one from the Middle East. This course deliberately encourages explicit cross-regional, trans-historical, and comparative thinking about the politics of movements that resist political order.
INTS 40095: Solidarity/Mutual Aid
This course begins with the understanding that our global political and economic systems contain structural inequalities that marginalize and harm millions. We will examine how violence is used to maintain social "order," and what it means to live and act within such a system. Students will explore how to practice solidarity with themselves and others, how individual behaviors can encourage meaningful change, and how mutual aid supports collective well-being. Guided by three central questions: What is freedom? What is solidarity and mutual aid? Can these practices help build a "Beloved Community?" The course encourages daily practices and reflective learning aimed at imagining and creating more equitable futures.
INTS 30750: Palestine/Israel
This course examines the historical and political developments that shaped the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, focusing on the rise of Zionism, the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the resulting displacement and ongoing struggles of Palestinians. We will explore the legacies of British colonialism, the 1947-49 expulsions, the experiences of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the 58-year military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
Through the lens of settler colonialism, students will analyze how these structures continue to shape daily life, rights, and resistance for both Israelis and Palestinians. The course will engage diverse perspectives to understand how the conflict evolved, why proposed solutions such as the "Two-State solution" have faltered, and what questions remain as debates continue around occupation, equality, and the possibility of a shared future. While no single seminar can answer every question, this course provides a foundation for critically examining one of the most complex and consequential political issues of our time.
INTS 40095: The Politics of Separateness
This class considers how policies of “Separateness” function as tools of repression, from segregation to apartheid to genocide. Students will explore who defines these terms, why accountability is difficult, and how enforced separation can lay the groundwork for mass violence. Through a comparative study of three major cases: the Jim Crow South, Apartheid South Africa, and Israel's policy of Hafrada, we will analyze both the shared patterns and distinct features of these systems. The course also considers the lasting political, social, and economic inequalities that remain after such regimes end, offering a deeper understanding of how separateness shapes societies across time and place.
INTS 40095: International Social Organizations (aka The Dawn of Everything)
This course challenges the assumption that human societies have followed a linear path of progress from hunter-gatherers to modern states. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and case studies from around the world, we will explore how societies historically organized around questions of power, equality, law, knowledge transmission, and social obligations. Students will critically examine the politics, economics, and social structures of both familiar and lesser-known societies, considering alternatives to the state-centric model. The primary text in this class is David Graeber and Davide Wengrow’s (2021), which guides our exploration of humanity's diverse social experiments.
Courses Taught by Dr. Julie Mazzei
INTS 40560: Human Rights and Social Justice
Torture is an international offense committed time and again across the globe. Similarly, genocide, though prohibited internationally, continues to be used by powerful regimes against marginalized populations and overlooked or denied by the very actors with the potential to prevent or end it. And where marginalized populations survive physical violence, they are often nevertheless struggling to survive in the face of structural violence. Poverty is often inescapable for the marginalized. Basic rights to organize politically; to distribute, publish in, and access a free press; to unionize; to govern one’s own bodily autonomy; and to protest are often inhibited or prohibited around the globe. This class explores a range of human rights and human rights violations, focusing on what empirical studies tell us about the perpetuation of, utilization of, motivation behind, and ability to prevent or defend against torture, genocide, and structural poverty.
Throughout this course, students will learn what we know about the nature and effect of torture; the legal structures relevant to the use of torture; what genocide is and the pattern of dynamics that precede it; the international legal code regarding genocide; how “shantytowns” operate, survive, and sometimes thrive; and about the connections between prejudice, racism, colonialism and “shantytown” evolution. Through these specific topic areas, students will explore the international and domestic structures that impact the ways in which we implement human rights.
INTS 30301: Human Security
For a century or more, leaders around the globe have defined “national security” narrowly, focusing nearly entirely on perceived threats of physical violence against the countries they led. A less state-centric and more person-centric conceptualization of “security” recognizes that the threats to human security include not only violence against a state or economic system. Food insecurity, for instance, whether caused by famine, poverty, maldistribution of resources, or disparities in access (for instance, so-called “food deserts”), undermines the security not only of individuals but communities. Climate change has caused land erosion, and thereby resource evolution and depletion in various parts of the globe, leaving whole communities (and thereby states) economically and physically vulnerable. This course will explore multiple dimensions of human (in)security, examine related policies, and stretch analytic muscles in considering improved ways to address challenges.