International politics
Every day we hear about news from different parts of the world, we are interested in what is happening in other countries, and we try to assess how events outside our country can affect our lives. This course will help you understand the basic categories and main topics of international relations.
Course program
The world order
What is the “world order” and where does it come from? Perhaps the current precarious balance in the global chaos with a large number of different players – from states to terrorist organizations – creates a semblance of order? We can learn about this from events on the world stage and from the ideas of key thinkers.
Stereotypes without borders
Koreans eat dogs, the British eat oatmeal for breakfast, Germans are not very attractive, and it takes a group of Moldovans to screw in a light bulb: where do various stereotypes come from, what are their benefits and harms, and most importantly, why have they not completely disappeared in the age of universal information? Perhaps countries and peoples really exist only within our stereotypical imagination…
The world as a big village
Everyone has heard that the modern world is a big village: you can buy anything online, you can get to any corner of the world with money, but has globalization really “compressed” the world to the size of a village, or, perhaps, has it divided us into even smaller groups? Globalization itself and its sister, glocalization, will tell us about this.
International Security: From Nuclear Missiles to Social Media Abuse
“I tell my students that Russia is not a threat to the Czech Republic. In order to convince them of this, I ask them if any of them can imagine a Russian paratrooper landing from the sky in our city of Brno?” I recently heard at a conference. So is contemporary international security really only about paratroopers, or is it also about viruses, hackers, sectarian fanatics, and climate threats?
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International organizations and players
In order not to confuse the hall of the European Parliament with the hall of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, one should look at the ceiling: white and without a chandelier – the former, but to understand the functions of key international organizations and players and not to get confused in the “various” OSCE, OECD, WHO, WIPO, WTO and others, one should look not only at the ceiling.
Diplomacy: from the art of negotiation to performances
What kind of “faith” is meant in the credentials that ambassadors present to heads of state? Is diplomacy really the art of negotiation and, at the same time, the foreign policy of a state? Different types of diplomacy, especially public and digital diplomacy, as well as curious cases from its history, will help us to understand this.