Crossing Borders: An Introduction to Institutions and Concepts in Global Studies

3 units

This course provides an overview of the emergence of international governing institutions, the ideologies that shaped them, and concepts helpful for understanding them. Identifying the systems that have emerged to govern modern human societies at the national and international levels provides the means to consider how human beings are categorized within those systems, as citizens, subjects, asylum seekers, refugees, and the stateless. We engage a few classic works -- including The Communist Manifesto, Imagined Communities, and Orientalism -- and consider how they have transformed knowledge. The goal is for students to gain an empirical grasp of world institutions and a critical vocabulary that will provide the means for an informed engagement with international issues across different world regions and academic approaches.