MSc Diplomacy & International Security

This course provides an advanced study of the evolution of diplomacy. While giving an historical overview it asks questions throughout about the current relevance of various diplomatic practices such as the appointment of ambassadors and the elite nature of policy-making in the diplomatic field. The class will also discusses the broader issues about the definition and purpose of diplomacy.

Embassies are integral to international diplomacy, their staff instrumental to inter-governmental dialogue, strategic partnerships, trading relationships and cultural exchange. But embassies are also discreet political spaces. Notionally sovereign territory ‘immune’ from local jurisdiction, in moments of crisis embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. It is this aspect of embassy experience that this class will explore.

This class introduces students to methodological and practical issues in historical research. The class is designed to help you decide a research topic and a design that you will use for your dissertation. Topics covered include formulating research questions, developing concepts, and how to select cases to study.

This class covers key research design issues and enables you to evaluate alternative research designs and create appropriate research proposals. The class is designed to help you decide a research topic and a design that you will use for your dissertation. Topics covered include formulating research questions, developing concepts, and how to select cases to study.

The concept of national security expanded to incorporate not only ‘traditional’ threats from hostile actors, but a host of issues ranging from the impact of climate change, natural disasters, resource security and even recession. Security has become increasingly globalised and interconnected in threat and response while also increasingly recruiting the populace to be ‘secure citizens’. The relevant theories underpinning these developing trends will be examined alongside the key institutions and actors.

This class explores the diplomacy of the post war world. It will provide students with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the key international issues faced by Britain, France and the United States after the Second World War. Students will examine the issues which strengthened the post-war alliance and those which challenged it.

This class introduces students to the literature and research agendas related to conflict and cooperation in international relations studies.

We'll cover a wide array of approaches that relate to interstate and intrastate (civil) conflict, cooperation and other contemporary security topics such as post-conflict peace, peacekeeping operations, terrorism, and human rights violations.

This module investigates the history of secret intelligence and international security from the Cold War to the global War on Terror. It looks at the development of intelligence services and their rivalry in the context of the Cold War. The course goes beyond the Western-centric narrative, to investigate the impact of the intelligence rivalry on the process of decolonisation and state-building in post-colonial societies. Moreover, it investigates the role of intelligence in counter-terrorism in historical context.

Human rights protection is a global concern. This class examines civil and political rights along with economic, social and cultural rights, and assesses the range of international monitoring and supervision regimes. Topics covered include the major international treaties and bodies. It also looks at the challenges to human rights in transitional societies as well as the right to self-determination.

The purpose of this class is to provide students with a comprehensive overview of the concepts and theoretical approaches central to understanding and analysing the role of international institutions and regimes in the contemporary world.

This class will survey a variety of international institutions and regimes, exploring how they shape global interactions in a number of cross-cutting issue areas such as security, trade, human rights and the environment. The overall analysis will contribute to the understanding of the theories, practices and processes through which global politics are organised, and to an assessment of the future of international institutions and regimes in global governance.

The class surveys and analyses the changing nature of conflict management and resolution in the Arab-Israeli dispute, together with the range of conceptual tools that seek to explain the international activity in this region. The objective is to examine the relationship between the theoretical literature within the field of diplomacy and conflict resolution and specific case studies with a particular focus on the period from the 1947 UN Partition Plan to the brink of the 1979 Camp David settlement, realised under President Jimmy Carter.

The first part of the module will focus on the influence of the United Nations on the region and the establishment of Israel in 1948. Students will then explore the impact of the Cold War on the Middle East and the role of the UN in international conflict resolution. Then the course will examine the 1973 crisis management and the US-Soviet competition to become a unilateral peacemaker in the region. Students will then explore Henry Kissinger’s negotiation tactics, including shuttle diplomacy, step-by-step approach and hard bargaining. The latter part of the module will then focus on summit diplomacy with Jimmy Carter’s single-negotiating text approach and Camp David Accords as a case study.

This class introduces students to major debates in the history of the Cold War in Africa, especially focusing on the agency of Africans in international politics. The class is arranged roughly chronologically.

The opening weeks set out major themes of the course, such as the nature of African nationalism and the outcomes of decolonization, before moving onto debates about development, modernisation, and culture in the African context. The class then considers several thematic case studies, which explore the causes of war, and conflict resolution, in southern Africa before finishing off with a discussion of the repercussions of the Cold War for the African continent.

We'll look in detail at the decolonisation in British and French Africa, before looking in some depth at the upheaval in the Congo. We'll also investigate the ‘diplomacy of liberation’, employed by African revolutionaries from the Portuguese colonies and South Africa to achieve majority rule and independence; examine the onset of the civil war in Angola and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

While the course will deal with the policies of the Soviet Union and the United States in Africa, its main objective is to study the diplomacy, strategies and statecraft of Africans in the twentieth century and investigate their impact on the ‘Global Cold War’. Were Africans simply proxies of superpower competition or did they use diplomacy to their own advantage?

The class thus aims to assess the ways in which the Cold War affected the processes of decolonisation, nation-building and democratisation in Africa. It also studies the importance of the continent for the global struggles and transformations of the post-War era. The course also allows students to creatively engage with a growing body of secondary literature and documentary evidence.

You'll learn about the theoretical and disciplinary sources underpinning conflict intervention to engage with the subject in a scholarly and critical fashion. The class straddles a wide range of topics and disciplines, like mediation itself.