On friendship

This seminar offers an introduction to the study of international organizations (IOs). It will concentrate on the history and politics of public intergovernmental organizations, while also touching upon NGOs and other private actors in global governance along the way. Private actors will not be in the seminar’s focus, however. The first part of the seminar discusses IOs as an organizational form and sketches the history of the phenomenon. In the second part of the seminar we turn to five policy fields in which IOs are active: peace and security, trade and finance, environmental protection, development, and human rights. In this second part of the seminar, working groups of students will present organizations active in these fields and use the empirical evidence to illustrate and critically discuss the theoretical perspectives outlined in the course. The language of instruction and debate in class is English. All course materials are provided online via moodle.