This unit provides students with a foundational understanding in two key areas of international relations. First students will gain an understanding of the history of the international political and economic system, and the forces, events, and processes that have shaped the contemporary international system. Second, students will be introduced to the main theories of international relations and explore how these help explain the forces that shape international relations.

What is politics? What is political science? How can we compare political systems? This unit introduces key political institutions, organisations, processes, activities and ideologies and how these differ between countries. It explains different approaches to political science, using examples from a range of countries, including Australia.

We can understand contemporary debates in politics and international relation via studying popular culture. The unit is based on three core concepts: power, identity and conflict. After introducing major theories and definitions the unit will apply them in multifaceted ways to popular culture: from House of Cards to Borgen, and from Eurovision to Game of Thrones.

This unit provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the main areas, processes, actors and structures involved in contemporary international relations. The unit is designed to build on the theoretical and historical knowledge the students have acquired in GOVT1621, and develops the students' understanding of the international system. The unit covers four main areas; international security, international organisations, international political economy, international law.

This unit introduces students to the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches used by politics and international relations scholars. 'What is politics?' and 'how can we understand it?' are questions used to explore conceptual approaches, ranging from behaviouralism to feminism, and the way in which social science research is designed and conducted.

This unit considers key themes in modern and contemporary political thought. It uses primary texts to address topics such as sovereignty, democracy, fascism, liberalism, human rights, politics and religion, violence, and political identity. Authors may include Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, J.S. Mill, Tocqueville, Rawls, Arendt, Schmitt, and Foucault.

Southeast Asia is among the world's most politically diverse regions and host to a wide variety of state structures, regime types, historical trajectories, social conflicts and identities, and religious and ideological streams. This unit familiarises students with major concepts and theories in political science, and applies them to cases drawn from the countries of Southeast Asia. Topics covered include political institutions; the formation of states and nations; regime classification and analysis; the role of ideology and religion; economic structures and social identities; the causes of peace and conflict; human rights and development.

This unit introduces the theoretical foundations, essential concepts and central issues in the field of international security. It provides students with analytical tools to understand and participate in current debates concerning security and threats. The first part of the unit provides an introduction to the theoretical interpretations of international security. The second part discusses security phenomena, problems and strategies, including the coercive use of force, deterrence, guerrilla and counterinsurgency, nuclear stability, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, crisis management, arms races and disarmament, security cooperation and security regimes. The discussion in this part includes a critical review of the dilemmas, strategies, and solutions in each of the issue areas.

International Organisations is a survey of both the range of institutions created in response to various economic, security and environmental challenges faced by states and other actors in the global system, and some of the most prominent theories aimed at explaining them. The unit will be arranged around a series of case studies of particular issue areas, from international peacekeeping, to the regulation of multinational corporations, and the struggle to slow global warming. More broadly, the unit will question whether international organisations are instruments of or rivals to sovereign states, and whether they reflect the hegemony of the West, solutions to international collective problems, or agents of new transnational communities.

This unit is primarily about news, its production, contents and impacts. It will examine the special demands of different news organisations and of reporting different news areas; the news media as an arena in political conflicts and the consequent interests and strategies of various groups in affecting news content; and the impacts of news on political processes and relationships. Our primary focus is on Australia, but there is some comparison with other affluent liberal democracies. The substantive areas the unit will focus on include election reporting, scandals and the reporting of war and terrorism.

This unit explores American political institutions and culture. We look at who holds power in the United States, how they gained it, and what they do with it. It uses cutting edge quantitative research to explore the causes and political consequences of growing economic inequality, ongoing racial tensions, and how it has shaped the dominant ideologies of US politics and growing political polarisation.

This unit will explore the political, economic, social and developmental challenges of countries in the Global South. Students will examine the changing place of these countries in the global political economy, as well their importance in debates about human rights, democracy and security. The Unit will focus on the events and processes that have shaped the current contours of the Global South, including the Cold War, development narratives, foreign aid, humanitarian intervention, globalisation and the rise of the BRICs countries.

Modern corporations have multiple roles and responsibilities. They perform functions for which states were once responsible, and are political and social as well as market actors. This unit provides students with theoretical and methodological approaches to explore how political agendas are set as well as influenced by corporate decision-making, and an advanced understanding of the social and ethical responsibilities and impacts of business.

The unit will discusses all aspects of the cost of international security conflict, including collateral damage. By cost of war, the unit refers to the material, human, cultural, social, institutional, and development impact of war and security conflict. Each student will chose one angle of the cost of conflict, and develop her/his own research agenda, as she/he applies the theoretical knowledge gained from the literature to empirical world.

This unit examines Australia's foreign and security policies since Federation, with a focus on contemporary issues such as defence planning and operations and engagement with the global economy. We explore Canberra's stance on terrorism, nuclear affairs, asylum seekers, and global environmental management.

This unit provides an overview of the American political system and the formulation of foreign policy. The unit considers how foreign policy is made through the interaction of executive, legislative and judicial branches and with other elements of civil society, with a special emphasis on the post-Cold War period. It seeks to answer: (a) what is the influence of domestic politics on US foreign policy; and (b) how does the US system cope with the apparent contradictions between its ideals and the imperatives of global power?

The end of the Cold War marks the victory of democracy as the 'best' political system in the world. Yet many existing democracies today are fledgling and of poor quality and are at risk of breaking down. This unit will examine advanced theoretical and empirical debates about the origin, development and collapse of democracies since the 20th century. It also focuses in-depth on understanding why some authoritarian regimes remain resilient despite an ongoing global trend towards democratization.

This unit offers a gender perspective on human rights, with a focus on gender and insecure international contexts. The unit covers themes related to the challenges of pursuing human rights, violations of human rights, and the role of civil society groups in advocating human rights. Attention will be given to the gendered nature of human rights and to specific issues that impact men and women differently when it comes to human rights protection and promotion.

This unit critically examines the role that ethnic conflict plays in national and international politics. Students will have advanced knowledge of nationalism, and close familiarity with current thinking around the role of the ethnic nationalism in particular. This unit will analyse the most influential theories, historical and contemporary, about the role of ethnic nationalism (as opposed to civic nationalism), regionally and internationally. We will consider a range of competing theoretical approaches, concentrating on the theory of a "divided society".

Power is the essential concept of political science, which is the systematic study of politics. Bertrand Russell, perhaps the greatest mind of the 20th Century, said power is the central concept of all the social sciences. Students explore this concept in different parts of political science and survey some debates on power, assessing the advantages and disadvantages of concepts of power. There are three themes in this unit. The first is the distribution of power in society. The second is power in comparative politics and the third is power in international relations. The emphasis is on the nature, sources and use of power.

The unit serves as a rigorous investigation of the politics of violent and criminal non-state actors. It will start with a conceptual discussion of such groups, focusing on analysis of their structure and behaviour and the roles that globalisation and technology play in non-state threats, before moving on to specific types of dark networks. The dark networks that may be covered include terrorist organisations, non-state nuclear proliferation networks, and various forms of organised crime, including maritime piracy, drug trafficking, mafias, mundane smuggling, and money laundering.

This unit addresses central themes from the history and philosophy of human rights. Topics may include justifications for human rights, dangers and threats to human rights, the meaning and role of dignity, tensions between human rights and state sovereignty, as well as wider themes in political thought such as equality, liberty, and power. Thinkers may include Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Marx, Arendt, Levi, Rawls, and Nussbaum.

Interdisciplinarity is a key skill in fostering agility in life and work. This unit provides learning experiences that build students' skills, knowledge and understanding of the application of their disciplinary background to interdisciplinary contexts. In this unit, students will work in teams and develop interdisciplinarity skills through problem-based learning projects responding to 'real world problems'.

Interdisciplinarity is a key skill in fostering agility in life and work. This unit provides learning experiences that build students' skills, knowledge and understanding of the application of their disciplinary background to interdisciplinary contexts. In this unit, students will work in teams and develop interdisciplinarity skills through problem-based learning projects responding to 'real world problems'.

This interdisciplinary unit provides students with the opportunity to address complex problems identified by industry, community, and government organisations, and gain valuable experience in working across disciplinary boundaries. In collaboration with a major industry partner and an academic lead, students integrate their academic skills and knowledge by working in teams with students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. This experience allows students to research, analyse and present solutions to a realworld problem, and to build on their interpersonal and transferable skills by engaging with and learning from industry experts and presenting their ideas and solutions to the industry partner.