The course seeks to familiarize students with the main theories, concepts and methods used in International Political Economy (IPE) as a true inter-discipline that is situated somewhere between International Relations, Political Economy, Economic Geography and Economics. Based on the core question(s) of “who gets what, why, when, where and how?” it tackles the interactions and mutual dependencies of political and economic dynamics on an international scale. After a critical assessment of major IPE approaches, we move on to key topics like trade, production, finance and development. Towards the end of the first seminar block we will also deal with the two hot topics of environmental policies, data and property rights. Combining a broad overview with in-depth applications of common theories and established research methods (single-case studies, comparative studies, regression analyses, QCA or Event History Analysis), the course enables students to analytically tackle central problems of the current international economic system and the variegated ways in which states, firms and societies interact.

Students can obtain either 6 or 9 credits. For details on the seminar requirements see the program website (https://www.uni-bremen.de/mair/program).

Students from other programs may participate with the instructor’s prior consent.

The state is widely considered to be the most important actor in international governance and, at the same time, a key concept in the social sciences. In recent years it has been argued that profound transformations are taking place which challenge the very foundations of the externally and internally sovereign modern state. The main tendencies of these transformations are the emergence of increasingly autonomous public and private institutions at the international level and the emergence of semiautonomous functional subsystems and powerful private actors at the domestic level. International governance thus takes place in a complex multi-level system with a variety of public and private actors. This course analyzes these developments and their consequences for modern governance, both theoretically and empirically, by looking at concrete examples in greater detail.

Students can obtain either 6 or 9 credits. For details on the seminar requirements see the program website (https://www.uni-bremen.de/mair/program).

Students from other programs may participate with the instructor’s prior consent.

The seminar supports MA International Relations students in the process of conceiving, designing, and writing the thesis, complementing the input they receive from their supervisors. The thesis seminar consists of three workshops: In the first workshop students present their thesis topic and initial ideas about how to tackle it. The second workshop gives students an opportunity to present and discuss their fully elaborated research design, i.e. precise statements of their (final) research question, its (normative, scientific, or practical) relevance, its place in the literature, their working hypothesis (or hypotheses), the role of theory in their study, the methods they are employing and the reasons for choosing them, the data they are using, etc. Finally, the third workshop is devoted to discussing results of students’ investigation on the basis of a “writing sample”, i.e. a draft of the introduction or of a key chapter. In each workshop students receive feedback from the instructors and their fellow students helping them to identify problems in their arguments and possible solutions to these problems.

Students can obtain 3 credits. For details on the seminar requirements see the program website (https://www.uni-bremen.de/mair/program).

The seminar connects social theory with the study of the international, building on foundations laid in “Modern Social Theory” and “Actors, Institutions, and Global Governance”. We will investigate how current theoretical debates and empirical research in International Relations are informed by social theories (practice theory, Marxism, dependency, feminism, post-colonial theory…), discuss key concepts of IR (statehood, imperialism, war, inequality, governance, capitalism…), and analyse concrete issues of global politics (climate change, development aid, the rise of China, global social policy, global trade…). The syllabus will be discussed in the first session and students are invited to bring their own suggestions. Different didactic approaches will be combined to encourage diverse and equitable participation and create a good working environment. In sum, the seminar has three overall aims: enabling students to critically reflect on the limits and potentials of established IR paradigms; understanding the value of using classic social theory in the study of international relations; and learning to apply theoretical lenses to empirical phenomena.

https://www.uni-bremen.de/mair/program

Students from other programs may participate with the instructor’s prior consent.

This course aims to provide an overview and understanding of some of the more commonly applied statistical techniques. It will cover methods for both continuous data as well as categorical data. The standard setting will be the supervised learning situation in which there is one target variable, the behavior of which is to be predicted by some other variables. We will briefly revise the essentials of confirmatory statistics, including hypothesis testing, significance and power, as well as the ideas behind data reduction, prediction and explanation. The course is “advanced” in terms of concepts and methods, rather than statistical theory or algebra. The focus will be on real-world applications, discussing the assumptions, limitations and interpretations of a wide range of statistical techniques.

Students can obtain either 6 or 9 credits. For details on the seminar requirements see the program website (https://www.uni-bremen.de/mair/program).

Students from other programs may participate with the instructor’s prior consent.