International Affairs
Summer 2008 Course Schedule Updates

General Course Descriptions: Undergraduate | Graduate

Detailed Course Descriptions: Undergraduate | Graduate

Please check this page periodically for changes and additions

To view course registration numbers, location of classrooms, times and dates of the classes below, please click here for the most recently updated information from the campus registrar. Where applicable, syllabi from previous semesters have been posted in anticipation of updated information on the course. Please feel free to use the Fall 2006 password and username to access these files. Current semester syllabi can be accessed in the normal manner.

Undergraduate Courses

IAFF 171.10 U.S. Foreign Policy Summer Institute

Prof. Kojm

The U.S. Foreign Policy Summer Institute features is a two-week intensive course, offering 3 credits, featuring core lectures by the U.S. Foreign Policy Institute director, guest lectures by faculty of The George Washington University, and guest speakers from a wide variety of organizations.

In addition to attending lectures, students participate in a foreign policy simulation, work on group projects and write a policy memorandum on a U.S. foreign policy issue of their choice. After the program is completed students write a substantive research paper on U.S. foreign policy.

For more details, visit the U.S. Foreign Policy Summer Institute website.

IAFF 190.10 Security and Terrorism

Prof. Inderfurth and Prof. O’Gara

Graduate Courses

Asian Studies

International Affairs

International Development Studies

International Science and Technology Policy

International Trade and Investment Policy

Security Policy Studies

International Affairs

IAFF 201.10 Cross Cultural Communications

Prof. Marquardt

The ability to communicate effectively and sensitively across cultures has become both more critical and more difficult in today’s global economy. This course will examine the underlying factors which a) create a culture, b) determine the culture’s values and practices, and c) establish cultural communication patterns and expectations. The focus of the course will be development of cross-cultural communications, management, and negotiation skills. Course methodology will include case studies, videos, simulation, and self-assessment instruments relative to communicating and doing business in multicultural settings.

IAFF 201.11 Negotiating Skills

Prof. Field

This course is designed to enhance the participants’ negotiation and leadership skills for managing differences between individuals and groups. Class members will learn how to handle two and multiparty negotiations, and analyze the importance of empathy and creative option design. The course will be a blend of skill building exercises and discussions about the behavior of individuals to understand the negotiation dynamics. The course builds on the concepts of interest-based negotiation developed by Roger Fisher at the Harvard Program on Negotiation.

IAFF 201.13 Understanding the U.S. Federal Budget

This brief course will cover the politics and processes of budgeting in the U.S. Federal Government. It will describe how budgeting works at each stage of the executive and legislative process—from preparation of the president’s budget, through the authorization, appropriation, apportionment, and audit of government funds.

IAFF 201.14 Public Speaking

Prof. Calabrese

This public speaking course will focus on speech construction and delivery, including: topic selection, research, organization, support materials, audience adaptation, visual aids, and presentation. Excellent conversational English required.

IAFF 201.16 Writing for International Affairs Professionals

Prof. Gaspar

The course will involve a series of short written assignments that are drawn from actual needs occurring in the workplace. These will include memos and briefings. While correct grammar is important, the focus of this course will be on rapidly producing written materials that are crystal clear, concise and accurate. This means that research is not necessary and the facts and background for each assignment can be drawn from experience, current events or previous assignments.

IAFF 201.17 Leadership and Teamwork

This course will focus on the theory and practicality of transformational leadership in international contexts. The following questions will guide our inquiry: How do cultural dynamics influence effective leadership? How can leaders create workplace environments that encourage creativity and synergy among subordinates or clients from differing cultural identities? How can individual class members increase skills and capacities to support their own experiences as effective leaders?

IAFF 212.10 Quantitative Analysis for International Affairs Practitioners

Prof. Cole-Bayer

To be an effective international affairs practitioner you will need to understand the assumptions that underlie a particular quantitative analysis, to disentangle proper and improper uses of statistical evidence, and ask intelligent questions about the validity of quantitative measurement and statistical methods. Special attention will be given to using data sets from various sources common in the field of International Affairs.

The goal of this course is not to turn you into statisticians, but knowledgeable consumers and attentive critics of quantitative measurement. You will become competent in using SPSS to manipulate data sets, graphically represent data and analyses and perform statistical computations such as probability calculations, comparing samples to populations and sample distributions to other sample distributions (use of z-scores and t-tests). We will also cover multiple linear regression. This course assumes a minimal mathematical background. There will be little difficult math, but the material is fairly abstract. It is absolutely essential that you keep up with the material and attend the classes. Classes will begin with a lecture and then we will apply the concepts learned to real-world applications using SPSS. SPSS is installed on the servers in the instructional labs. It is highly recommended that your purchase the software for your home computer.

International Development Studies

IAFF 226.10 NGOs and Development

Prof. Van Wicklin

Over the past two decades, increasing discouragement with the program results of governmental development organizations has focused more attention on the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in development. NGOs have been viewed as offering positive alternatives to the development worldview and operational practices of the World Bank and other multilateral and bilateral donors. There is a belief that NGOs are more flexible, participatory, responsive to the needs of the poor, and less driven by a modernization worldview and a top down approach to development. These beliefs became increasingly questioned during the 1990s, and the field of ‘civil society’ began to overtake the narrower focus on NGOs.

The objective of this course is to critically examine the rapidly evolving theory and practice of NGOs, and civil society more broadly, in their international development work. The course examines past and current practice, but also potential future directions, of NGOs seeking to affect global development. This course presents an introduction to a range of assessments and critical views of the work of NGOs as they fit within the broader context of trends in international development and debates about the nature of the state and the role of civil society. In particular, it gives attention to two complex sets of relationships: NGOs and states, and international NGOs and community-based organizations (CBOs). This requires analyzing multiple dimensions of NGO work, including program effectiveness, scaling up impact, management, legitimacy and accountability, evaluation and learning, advocacy, and relationships with various stakeholders. The course focuses more on providing an analytical framework for understanding and assessing the work on NGOs than on case study material, although some case studies are included in the readings and discussions. Students can use the research paper and supplementary readings to develop their interests and knowledge in specific topics or NGOs.

IAFF 238.10 Human Rights, Culture, and Development

Prof. Messer

This course explores the promise and practice of human rights as a framework for development from legal, political-economic, and sociocultural perspectives. Participants will learn basic human rights concepts and instruments and how they are used in international diplomacy, state legal-political systems, and local cultural situations. Readings will probe what sociocultural perspectives add to international formulations and what human rights perspectives add to social and cultural theory and practice, and will also consider how anthropologists and other professionals function as scholar-activists. Class discussions will evaluate how (well) human rights serves as a platform for social mobilization and touchstone for “rights-based development”.

Security Policy Studies

IAFF 275.10 & 11 Transnational Security

Prof.Fidas or Prof. Schmidt

The goal of this course is to introduce students to some of the key topics in the study of transnational security issues. Topics covered include the definition of (transnational) security, the causes behind the growing importance of this subfield of Security Studies, transnational terrorism, nuclear proliferation, transnational dimensions of civil war, the role of NGOs and private military contractors (PMCs) in addressing national and transnational security challenges, the security implications of transnational phenomena such as AIDS and environmental degradation, as well as strategies for predicting and responding to transnational security challenges.

IAFF 288.11 Fundamentals of Intelligence

Prof. Fidas

This graduate level seminar will focus on the craft of US Intelligence, including its past, present, and future role in national security policy. It will examine the institutional structure of the Intelligence Community; the Intelligence production cycle, including tasking, collection, analysis, covert action, and counterintelligence; and relations between the Intelligence and Policy communities. Successes and failures in these areas will be examined using several case studies and class exercises. The seminar will then focus on new missions and agendas fostered by the changing nature of the threat environment; proposals on how to best go about this; and performance thus far. It will conclude by assessing the extent of executive, legislative, and judicial oversight of the Intelligence Community and the compatibility of secrecy and democracy and other ethical questions. Upon completion of the course, students should have a better understanding of Intelligence as a craft and as a policy input and output. They will gain new insights into the dynamics of key historical and contemporary issues and the role of Intelligence in shaping them. And they will improve their analytical, writing, and briefing skills.

IAFF 288.12 Intro to Conflict Resolution

Prof. Williams

This course provides students with an introduction to the field of conflict analysis and resolution. It is intended to provide a solid foundation for further inquiry and application. The course will introduce students to the major concepts and issues currently animating the field, explore the main strategies for responding to conflicts, and help them recognize the assumptions upon which these strategies rest. This is not primarily a “how-to” course nor does it delve extensively into the fields of community and neighbor mediation. Instead, this course considers the “upper end” of the conflict spectrum, focusing on inter-state disputes, contemporary civil wars, complex political emergencies and other forms of violent conflict. At the end of the course students should be acquainted with the nature of conflict resolution as a distinct theoretical and applied field of study and have some understanding of current thinking about major approaches to war prevention, mitigation, settlement, and post-war reconstruction projects. It will be useful for anyone with an interest in conflict resolution and management, including professionals in the fields of diplomacy, journalism, development assistance, humanitarian aid or international peacekeeping who wish to develop their knowledge of this important area. The course will connect theory to practice through discussion, research and case study review of real events.

IAFF 288.14 Energy & National Security

The course is designed to help students to understand an important driver of international relations and national security – connection between energy and security.

Students will analyze an increasing role of the access to economic opportunities in the strategic make–up of the current and future world. Starting from the beginning of 20th century economic forces largely determine national objectives and strongly influence the security architecture of the world. In last four decades the Energy has a special role in this process. Every nation tries to ensure that its national security, prosperity, economic growth and foreign policy is secured and is not constrained by energy concerns.

Special emphasis will be made on energy security of the world, as well as security of the world’s transportation links, important for the secure energy supplies. Students will learn about major consumers and producers of energy resources, and their geographic locations. Students will look at the world’s major transportation chokepoints and potential threats associated with them. There are traditional natural barriers for energy security of the particular states and regions, such as geography, distance, large landmasses, oceans, and narrow straits. There are also traditional political barriers such as state borders, political alliances and sanctions. In recent years world is increasingly dealing with the emerging new challenges: terrorism, and transnational crime. The course will explain why access to resources and markets is more important, than direct political control of territories and states.

Asian Studies

IAFF 325.10 US - South Asia Relations

Prof. Inderfurth

South Asia encompasses the countries of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Maldives. The region is home to one fifth of humanity (with over 1.4 billion people), the world's largest democracy (India), two declared nuclear weapons states (India and Pakistan), and, until the post-9/11 U.S. military-led action against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, arguably the most dangerous 'failed state' in the world (Afghanistan). Still, for several decades South Asia was on the backside of the U.S. diplomatic globe. That is no longer the case.

Today South Asia is recognized as having strategic, political, economic (including trade and investment) and social consequence for the United States. At the center of this heightened interest in South Asia is India, a rising global power for the 21st century. This course will therefore focus on the changing nature of U.S.-India relations, with a special emphasis on the improvements in the relationship that began in the Clinton Administration and accelerated under President Bush. In addition, the implications for the United States of the twin transformations of Asia's two mainland giants — China and India — and their relations with each other will be examined.

The course will also devote attention to the transformation that has occurred in U.S. ties with Pakistan and Afghanistan as a result of 9/11. The events of September 11, 2001 placed the region of South Asia, especially these two countries, at the center of the U.S.-led 'war on terror,' where it remains today. Recent elections in Pakistan, and the drawing to a close of the Musharraf era, have further contributed to U.S. policy considerations.

Finally, the course will look at ongoing efforts to normalize relations between India and Pakistan, neighbors that have fought three wars and endured several other crises, but are now attempting to open a new and more promising chapter in their 60 year adversarial relationship.

International Science & Technology Policy

IAFF 252.10 Environmental Policy

Prof. Rycroft

This is a seminar that examines policy designed to protect the human and physical environment. Throughout the seminar, the dominant theme will be the role of science and technology in creating environmental problems and providing opportunities. Topics covered include a comparative analysis of national and multinational environmental policy, the relationship between science, technology, and modern environmentalism, and the degree to which some ‘greening’ of the private sector has been taking place.