IR4A3      Half Unit
International Relations: Critical Perspectives

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This lecture course introduces students to critical international theory, i.e., to modes of thinking that question, challenge, or repudiate conventional approaches to the study of international relations. It is a course about the conduct of inquiry—about alternative ways of seeing. Critical approaches to be discussed range from Marxism to post-structuralism and from feminism to critical race theory. By thinking critically about the study of international relations, the course raises––and answers––thorny questions about the promise—and limits—of international politics.

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Essay plan

• Richard Devetak, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 
• Patrick Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, (London: Routledge. 2010);
• Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (eds, 2010), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in January