Gabriel Mares

In this course we will seek to gain a critical consciousness of what we are doing when we do international relations [IR]. In what ways did IR as a discipline evolve against competing disciplines? How does IR legitimate itself, and how does it legitimate particular ideologies? Does IR explain the world as it is, or does it attempt to create a world through scientific analysis? How is recognizing a discipline's omission or disavowal distinct from simply formulating a research question? Are IR scholars complicit with structural forms of domination? Why has IR been so resistant to critically revising the histories it tells about itself?

This course is organized around critical histories of (the) discipline. Often derided as “navel gazing,” critical histories use the tools of political (science? theory? analysis?) reflexively, inquiring into the constitutive formulations and assumptions guiding IR as both a scholarly endeavor and an institutional practice.

In this seminar we will explore how international lawyers, political scientists, historians, and philosophers approach the question of international law. Is international law a coherent concept? Is it simply a codification of “the will of the stronger”? Can international law bind states to agreements and enforce compliance? What is the colonial legacy of international law, and is it relevant to its modern forms? How do regimes and doctrines emerge in international law?

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of international law; as such, the readings are not limited to legalist approaches but are also political, philosophical, and historical. Students are welcome to foreground whatever interpretive approach they desire; however, as a class we will resist the claim that there is a single “proper” field for the study of international law.

This course examines classic and contemporary theories and critiques of the ethics and justice of war. Are attempts to limit war or to fight only for just causes important advancements in modern civilizations, or are they ways of justifying particular powerful actors? How have the norms and rules of war changed over the last several centuries, and have these changes been good? How are laws of war different from norms of war?

This course takes as its central texts one orthodox account of ethics in war – Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars – and one critical account – Helen Kinsella's The Image Before the Weapon. By placing these two texts in counterpoint (with numerous supplemental readings) this course will emphasize that the ethics of war are an ongoing debate rather than a settled set of maxims or laws. Further, the ethics of war is a context in which broader philosophical, legal, and IR debates take place. Thus, questions about authority, agency, gender, innocence, humanity, and responsibility will be central to discussion.

Political theory has long been criticized as a Eurocentric discipline, centered around “great thinkers” like Plato, Hobbes, and Nietzsche, while failing to engage thinkers from the world outside of Europe and North America. Beginning in the 1990s, a number of new fields emerged within political theory to address this shortcoming. Comparative political theory seeks to promote dialogue between different traditions of political theorizing across cultures – or so claimed its early proponents.

The primary focus of this course will be on how the idea of “comparative” continuously evolves within political theory. What is being compared? How can we compare, or are traditions of political thought that emerge from different cultures simply incommensurable? Does thinking comparatively broaden our dialogues, or does it pigeonhole other traditions as “Others,” making them forever foreign?

For decades, concern for civilians in conflict zones and refugees were treated as ancillary to “security studies,” a field which defined itself as tough minded and concerned with the “hard realities” of war and national defense. Beginning in the 1990s, a new field, “human security,” began to emerge which (loosely speaking) critically examined the human costs of war – and whether concerned global citizens might have an effect on global politics. 30 years later, human security is a well-established field – but has it made a difference in how we think about security and conflict? This course introduces undergraduate students to the framework and concepts of human security, as well as both traditional and contemporary critiques.

While this course analyzes human security primarily within the field of international relations, human security is a broad, interdisciplinary research program. Scholars from various critical traditions, such as gender studies and postcolonialism, are both contributors to and critics of human security. For their final projects, students will be encouraged to draw on materials from multiple fields to engage their topics.

In the summer of 2020, the George Floyd protests thrust debates about punishment, the carceral state, and police abolition into the mainstream. Minneapolis and LA significantly reduced funding for their police departments, and Democratic political candidates called for greater police accountability while Republican candidates promised to “back the blue.” In fact, these were accelerations of political debates that have become far more pointed in the past 15 years: in 2020 the Trump administration hurriedly resumed the execution of federal death row inmates. Since 2016, a wave of “progressive prosecutors” have won election and used DA offices to investigate police departments. In 2022, against calls to “defund the police,” the Biden administration increased federal assistance to police departments. Meanwhile, in 2024 “defund the police” was used as a scare tactic, with no major national political candidates endorsing such a view.

This course examines classic and contemporary theories and critiques of punishment, and how they relate to the development of the modern state. We will attempt to challenge “common sense” rationales and justifications of punishment by raising a series of related questions: Who has the authority to punish? What deserves punishment? Who is punished? Is punishment used to enforce broader social aims, or does it generate new social aims?

This course will introduce students to a handful of foundational texts in the history of political and social thought. The course will be roughly split into three parts: the Greek tradition, the Abrahamic tradition, and the dawn of Modernity in the West. While this course is focused on the origins of the Western Canon, it is worthwhile to note that until Aquinas none of these thinkers considered themselves to be “Western,” and many of these texts deeply influenced Islamic thought as well. As Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen notes, the West “is not quite as ancient as it is sometimes suggested…Alexander and other ancient Greeks were less interested in chatting with Goths, Vikings, Angles, and Saxons than they were in conversing with ancient Iranians, Bactrians, and Indians, and Julius Caesar and Mark Antony identified more readily with ancient Egyptians than with Europeans located to the north of Rome.” With this in mind, students should also be prepared to rethink how we envision communities and traditions. Overly broad appeals to “Tradition” will not substitute for methodical argument in this course.