Christian Kaunert - Department Overview

Our main post-graduate course that we have within the School of Humanities and the Department of Politics is our M-Lit in International Politics and Security. What we're trying to do with that master's course is to introduce students and make them specialize in international relations, international politics, and a kind of security topics that have occurred much more recently in our world. Make them understand and produce specialist knowledge and what it means to be part of the global world. Big issues such as globalization. Issues such as international security.

After 9/11, of course, one of the biggest issues was terrorism, so terrorism is an important feature of our post-graduate offering, but also other security issues, such as military security, as you might know, there have been increasing tensions between Japan and China more recently, so we'll also be looking at Asian security.

We'll be looking at very significant issues, such as human rights. As you are aware, human rights have been becoming more and more important in a global context. More and more countries and international organizations are putting increasing emphasis on human rights, so we have a very attractive offering on sanctioning rights.

But, the main focus of our degree is to first make a student understand what international relations are all about and focus on the role that states play within international relations, at looks and theoretical aspects of how they interrelate with one another. It theorizes the role that different states can play, such as the role of the global hegemon such as the United States, the role that regional organizations play. For instance, the European Union. It looks specifically at the process of European integration and how that matters to the United Kingdom, to Scotland specifically, especially in anticipation of the two important referendums that we're going to have next year on Scottish Independence, in 2017 on membership of the European Union.

So we look at all of these issues and give students a good analytical background that will be useful for them to really analyze the important issues of today.