International Relations MSc

Royal Holloway, University of London

This module will describe the key principles of academic integrity, focusing on university assignments. Plagiarism, collusion and commissioning will be described as activities that undermine academic integrity, and the possible consequences of engaging in such activities will be described. Activities, with feedback, will provide you with opportunities to reflect and develop your understanding of academic integrity principles.

This module expands on the qualitative methods taught in the first term. It explores the ways in which scholars in politics and International Relations engage in qualitative research. Each week we will explore one type of object for analysis and several methods of analysing it. We will explore grounded research, discourse and narrative analysis, case studies, visuals, emotions and archives and we will ask questions about knowledge and power, decolonisation and critical explication.

This module will introduce you to advanced quantitative methods that address common problems such as non-linearity of data, multicollinearity in time-series data, causality and experiments. Through the seminar exercises and the assignments, you will gain not only a theoretical but also a practical understanding of quantitative methods and how these can be used in research. In this way, the module is envisaged to set you up for success in your MSc dissertation.

This module will provide you with an advanced grounding in the key concepts and idea employed in the analysis of international relations. You will explore the ways in which the international system in which we live is not a timeless reality, but rather a particular, socially and historically constructed way of organising human affairs. You will develop an understanding of the key concepts, problems and theories of International Relations and how they inform our normative understanding of world politics, seeing how far these ideas measure up to historical events and processes which they claim to describe and explain. You will also assess the claims made today that world politics is now undergoing fundamental change as the ?Westphalian system? is dissolved by the forces of globalisation.

The dissertation is the culmination of your independent supervised research and will be around 10,000 words in length. Your choice of dissertation topic will be made at the end of the spring term, and you will be allocated a supervisor with expertise in your chosen field. You will submit an outline of the project, with an indicative bibliography, to the Programme Director at the beginning of the third term, and your supervisor will arrange a series of progress meetings over the summer period. Your dissertation may be either a critical analysis of a theoretical problem or the result of an empirical project.

This module will introduce you to how different methodological and ontological/epistemological approaches can be used to answer research questions in the study of Politics and International Relations and how they inform research design choices. You will be exposed to different types of research questions, and different approaches to using theory and empirical evidence in order to answer them. One of the module?s foci will be the concept of causality and its relevance and meaning from the point of view of different approaches. The module will offer both an introduction to qualitative research methods and quantitative research methods, allowing you to choose which of the two you want to specialise in further.