This course introduces feminist and queer theories, methods, and epistemologies to critically examine how gender—as structure, identity, and analytical lens—shapes global politics and the discipline of international relations. Centring marginalised perspectives and attending to race, sexuality, and coloniality, the course explores topics such as security, development, international law, NGOs, and social movements through applied case studies including conflict-related sexual violence; migration and the informal economy; gender, Indigeneity and climate change governance; and gender and military service/dissent, highlighting how transnational hierarchies are continually constructed and contested.

This course explores the causes, consequences, and changing nature of war and security through both mainstream and critical perspectives, combining theoretical frameworks with contemporary policy debates. Topics include political violence, terrorism, civil war, nuclear weapons, humanitarian intervention, and the intersections of gender, race, colonialism, and emerging security threats such as climate change and technology.

This course uses gender as a lens to rethink violence, conflict, and power, centring marginalised perspectives and paying close attention to race, sexuality, and coloniality. Students explore how different forms of violence—such as war, policing, domestic violence, migration regimes, digital harms, and structural violence—are gendered and embedded in global hierarchies, challenging traditional boundaries between the global and the everyday and reimagining what counts as “political” or “secure.”

This course offers a graduate-level introduction to Critical Approaches to International Politics, focusing on unpacking and challenging critical International Relations theory. It explores three core themes—the politics of knowledge and science in IR, the entanglement of international politics and modernity, and the promises and limits of critique—while surveying key critical perspectives such as classical Critical Theory, Marxism, postcolonialism, decolonialism, feminism and queer theory, poststructuralism, and new materialism to rethink how ‘the international’ is conceptualized, made, contested, and remade.

This course examines how emerging technologies—such as cyber operations, bioweapons, and AI—are reshaping modern warfare and international security, and what these changes mean for the ethics, laws, strategy, and governance of conflict. Taking a global perspective with broad geographic representation, students explore the political and social implications of new tools of war through interdisciplinary analysis, combining political theory, policy writing, and (basic) technical knowledge.

This course involves designing and executing an independent 10,000-word MSc dissertation in international relations, moving from identifying a topic to refining it into a clear and researchable question. Epistemologically plural in approach, the course supports both positivist and interpretive understandings of knowledge and research design. Through lectures, workshops, and supervision, students are guided through each stage of the research process: framing their project through literature reviews, developing theoretical arguments or hypotheses, conceptualising key terms, selecting appropriate cases, evaluating evidence, and connecting their research design to questions of methodology and method to ensure a coherent, rigorous, and viable dissertation.