Spring 2018 - 60790 - PA 388K – Advanced Topics in Public Policy

GLOBAL CHALLENGES: HISTORY and POLICY

 

This advanced graduate course will examine the nature of global dynamics in our contemporary world and their effects on a series of pressing issues related to security, growth, and sustainability. The course will focus on international developments since September 11, 2001. The goal of the course is to provide students with a firmer foundation for integrating diverse challenges, understanding their common roots, and defining policy responses that are holistic and strategic. Achieving this goal requires a mix of history, theory, and close policy analysis. It also calls for broad reading and intensive discussion. This course will push students to synthesize various analytical skills, broaden their issue expertise, and develop a coherent individual worldview that offers useful prescriptions for future policy. The course will not encourage agreement among students, but it will demand a consideration of multiple points of view before students settle on their own, original explanatory frameworks for contemporary global challenges.

Requirements: Extensive reading each week (250-300 pages) and a weekly 1-page response paper. Students will also give an original presentation and write a 20-25 page final analytical paper.