International Relations of East Asia

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the security dimension of China's rise. While much of the public debate on China and security revolves around Beijing's expanding military capabilities, the security dimension of China's rise is in fact a more complex and multi-faceted phenomenon: it involves both China's domestic politics and its foreign policy, and is closely intertwined to other dimensions of China's rise (diplomacy, foreign trade, soft power etc.). By focusing on the security dimension, the course will then address a set of issues that are crucial for China's rise and its implications for East Asia. This will help students to familiarize with the key political and strategic dynamics of the East Asian regional arena, thus contributing to the learning objectives of the Master's programme in International Relations (curricula "International Politics and Regional Dynamics" and "International Cooperation and Human Rights").

By the end of the course, students will have acquired the basic theoretical tools for the study of China's rise and its security dimension (theories of civil-military relations, military doctrine, use of force etc.). They will be able to apply such tools to the analysis of the complex political and strategic issues raised by China's rise in East Asia and beyond. In addition, students will have further refined soft skills coherent with the wider objectives of the Master's programme: they will have further familiarized with the special language of International Relations theory, improved their capability to engage with different types of field-specific texts (academic articles, policy papers, official documents etc.), and developed their ability to critically discuss complex political and strategic issues.