Non-State Actors

Catalog description

This course will examine the role of non-state actors in international relations. By examining a broad range of theoretical models and real-world exemplars, we will assess how non-state actors compromise the assumed universal authority of the state central to international relations doctrine. Over the course of the semester, we will investigate the nature of state formation and ascertain whether this is actually the necessary or even inevitable outcome of normative human sociopolitical evolution. We will identify the core features presumed necessary to the functioning of a viable state and explore whether the needs thus met could have been better satisfied through alternative means of structural governance.From this structural background, we will proceed to a thematic investigation of the non-state actors who have persistently, or recently, acted as rivals to the hegemony of a state over its own citizens and to geopolitics within the system of international relations.