Course companion · Spring 2026
Global politics, read through six lenses.
This guide covers six lectures in Leiden University's BA International Studies course. It sets out the question behind each lecture and explains how the readings address it. The guide also records the classroom studies used to examine selected claims.
- Course
- International Relations
- Teaching block
- February–May 2026
- Included here
- Six lectures by Steven Denney
The course arc
The sequence begins with the discipline's major explanatory traditions, then turns to identity and social change before closing with planetary futures. Each page gives an overview of the lecture, its core readings and any classroom inquiry. It ends with conclusions students should be able to defend.
Power, Institutions, and Ideas
How realism, liberalism and constructivism explain conflict and cooperation differently.
Security Dilemmas and Nuclear Proliferation
Why states seek nuclear weapons and why scholars disagree about whether deterrence produces security.
Non-Western IR Theory
Whether a discipline built from Euro-American experience can make universal claims about world politics.
Nation, Race, and Gender
How nations define belonging through ancestry and civic obligation, with attention to race and gender.
Society in a Global Age
How globalization changes social belonging and why unequal integration can generate populist conflict.
Global Politics and the Anthropocene
How ecological limits and technological change alter the futures that international relations can imagine.
Using this guide
Start with the lecture overviews for the main argument. The reading guide explains what each assigned text contributes. The classroom-study record shows how selected ideas were examined during class.
Lecture overviews
The central questions, analytical sequence and conclusions for all six sessions.
Reading guide
The required texts and the role each one plays in the lecture's central debate.
Classroom studies
A design record for the survey experiments, knowledge checks and course-review instruments. Response data remain private.