Teaching International Relations

Teaching Philosophy

International relations theory can feel abstract — a parade of “-isms” disconnected from the world students read about in the news. My goal is to close that gap. Every session I design starts from a core conviction: theory becomes meaningful when students use it, not just when they memorize it.

That means three things in practice:

1. Theory is always applied. Each module pairs abstract frameworks with a live case — Greenland tariff threats through a realist lens, ASEAN’s binding strategy as a constructivist puzzle, North Korea’s arsenal through Sagan’s three models. Students leave each session having used theory as an analytical tool, not just encountered it as a vocabulary list.

2. Students experience epistemological claims firsthand. Constructivism argues that how we frame the world shapes what we see. Rather than asking students to take that on faith, I run randomized framing experiments in class — identical questions, different narrative primes — and then we analyze the divergence together. The lesson is visceral, not theoretical.

3. The canon gets interrogated. IR theory is overwhelmingly a product of American and European scholarship. I dedicate an entire module to non-Western IR theory and thread that critique through the rest of the course — asking not just “what does this theory say?” but “whose experience does it generalize from, and what does it miss?”

Course Design Principles

Applied Theory, Not Abstract Theory

The standard IR course structure — three weeks of theory, then weeks of issue areas — treats theory as a prerequisite to be checked off. I integrate application from day one. In Module 1, within the first hour of encountering realism, students are using it to explain Trump’s Greenland tariff threats. By the end of the session, they’ve applied all three major traditions to the same event and discovered that each produces a different — and defensible — analysis.

Live Classroom Experiments

The most distinctive feature of this course is the in-class framing experiment I run in each of the first three modules. Here’s how it works:

• Students scan a QR code and are randomly assigned to one of three conditions (e.g., a “Hobbesian” framing of U.S.–China relations, a “Lockean” framing, or a neutral control)
• They read a short vignette and answer the same battery of Likert-scale questions
• After a break, I analyze the responses live and we discuss what the data show

This approach does several things at once: it teaches survey methodology, demonstrates framing effects, and gives students a personal stake in the results. When their own responses diverge based on a paragraph they read five minutes ago, the constructivist insight about the power of framing lands in a way that no lecture can replicate.

See the Experiments page for a full walkthrough of the methodology, including illustrative charts using simulated data.

Decentering the Western Canon

Module 3 is entirely dedicated to non-Western IR theory — but the critique doesn’t stay contained there. Throughout the course, I flag where dominant frameworks assume a Westphalian baseline: the presumption of anarchy, the state as unit of analysis, the balance-of-power logic rooted in European history. Students encounter Acharya’s Global IR agenda, the Chinese tributary system, Southeast Asian mandala politics, and scholars like Kautilya, Ibn Khaldun, and Mahbub ul Haq alongside the standard canon.

The point isn’t to discard Western IR theory — it’s to understand its provenance and its limits, and to ask what a genuinely global discipline would look like.

What I’m Building Toward

This site is a living document. Things I’m actively developing or want to add:

• Expanded experiment designs for Modules 4–6, bringing the framing experiment approach to nationalism, globalization, and climate politics
• Visual theory maps — interactive diagrams showing how traditions relate, diverge, and respond to each other
• Student-facing explainers for methodological concepts (what is a Likert scale? what does “random assignment” mean in this context?)
• Case study deep-dives — longer analyses of the events used in class, showing how each theory produces different policy prescriptions
• Annotated reading lists with guidance on how to approach dense academic texts

I see teaching as iterative design. This site documents where the course is now and where I want to take it.