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Overview

This programme equips students to examine, explain and understand global issues which affects the world around us, from security and terrorism, migration and mobility, to global financial crises.

The diploma provides a foundation in the academic discipline of International Relations and the array of ‘real world’ practices and problems that produce world politics: looking for example, at diplomacy, arms control and arms proliferation, global health policy, humanitarian intervention and international development policy. While attending closely and consistently to issues such as armed conflict, it thus offers a significantly broader education in international politics.

The programme provides an opportunity to study the deep structures that constitute world order, and the pressing contemporary issues that we face, such as armed conflict, human displacement, inequality and injustice. As such, it offers a balance between covering core content in the field of International Relations while allowing students to actively develop areas of specialism as they progress through choosing elective courses according to their own interests.

Many students on our PgDip who make satisfactory academic progress transfer on to the MA programme, thus taking on the additional challenge of an independent research project in the form of a dissertation. Recent students' dissertation topics have included: Jihadi use of social media; Russian foreign and security policy after the Ukraine conflict; Extreme right-wing terrorism and the internet; Russian private military actors; EU defence policy after BREXIT; Baltic security and the future of NATO; Paramilitarism and the Northern Irish border; Indian defence and security in relation to rising China; The limits of ‘truth and reconciliation’ in conflict resolution.