{"id":3695,"date":"2010-09-22T21:49:47","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T20:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3695"},"modified":"2010-09-29T21:29:10","modified_gmt":"2010-09-29T20:29:10","slug":"my-international-relations-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3695","title":{"rendered":"My international relations course (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This evening, I started a course at the<a href=\"http:\/\/www.citylit.ac.uk\/\"> City Lit<\/a> in central London. The course &#8211; which will run for an evening each week for 12 weeks &#8211; is entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citylit.ac.uk\/courses\/Humanities\/History_and_politics\/International_relations_and_world_conflict%3A_part_1\">&#8220;International Relations And World Conflict&#8221;<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Our lecturer is an American called Dr Dale Mineshima-Lowe. There are supposed to be 32 students but not all turned up for the first session. Of those who have so far made an appearance, I&#8217;m the\u00a0 second oldest.<\/p>\n<p>This first session was very introductory and revolved around discussion of what we mean by international relations. Essentially IR is about the relations between states, but:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>States are very different in size and resources and in their political and legal systems.<\/li>\n<li>Some &#8216;states&#8217; are not universally accepted as such &#8211; think of Palestine, Western Sahara, Tibet, Taiwan &#8211; while some &#8216;regions&#8217; want to be states &#8211; think Basque, Kurdistan, Kashmir.<\/li>\n<li>There are important other actors in IR such as international bodies like the United Nations, international groupings like the European Union, and non-governmental organisations like Amnesty International.<\/li>\n<li>Many international problems &#8211; such as poverty, crime, climate change &#8211; transcend national boundaries.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s going to be a fascinating course.<\/p>\n<p>Footnote:\u00a0 On my web site, I have a short essay discussing the nature of nationhood and specifically addressing the questions:\u00a0 How do we define a nation state? Who decides whether a territory is to  constitute a state? How do we deal with those who do not identify with  the state? You can read it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nationhood.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This evening, I started a course at the City Lit in central London. The course &#8211; which will run for an evening each week for 12 weeks &#8211; is entitled &#8220;International Relations And World Conflict&#8221;. Our lecturer is an American called Dr Dale Mineshima-Lowe. There are supposed to be 32 students but not all turned [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3695"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3752,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions\/3752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}