With ten member states, a population of 630 million, strategic sea lanes, and growing economies, ASEAN is a force on the world’s stage and a dynamic economic and political influence in an increasingly vital Southeast Asia. As the world’s 7th largest economy. ASEAN provides a significant platform for multilateral engagement and integration within the Asia region. It is especially important to the United States — as its 4th largest trading partner and a strategic ally in fighting the terrorist threat and handling issues like drug and human trafficking, non-proliferation, transnational crime, and health and humanitarian concerns. This seminar will examine ASEAN’s formation in 1967, policies, and progress until now. It will also discuss past and present problems, particularly the Rohingya crisis and the South China Sea dispute. The course will conclude by looking at opportunities ahead for ASEAN and its continued promise – for the vibrant SE Asia region, Asia, and the world.

This course offers a broad introduction to comparative politics, the subfield of political science concerned mainly with political ideas, institutions, and behavior within states. The course examines such themes as the origins and functions of states, formal institutions such as legislatures and executives, the variety and impact of electoral systems, the nature of democracy and autocracy, internal and external challenges to political order, and the impact of international and domestic factors on state performance. Discussions of theoretical and cross-regional issues will be accompanied by treatment of individual countries and contexts. This course counts for the Comparative Government distribution requirement. This course has been renumbered, effective Fall 2014. A student who earned credit for GOVT 121 Comparative Political Systems in a prior term should not enroll and cannot earn credit in this class.

The SFS INAF180 science courses are designed to teach students science that is relevant to international affairs. The sections consist of a series of courses that will focus on learning the science that is necessary to understand global, societal challenges such as climate change, emerging infectious disease, and food security, among many others. To facilitate active learning and hands-on opportunities, as well as to ensure an interactive experience, enrollment will be limited to 20 students per section. Additionally, to build a sense of community among incoming freshmen, some sections will be limited to freshmen only.

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News headlines around the world are dominated by crises and disasters involving major threats to basic human needs for security, clean water and air, food, and health: Cape Town, South Africa is at risk of running out of fresh water, an Ebola outbreak rages in West Africa, and honeybees are suddenly disappearing. In these cases and others, an understanding science is required to understand how the crisis or disaster happened, what caused it, and how it might be resolved. Science plays a critical role in informing governments, communities, non-profits and individuals who need to make important decisions in response to such crises. In this course, we will examine these cases and others through the lens of science. By studying these cases, you will develop a better understanding of the role of science in policy-relevant issues and international affairs. You will also develop a stronger understanding of the process of science and how scientific understanding is developed, tested, and revised. Given the complex, interdisciplinary nature of these issues, we will focus on learning scientific principles and methods from a broad array of scientific fields including biology, chemistry, geosciences, and environmental sciences. The course will also highlight the importance of interdisciplinary science. This course is cross-listed with ENST180-01.

This course is a survey course, designed to explore the major concepts in corporate finance. Topics include Time Value of Money; Net Present Value/Internal Rate of Return; Valuation of Stocks and Bonds; Financial Statements/Ratios; Managing Growth; Discounted Cash Flow; Risk, Return and the Cost of Capital; Capital Structure; Dividends; Raising Capital/Going Public; Mergers and Acquisitions; and Corporate Restructuring. The course focuses on applications of finance to assist students outside the Business School to understand financial statements, apply financial analytical techniques, and learn the basics of the capital markets. Note: students will not be expected to have prior knowledge of course concepts.

The Global South: Politics, Literature and Film: In literary and cultural studies, the Global South has been employed in a transnational sense to address spaces and peoples impacted by the legacies of colonization as well as globalization. The course would explore historical, cultural, literary and cinematic applications of the term, especially in the context of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Oceania.

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As the Cold War era ended, the transnational term “Global South” largely supplanted the “Third World” to refer to geographical regions with large inequalities in living standards, life expectancy, and access to resources. The spaces and peoples of the Global South have not only experienced political, social, and economic upheaval, but have also faced seemingly insurmountable challenges brought on by poverty, hunger, disease, war, human and civil rights violations, displacement, migration, and environmental degradation. Global South countries have also been greatly impacted by globalization and the legacies of colonialism. However, should the Global South just be reduced to a metaphor for underdevelopment and poverty? To answer this question, we will explore the ways in which the Global South, especially its culture and politics, are represented and described in literature and film from regions as diverse as the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, and Oceania. We will examine how literary and cinematic representations reinforce, transform, and/or disrupt notions of a developing Global South. In doing so, we will also consider and interrogate the idea of a “developed” Global North.

The course studies the economic relationships among countries. The first part of the course will focus on International trade and some of the popular trade theories. We will explore how trade can be explained by differences in absolute and comparative advantage as seen in the well-known Ricardian model and analyze the effects of trade on income distribution as well as see different sources of gains that arise when countries trade with each other. In addition, we will also study how trade takes place when two countries differ in resources or factor endowments as seen in the Heckscher-Ohlin model. We will also cover certain important issues in trade policy – such as the benefits and costs of tariffs, subsidies and trade quotas, that accrue to countries using these instruments. The second part of the course will cover some key concepts and issues in international macroeconomics, such as exchange rates, balance of payments, trade and financial accounts, exchange rate regimes. In particular, we will focus on some pertinent questions such as what causes countries to run trade surpluses or deficits with their trading partners? How are such imbalances resolved over time? What causes banking and currency crises in open economies? What factors are responsible for financial contagion between economies, and how can governments handle international financial instability? We also spend time looking at the role played by exchange rates in the financial crises, and how adopting different exchange rate regimes can fulfill different policy objectives of the countries.