The course is built around a single insistence: an opinion about world politics is not an argument. Every lesson starts with the puzzle — the thing that needs explaining — then locates the level of analysis, the definition of power in use, and the perspective doing the framing, before any of the five traditions (African, Chinese, Russian, Western, UN) is allowed to adjudicate.
It covers the canonical IR machinery — realism in its variants, IPE, institutionalism, constructivism, the English School — alongside structural formulations: world-systems, weaponised interdependence, poly-hegemony, the military-industrial complexes that survive deglobalisation. These are then tested against the empirical matters: conventional and irregular warfare, nuclear latency, cyber and information operations, energy and critical minerals, African demographic and resource trajectories, Ukraine’s protracted dynamics, and Iran’s strategic positioning.