This course introduces students to a selection of the major theoretical approaches to international relations as well as some of the key issues in contemporary world politics. The aims are to foster familiarity with international relations as an academic discipline, build students' knowledge of debates within the field and to foster an understanding of how the assumptions we make, and the intellectual positions we take, inform our understanding of particular issues. After surveying some of the major approaches to the study of IR in the second section of the course we go on to investigate the development of the modern system of states via consideration of the concept of sovereignty and the relationship between this and the idea of the nation and of the right to national self-determination. In the final section of the course we consider some major issues in contemporary world politics. These include the role of human rights norms in the international system, the future of the sovereign state and conceptions of community in an era of globalization and, finally, consideration of the implications of American power for contemporary world order.