Global Arc

The junior policy research seminar serves to introduce departmental majors to the tools, methods, and interpretations employed in policy research and writing. Students may choose from a range of topics.

People have plowed up, cut-down and otherwise heavily manipulated more than 75% of the world's land, and the degree and extent of this manipulation continues to expand to meet rising demands for food and wood products. This course will explore the consequences for biodiversity and climate change, the drivers of change and scenarios for the future. Students will think through the complex issues behind conservation planning for biodiversity and gain understanding of what is known and not known about the global carbon cycle. Major class papers and a final presentation by each student will explore solutions.

Course introduces use of economics in understanding both the sources of and the remedies to environmental and resource allocation problems. It emphasizes the reoccurrence of economic phenomenon like public goods, externalities, market failure and imperfect information. Students learn about the design and evaluation of environmental policy instruments, the political economy of environmental policy, and the valuation of environmental and natural resource services. These concepts are illustrated in a variety of applications from domestic pollution of air, water and land to international issues such as global warming and sustainable development.

This course will introduce students to the variety of forms of constitutional government and the way that human rights are understood and enforced by courts around the world. We will trace the emergence of a global constitutional culture and focus more directly on the constitutions of South Africa, India, Germany, France, Hungary, Israel and Canada. We will give primary emphasis to the rights provisions in national constitutions, but will also take transnational constitutional regimes through examining decisions of the European Courts of Human Rights. Two ninety-minute seminars.

Special topics in security and sustainability will explore areas of policy related to conflict and cooperation, development, environment, climate and energy, science, technology and security as well as trade and financial policy both domestically and internationally.

Special Topics in International Policy and Development will house courses related to policy and development specifically in regions outside of the US.

This seminar is organized in three parts: an overview of the impacts of climate change and general approaches to adaptation and transformation in floodplains; a study of several regions that have had to adapt to increasing flooding; and a series of five specific local case studies, coastal and riverine. The topic of climate adaptation is of course vast and of necessity the scope of this seminar is limited to one already major impact of climate change.

The Policy Advocacy Clinic provides a unique offering for students to learn about and participate in the policymaking process. This one-year, two semester experience includes two core components: a fall semester academic seminar, and a spring semester clinical program. Students in this seminar will study the policymaking process and learn how to turn social problems into policy solutions. Topics will cover both the academic and practical, ranging from studying public policy theories and structures, to developing the skills needed to engage in policy analysis, campaign planning, power-mapping, SWOT analysis, and the legislative process.

The seminar will examine the Israel-Palestine conflict and the conflict resolution process, focusing on the narratives of Israelis and Palestinians and on U.S. policy. Students should emerge from the course well-versed in the intricacies of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the conflict resolution process.

National security secrecy presents a conflict of core values: self-government and self-defense. We need information to hold our leaders accountable, but if we know our enemies know too. This course explores that dilemma and the complex relationships that resolve it. Beginning with the traditional rubric of "government versus press," the course maps an increasingly fragmented information marketplace. We will apply competing legal and philosophical models to real-world cases of unauthorized disclosure. Among the subjects: weapons of mass destruction, the "war on terror," the Snowden surveillance disclosures, torture and Wikileaks.