Courses & Focus Areas
Diplomacy Approved Courses by Semester
The following course listings are tentative. For the most updated version, please see the university class schedule.
Choosing a Focus
You should choose an area of focus based on your academic interests, future academic goals, and career aspirations. The coursework you take as part of your focus will provide the academic background needed when applying for graduate school or a job.
Each focus allows students to arrange their coursework on an international theme and its impact across several regions and disciplinary perspectives. You must choose one focus and choose only approved courses for that focus.
Focus Areas
Select a focus area to learn more about this global theme and to see course offerings in this area. Classes shown here are not guaranteed to be offered during the time you spend here at the U and are subject to change. Check each semester's course lists for the exact courses available.
Whether between Native American communities and federal and state authorities within the United States, or between indigenous peoples and industrializing states throughout the world, a diplomacy that takes seriously the perspectives of native communities in contests for sovereignty and cultural heritage is at the core of this focus area.
Diplomacy is a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary domain of real-world practice. Wherever competing interests and perspectives collide—and especially where they have devolved into disfunction or erupted into violence—the craft of diplomacy is critical. Issues of displacement, conflict, and violence are at the core of this focus area.
Climate change and global health are inescapably interconnected. Poverty, disease, and climate vulnerability do not abide national boundaries. The framework of global health came to prominence in the late twentieth century to denote efforts to manage health on a planetary scale. Diplomacy is increasingly cited as a constitutive part of the system of global health governance. Global health diplomacy has proven essential for efforts to reduce poverty and climate susceptibility, prevent disease transmission, and to sustain effective treatment protocols across national boundaries. Global health has therefore become integral to foreign, security, and trade policy. These and related issues are at the core of the this focus area.
The seemingly rapid pace of technological change, and especially the social media revolution, has opened new and challenging fields for the work of diplomacy. Beginning in the nineteenth century, a range of new audio, visual, and mixed-media technologies became vehicles of state-formation and national building. These communication technologies consolidated national identities and often fostered the development of stronger, more centralized, secular states. Yet newer social media technologies have often had the reverse effect. They have appeared as bastions of rapid and sometimes radical decentralization. They are, by turns, platforms for resistance to centralized authority and vehicles for the spread of disinformation. How can negotiation and consensus be achieved when disparate facts sustain divergent realities? How can vital institutions be reimagined, reinvigorated, and reinforced? What are the prospects for a more humane and more human-oriented information society? Such questions about the relationship between science, technology, and society are the core of this focus area.
