Central European University A Program for University Teachers, Advanced Ph.D. Students, Researchers and Professionals in the Social Sciences and Humanities Summer University

Course Director: Roger Coate (University of South Carolina, USA)

Resource Persons: 

Riina Kuusik (Concordia International University, Estonia)
Vladimir Lomeiko (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Paris)
Craig N. Murphy (Wellesley College, USA)
Donald J. Puchala (University of South Carolina, USA)
Mihály Simai (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

Course Description
This course is organized around one of the late twentieth century's most challenging intellectual and practical puzzles, a puzzle that challenges the core of the interstate legal order's foundations in state sovereignty. Initiating and sustaining effective international responses to threats to human security require the integrated engagement of nonstate entities with state entities at and across all levels.  Yet the foundation of the UN system in the principle of the inviolability of state sovereignty greatly constrains and inhibits UN agencies from engaging civic and subnational state entities constructively.  In this context emerges an overriding challenge:  how to generate and sustain effective cooperation both horizontally across differing autonomous organizational domains, legal jurisdictions, and sectors of society and vertically across time as well as across different levels of social aggregation from the micro level of individuals in their roles in groups, organizations, and communities to the macro level of representative governance in international forums.
 
The course will have six interrelated parts. The first part will address the question "what is governance?" In that general context, we will explore the relationship between global governance and the creation and maintenance of democratic open societies at the local and national levels. Participants will also seek to identify the constellation of factors and forces that have conditioned the evolution of contemporary global governance processes and structures. Particular attention will be focused on the rise to predominance of liberal ideas, constitutive principles, and normative structures that underpin contemporary global governance. Class readings and discussions will explore the nature and implications of the dialectic between liberalism and other competing systems of thought.
 
The second part of the course focuses on the evolving meaning of security. It explores the global value dialectic over peace and security and the transition from a narrow definition of national security and protection from physical military aggression to the much broader concept of human security meaning that individuals sense and perceive themselves increasingly secure. Global governance and human security are inextricably linked, and the notion of human security focuses international organizational attention directly on individuals and their circumstances and thereby constitutes a subtle challenge to state sovereignty. To make people psychologically secure may, under some circumstances, be the antithesis of making the governments of states and their territorial boundaries physically secure. Human security is directly linked to the satisfaction of fundamental human needs and sustainable human development. It emphasizes the psychological end state of human development instead of the more mechanical process of developing. Enhancing human security is what development is all about. Class activities will explore this important relationship.

The third part of the course analyzes the competing forces and tensions that underpin global governance and condition the authoritative allocation of human needs and values.  Participants will examine the evolving dialectics between numerous forces and tensions, such as integration and fragmentation, globalization and localization, and universalism and relativism. Particular attention will be paid to identifying and analyzing those forces that serve to undermine and limit the authority, legitimacy, and competency of the national state and state-centered international order. In addition, participants will critically analyze the nature and content of global discourses about governance and security to identify ideas, constitutive principles, and structures of meaning that underlie those discourses and practices and associated practices.

In the context of this turbulent world environment, one thing is clear: humankind resides in a multicultural world in which even the remotest areas are permeated by the capitalist global economy and a wide variety of transnational social institutions. If human security and open societies are to prevail, they must do so in that context. In this regard, special attention will be focused on global political economic concerns. In part four, participants are challenged to reconceptualize international relations and global governance in non-state-centered terms and to move beyond state/nonstate conceptualizations, such as domestic/foreign, inside/outside, or "we"/"they." Class activities will explore the concept of civil society and will discuss the ways in which diverse agents and forces of society can be brought more effectively into our models and theories of international relations. Special emphasis will be placed on identifying actual and potential partnerships between international institutions and those diverse, often contradictory, and sometimes conflictual social forces and entities that lie beyond state control.

Traditional approaches to multilateralism and global governance have been predominantly hierarchical, concentrating on great power relationships. Such a top-down approach, however, obscures important aspects of dominant-subdominant relationships at the international level and reifies and promotes certain ideas and constitutive principles held by the most powerful participants. In recent years, however, an increasing body of literature has emerged that challenges such a traditional orientation. In part five, these new approaches to multilateralism and global governance will be analyzed, as they relate to the intellectual puzzle being explored. Particular emphasis will be placed on identifying implications for enhancing the effectiveness of international institutions for promoting human security.

Finally, part six explores the nature, plausibility, and possibility of reforms in international institutions that would be required to bring civil society more fully and effectively into global policy processes. It is designed specifically for young Ph.D’s and advanced doctoral students who possess a basic knowledge about international relations and/or multilateral affairs.

The course will be conducted in a mixed format, including lectures, discussion groups, a research concept paper, a syllabus construction project, an Internet exercise, two brief written reaction review essays on the readings and discussions for selected topics of the course, and a role playing/simulation exercise. Each participant will be assigned one or more faculty mentors with whom to work during the term.