• Class of 2010 IR Program Awards! • New Fall 2010 lecture courses!

The International Relations Program at Brown

The IR concentration is a rigorous and comprehensive program that maximizes student choice with cross-disciplinary training and strong international skills. The objective is to foster creative thinking about pressing global problems and equip students with the analytic tools, language expertise, and cross-cultural understanding to guide them in that process. To this end, the concentration draws on numerous departments including political science, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, religion, and environmental studies. It also incorporates courses from the humanities and has a 3-year language requirement. The IR concentration is organized around a multidisciplinary core and the sub-themes of global security, economy, and culture and identity and offers a quality honors program in which students undertake thesis research on an international topic. The concentration is located within and draws upon the expertise of the Watson Institute for International Studies, a research and policy-oriented center whose faculty come from many countries and international agencies. The IR curriculum emphasizes 1) a solid grounding in the methods of analysis used in the social sciences to help students think critically about international phenomena, 2) the exploration of the empirical and the normative domains of the subject, and 3) flexibility to allow students to customize their IR concentration around the themes and disciplines of their choosing.