300453 Power, Peace and War (S) (SoSe 2023)

This seminar explores how great power politics – that is, the relations among the most powerful states – shape world politics. A prominent argument is that the rise and fall of powerful states makes world politics conflict-prone. For proponents of this argument, the increasing “great power competition” among the US, Russia and China as well as Russia’s War against Ukraine foreshadow a more antagonistic phase of world politics characterised by weakened global governance, more tensions among the powerful states and the return of traditional forms of power politics.
The seminar seeks to unpack this argument in two ways: firstly by discussing whether, and how, great power politics can be managed in ways that foster cooperation rather than conflict and secondly by using foresight practices to develop scenarios of possible futures of world politics in 2030 and 2040 and to tease out the factors that will make some of these scenarios more and others less likely.
For this purpose, the seminar is organised as a block course with three blocks: The first block provides an overview of key theoretical perspectives on great power politics (14 April 2023). The second block introduces the students to foresight practices, in particular the development of scenarios (28 April 2023). The third block then simulates a foresight conference in which the students present and discuss scenarios of world politics in 2030 and 2040 (23 June 2023).