300458 Power, Competition and Conflict (S) (WiSe 2025/2026)

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 foreshadows 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. In this perspective, the trade conflict between the US and China as well as Russia's war against Ukraine are but two episodes of a much broader transformation of world politics.
The seminar aims to equip students with a set of theoretical and methodological tools to better understand and analyse this transformation. It does so in two complementary ways: Firstly, it provides an overview over the debate on whether, and how, great power politics can be managed in ways that foster cooperation rather than conflict. Secondly, it familiarises students with foresight methods and uses these methods 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 (17 October 2025). The second block introduces the students to foresight practices, in particular the development of scenarios (24 October 2025). The third block then simulates a foresight conference in which the students present and discuss scenarios of world politics in 2030 and 2040 (05 December 2025).