World Studies: Orders, Politics, Cultures

The international Master's Program World Studies: Orders, Politics, Cultures provides students with in-depth knowledge of global structures and interactions. It aims at examining political and cultural processes at a world scale from an interdisciplinary perspective. We engage with international orders, the complex inter-relations between international actors, the global dissemination of ideas and knowledge, as well as diverging and converging modes of understanding in intercultural contexts. We understand ‘orders’ as stable settings gathering the parts and a whole (e.g., in the sense of multi-level governance and international legal systems). ‘Politics’ is concerned with the regulation of societies in transnational contexts. ‘Cultures’ refers to disputed interpretations, practices, and values pertaining to these orders and politics.

The MA program is jointly convened by the faculties of Law, Sociology, History, Literary Studies. Accordingly, we address global processes and structures from diverse perspectives including social sciences, history, literary, and cultural studies. Combining those enables students to bring different perspectives and approaches together in systematically developing their own interdisciplinary perspective, taking into account both how different disciplines address each other, but also how they at times contradict each other. Taken together, the Master's Program aims at facilitating an enhanced understanding of structures and processes as globally interdependent and interconnected relationships; and to do that in an interdisciplinary way.

Beyond that, the Master's Program helps students develop competences in independent academic working such as identifying appropriate research questions, conducting research, and presenting their work in writing and oral presentations. MA ‘World Studies’ graduates, thus, possess specific academic skills that qualify them as ideal candidates for careers in academia as well as in other professional fields with interdisciplinary and international requirements.