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Rethinking Sustainability in International Relations

The project aims to add a sustainability theme to the introductory international relations course, focusing on how sustainability affects norms in the international system and poses new challenges for the 21st century. The course will introduce sustainability concepts through discussions on globalization that highlight the connections between sustainability and international politics.

Valley and Ridge was instrumental in shifting how I planned to approach this course. The program encouraged us to think about sustainability as a broader concept that focuses on the interconnectedness of environmental, economic, and social systems – this was quite different than my original thinking that focused only on the environmental component. With this new perspective, it was a clear fit for a course on international relations, which stresses global interactions and interconnections, to be adapted to highlight questions surrounding sustainability. While I had initially envisioned a standalone unit on sustainability, including a discussion of climate change, Valley and Ridge helped me to rethink how I was approaching the class more holistically. As a result, I have taken a much more expansive approach to the ways that sustainability will be discussed throughout the course. I have revised the second half of the semester to incorporate sustainability into our discussions of key issue areas across the field – not only in areas like environmental governance, but also incorporating sustainability into conflict studies and international cooperation. I plan to do this through a lens of globalization and sustainability. This framework highlights the ways that the international system is increasingly interconnected and facing complex problems. Additionally, as this is an introductory course (required for several programs) my hope is that this opens the door to students engaging with sustainability and international relations in their upper-level coursework as well.