International Politics

International Politics, formerly Geopolitics, formerly World Geopolitics, is a Humanities course in the CTY program with no prerequisites. Its course code is POLY (formerly WOGE), and it is offered at Baltimore, Carlisle, Los Angeles, and Saratoga Springs.

Course Description

International Politics provides a basic overview of many of the problems in the world, such as hunger, genocide, and informational security. The course has been criticized or been given apathetically no consideration by different people considering its pacifist style of conflict resolution.

Class History

At SAR.05.2, Donald Rumsfeld was put on mock trial for war crimes. He was found not guilty.

At CAR.05.1, many complaints were heard about the many useless geography sheets that students were required to complete after looking up large quantities of useless statistics. The same complaints were made next session, with the addition of a number of necessary poetry assignments.

International Politics was taught in Carlisle in 2007 by Dan Mumford and was TA'd by Taku Chakravarti. Taku inspired his own activity, called Taku appreciation. Dan, meanwhile, was in the Peace Corps in Africa and was an actor in an acclaimed World of Warcraft movie. Dan was frequently called D. Mums so as to differentiate between him and Dan Soltis (Diesel/D. Sol/D. Train/Dan). Dan was the RA for all of the guys in International Politics at Carlisle in 2008.1. D. Mums loves the elder god of chaos known as Cthulhu and you 'will grow to love Cthulhu by the end of the session.

At CAR.08.1, there were no more useless worksheets/poetry. The class was very interesting to those who enjoyed history/politics. A word of warning though, many of the arguments do tend to have many different sides with little difference between them and those at either end of the side were usually considered to be wrong by everyone else. As the TA, Megan, said, "There is no black or white there are only shades of gray." Some highlights included a game called Coalitions, a game about International Relations (2008.1 was the first year in which IP A and B failed the game completely resulting in the destruction of the world, a kid named Nate vetoed the peace agreement resulting in utter destruction), reading/discussing the New York Times for the first 2 hours of the day (then discussing the book/other points the teacher wanted to make for the rest of the time (you read the book/various articles during study hall in the evening)), and just the general awesomeness of the class.

At CAR 08.2, the reading/discussing of various NY Times articles resulted in one CTYer losing some of her faith in humanity, as well as other intense class ethical arguments.

At SAR.08.1, one student (also the biggest(both literally and metaphorically) douchebag of the class) discovered that Quake 3 is on the computer he's using, while at Wiecking computer lab(he fell into a destructive obsession over it. He sat on me for taking that computer once, I'm serious). The said student was also nicknamed "Doo-than the Han from Azerbaijan", as a response to his constant racism and calling a fellow classmate a Han. The rest of the class retort by downloading Combat Arms, a free online FPS that his roommate(and one of his many enemies) pulled from an ad in a gaming magazine(its site URL was kept secret). Also, the class was awesome. We saw Karl, the instructor, in a BBC documentary about the Azeri Orange Revolution (he was holding a camera, and was "duly" chased by riot police for documenting the revolt(that's what I think) as he ran around a corner).

At CAR.09.1, Mumford instructed and Cassie was the TA. The week and a half was highly memorable due to Race's inappropriate moments and Claire's un-PC comments. Most memorable of all was the discussion that sprung from an article in the NY Times about illegal immigration, which lasted over an hour and consisted of yelling and disintegrating friendships. Log rolling also proved to be a learning experience.

At CAR.09.2.POLY.A, Maria Vassilieva instructed and Kehan DeSousa was the TA. This dynamic duo consisted of a Georgetown professor and a very knowledgeable coffee/tea loving TA. With the most amount of information squeezed into the smallest amount of time they sucessfully kept their class interested in the subject. The day began with current events reading and discussion for an hour in the NYTimes, continued into a lecture, and ended with the afternoon class where projects were worked on and more studying was done. With a day to spare there was an inter-class simulation where both classes broke into groups representing made up states. Within this simulation, a made up terrorist organization called S.W.I.N.E F.L.U was admitted to the security council and proceeded to nuke the world.

At LOS.09.1.POLY, David Fields instructed and William Hon was the TA. The former is an international traveler, and the latter was studying International Politics. Days included reading from the New York Times, their main textbook, and other books that had good supporting information. They also spent good amounts of time reading The Clash of Civilizations and playing the game of Diplomacy, which Will Wheaton and Courtni Addison won as Britain. Other activities included debates on international issues, mock Security Councils, and cultural simulations.

At CAR.10.2.POLY.A , Maria Vassilieva instructed and Jose Iriate was the TA. Both teachers were great instructers, and Jose's lecture was fast, fluid, and ecconveyed hard concepts efficiently. The class read the NY times and analysed, and played several debates, including an incredibly unrealistic Isreali-palestinian peace talk. The class also watched a horrifying documentery called Ghosts of Rwanda. At the end, the class made another simulation where amnother terrorist group called L.I.O. B.P. attacked the world. Turn that around and you get BP oil.