With the end of the Cold War, the world has grown more complex and interdependent. New issues like terrorism, currency crises, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and global warming provide fascinating research challenges. The collapse of the former Soviet Union and the erosion of Cold War have increased the complexity of international relations, leaving the architecture of post-Cold War security in flux. Globalization of production, financial markets, and information systems has introduced powerful new dynamics into the international system. The faculty of International Relations at GNU has special interests in the field of international political economy and international organizations.
Members of the Comparative Politics field conduct research about democratic transitions, political economy, integration, political development, institutional design, political violence, and the politics of Europe, Russia, East Asia, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Our Comparative Politics group is noteworthy among top-ranked departments for its combination of specialized area expertise with cutting-edge methodological sophistication in formal theory and statistical methods. Many faculty have received distinguished national fellowships. The field is supported by the Center for Area Studies, the Center for Unification and Peace, and the Center for Women’s Studies.
Our political theory program represents a broad range of perspectives on how to pursue political thinking in an era of rapid institutional change like our own. We have great strengths in Asian political thoughts and democratic theory as well as European political thoughts. Across all of these topical inflections, we emphasize a substantive concern for how issues of globalization, modernization, and multiculturalism variously enable and constrain possibilities for political agency, rights, and citizenship in the present. The College of Social Sciences at GNU is at the center of human rights studies in South Korea with the Center for Human Rights and Development.