Developing Global Citizens through International Studies: Enhancing Student Voices and Active Learning in Short-Term Study Abroad Courses

Educating global citizens has become part of higher education in international studies. Scholars argue that education includes having a global worldview that critically evaluates complex challenges in an ever-changing environment. Most agree that something more than classroom lecture is required to transform students’ perspectives, but debates exist about exactly what “more” means. Short-term study abroad courses have evolved as one way to offer a global experience to students, especially those who must balance work, school, and family life while also facing the economic restraints of higher education. These programs, however, have been criticized as providing little more than a voyeuristic view into the lives of others with no real experience with cultures, development of global citizenship, or true engagement with global issues. This study assesses the impact of a short-term study abroad program on students’ perceptions of their role as global citizens and identifies pedagogical tools that increase the likelihood that students will embrace global citizenship as a transformative learning experience. Using reflection papers and photo elicitation, this article shows that immersive short-term study abroad experiences that include extensive community engagement have the potential to change students’ perception of the world and the way they see their role in it.

Anxiety and the Onset of COVID-19: Examining Concerns of Historically Excluded Scholars

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic increased uncertainty, leading to questions about how it spread, how long it would last, and its long-term effects. In academia, many scholars worried about their positions and career advancement. Our research focuses on how different groups within academia coped during the initial period of the pandemic, with particular attention paid to the role of anxiety. We argue that vulnerable groups, such as historically excluded individuals, graduate students, and women, felt even higher levels of anxiety. We use original survey data collected from international relations and political science scholars during May 2020. We content analyze open-ended responses to illustrate the impacts of the pandemic on our participants’ work life, including research productivity, the job market, promotion, and tenure. These analyses reveal not only what different groups of scholars are concerned about, but also the different ways in which they discuss the pandemic. Our research aims to highlight the social and mental health effects of the pandemic, with an eye toward addressing inequalities in academia.

The Limited Scope of the Democratic Peace: What We Are Missing

The democratic peace program arguably constitutes one of the most successful empirical research programs in the discipline. Its main empirical finding motivated extensive theorizing (e.g., challengers, as well as distinct theoretical enterprises), sparked further debate about how to conceptualize and operationalize democracy, and shifted the foreign policy discourse, particularly in the United States. Lost in these successes, however, is a critical unanswered question: how much interstate peace can the democratic peace potentially explain? We explore these limits (i.e., scope, or empirical coverage) in this study. We first identify the peaceful dyadic relationships—namely those that never go to war across long historical periods. We next classify these dyads as democratic (i.e., both members are democracies) or nondemocratic. The empirical analysis then examines this democracy–peace relationship across three time periods, three distinct samples (which address potential false positives), two definitions of “peace,” and two thresholds for democracy. Regardless of how we approach the data, only 4–26 percent of all peaceful dyads qualify as “democratic.” Because we control for the obvious trivial explanation (insufficient capabilities due to distance), some other (set of) factor(s) must account for the majority of interstate peace. We close with a discussion about where future research might search for these factors, as well as the larger policy implications of the study.

Forum: Did “America First” Construct America Irrelevant?

Did “America First” construct America irrelevant? Answering this question has been the subject of much debate in the popular press, the policy community, and scholarly circles. That asked, it is worth remembering that scholars and policymakers have long argued that one of the most enduring and important aspects of the US role in the world is American structural power. Perhaps nowhere has the Trump administration's approach to world affairs been more notable in perhaps diminishing US structural power than in withdrawing from multilateral forums. On an individual level of analysis, however, Trump's ever-changing, whiplash style of leadership made allies and adversaries less certain about American actions, intentions, and the direction of future policy trajectories. These issues point to the possibility that such impacts were more about Trump being Trump and less about a decline in American structural power. Only time will tell whether President Biden is able to rebuild from that structural wreckage. With these ideas in mind, the forum editors asked scholars representing diverse voices and perspectives to provide varying analyses of America First, specifically in light of the emergence of multiple global challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic to racial reckoning through the climate crisis and more. As you will see, each author brings a decidedly different lens to the questions we pose below and also generates divergent analyses of the present and the future.

Developing Students’ “Soft Skills” through the Flipped Classroom: Evidence from an International Studies Class

The goal of this study is to evaluate the application of the flipped classroom (FC) format in the international studies curriculum. Previous research has examined the impact of the FC on students’ performance, operationalized by test scores, and demonstrated the utility of this technique in the learning process. Our research goes beyond student performance to evaluate the impact of the FC on student class attendance and the development of a set of soft skills, such as teamwork, critical thinking, self-efficacy, academic self-concept, and perception of learning. In our experiment, we compare an FC with a non-flipped class that combines traditional lecturing with other active learning techniques, such as presentations, teamwork activities, and problem-based debates. The study finds that the FC did not have a substantial impact on either students’ performance, attendance, or soft skills. The differences between the two groups were too small to corroborate any tendency in favor of one or the other format. For the most part, students performed in a similar way. This can suggest that the benefits of an FC format might be less when compared with other active learning techniques.

Active Learning and Interpersonal Skills Development among First-Generation College Students

Scholars have detailed the benefits of active learning, particularly the impact that simulations can have on promoting engagement and evaluative thinking. Scholars have discussed the positive effects of active learning on first-generation college students, but there is minimal research on how simulations contribute to developing interpersonal skills, especially among first-generation college students. Interpersonal skills, often referred to as soft skills, are challenging to quantify since they focus on how individuals relate and interact with others. These skills include oral and written communication, teamwork, confidence, and leadership skills. This article examines whether stimulations taught within an active learning environment contributed to developing interpersonal skills among first-generation college students. In a retrospective survey administered at a single campus, our findings suggest that active learning contributes to the building of cultural capital for first-generation college students and also contributes developing interpersonal skills for both first-generation and second-generation college students.

Is a Pedagogy of Indigenous Solidarity Possible in the International Relations Theory Classroom?

How should teachers of international relations in settler-colonial states engage with First Nations’ sovereignty claims? While a growing body of recent scholarship explores how teaching might acknowledge and move beyond the discipline's racist and colonial origins, less research investigates how pedagogy might rectify inattention to Indigenous sovereignty. This paper reports on a class activity that sought to highlight how the discipline's foundational assumptions can naturalize Indigenous dispossession. In the class, students were asked to conduct discourse analysis of debates surrounding the “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” and to consider practices of Indigenous transnationalism. Although students generally succeeded in identifying how discursive practices consolidate the authority of the settler-colonial state, class discussion tended to reproduce the state's justificatory narratives and to classify First Nations’ claims as akin to those of any other ethnic minority. At a time when many universities are seeking to embed more Indigenous content within curriculum, we reflect on how the activity revealed epistemic colonialism's operation within educational settings. We argue that in addition to introducing Indigenous perspectives and knowledges, it is valuable for teaching in settler-colonial states to focus critical attention onto non-Indigenous practices that reproduce systemic injustice.

Getting Cozy, or How the European Commission Produces Legitimacy in the EU

International organizations increasingly resort to strategies of legitimation in order to justify their authority and policies. This article explores one such strategy of the European Commission that targets organized interest groups with the aim to build a legitimating constituency. The members of this constituency not only contribute expertise to a policy, but also benefit from that policy and, therefore, participate in the development and confirmation of a claim to the policy's legitimacy that is put forward by EU officials. As a consequence, the agents seeking legitimacy and the addressees granting it become closely associated and “get cozy” with each other. EU officials address their claim to legitimacy to a community of co-opted elites who are likely to confirm this claim and in whose own interests it is to do so. The result is legitimation as a collaborative activity with preordained outcomes. Taking the case of the European Commission's research and innovation policy, and building in part on an ethnographic practitioner's account, the article provides an original insight into how this legitimation strategy works in everyday EU policymaking.

Is There Still a German IR Discourse? Investigations in the Semi-Periphery of an Academic Discipline

In non-English-speaking countries, international relations (IR) scholars often face considerable pressure to publish in international journals and address international debates. At the same time, they are expected to cater to national publics, politicians, and funding agencies. In this article, we investigate how German IR scholars navigate this terrain and whether a national IR discourse still exists in Germany. To answer this question, we analyze citation patterns and the formulation of the puzzle in twenty-five volumes of the Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, the German flagship journal of IR. We find that two-thirds of scholarly works cited in those articles are written in English. References to German-language literature cluster in articles written by authors without disciplinary affiliation in IR. The majority of research puzzles are also situated firmly in international discourses, while only a minority really target German debates. We conclude that not much of a distinctively German conversation over matters of IR is left, at least in academia. What is still there revolves around German foreign policy, theory issues, and, to some extent, European studies. On most other issues, authors link up directly to international debates even when addressing their German colleagues in German.

We Are a Community of Practice, Not a Paradigm! How to Meaningfully Integrate Gender and Feminist Approaches in IR Syllabi

The most frequent practice in teaching western undergraduate students about international relations (IR) is either to avoid gender studies altogether or at best to compartmentalize them to a single week. This practice marginalizes feminist research by amalgamating highly heterogeneous publications under the pretense that “they look at gender.” Rather than treating gender studies as a unified research program, they should be linked to the full range of theories, approaches, or topics they are relevant to, based on their normative and ontological assumptions. In the end, gender-oriented scholars do not form a would-be paradigm, but a community of practice. This community, however, can itself perpetuate colonial exclusions and silencing. This study is based on a content analysis of fifty western undergraduate “Introduction to IR” syllabi from 2015 to 2020, as well as a reflection on my own experience since 2011 as a student, teaching assistant, guest lecturer, and professor in ten IR courses at three western universities.