PIR-20062 - Module Specification
School of Social Sciences
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Programme/Approved Electives for 2024/25

Available as a Free Standing Elective

Co-requisites

None

Prerequisites

None

Barred Combinations

None

Description for 2024/25

Eurasia, the vast lands between China and Germany, has emerged as the world's axial super-continent, which is now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, both for political/military and economic reasons. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's power overshadows even America's. The geopolitics of the region is therefore a significant matter. On a lighter note, it is even the setting and plot device for one of the latest James Bond movies.
This module looks at the struggle between the processes of globalisation and geopolitical forces since the end of the Second World War. One of the most significant characteristics of the Eurasian heartland is its central location in relation to the major sedentary civilisations of the past and present. Over the centuries, these lands have come under the sway of several great world-historical civilisations and empires: the Eastern Roman or Byzantine, Mongolian, Ottoman, Holy Roman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Soviet. These lands have felt the influence of Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Protestanism, Judaism, Islam, and world communism.
At the intersection of many powerful global forces, these lands have experienced with particular sharpness what is called "modernisation" and its challenge to customary ways of life. In addition, the collapse of Soviet domination and communist regimes across this region has dramatically increased its importance for the global economy. The Eurasian heartland, which has for a number of years been in the process of becoming a region of major strategic importance, has often been treated as peripheral to other fields of study such as study of Russia or China. Perhaps more than any other region of the world, the Eurasian heartland has become an avenue of the much-mentioned condition of multipolarity in world affairs.

To introduce students to the history and politics of Europe and Asia has been divided into an East and a West during the Cold War years and is now subject to new regional divisions.
To examine the slowly changing geopolitical forces, power distributions and relational networks in Europe and its immediate neighbourhood.
To encourage students to participate in a critical engagement of an appropriate conceptual framework that will enable them to make meaningful judgements about the important processes of change in the region that are affecting the lives of all of us today.

Intended Learning Outcomes

recognise and evaluate a conceptual framework enabling them to analyse important geopolitical and political economy processes in the Eurasian region: 2
develop a clear research question and a research strategy to enable the question to be effectively addressed in relation to the modern history and politics of Eurasia: 1,2
critically analyse current developments in Eurasia, placing them in a social, political and political economy context: 1,2

Study hours

20 contact hours (10 hours lectures + 10 hours seminars)
20 hours of preparatory reading
40 hours of research for seminar preparation
70 hours research (reading, collecting data, analysing and writing) for research (long) paper
Total: 150 hours

School Rules

None

Description of Module Assessment