Research Methods in International Relations

This is where IR shifts from learning what scholars argue to learning how they actually build those arguments — how a vague curiosity becomes a research question, a question becomes a testable claim, and a claim gets checked against evidence. You'll spend the semester incrementally producing your own paper: framing a question, doing a real literature review (including a library session with an advisor), picking between quantitative tools, game-theoretic models, or case-study designs, and defending your methodological choices. It's the second-year scaffolding behind every later seminar paper and your eventual senior thesis, so habits formed here tend to follow you the rest of the degree.