The Department of International Relations at Ashoka aims to provide students with in-depth knowledge of the events and issues that shape the international world and equip them with a profound understanding of the foundational concepts and theories that enable intellectual analysis of international relations. Its faculty introduces students to varied perspectives on international affairs from both a scholarly and a practitioner’s point of view. This is a highly interdisciplinary department, offering courses that are grounded in theory and history, complemented with a wide variety of electives on specific issue areas, world regions, and intellectual approaches to international relations.
The department especially boasts of regional expertise of South Asia with several faculty members analysing the region’s international-historical position as well as South Asian thinking in international relations, two exciting areas of research in the discipline. This regional focus is complemented with courses on China, the United States, and Latin America, as well as courses on topics ranging from decolonisation, gender, globalisation, and diplomacy, to international conflict, aesthetics, ethics, social theory, security, and democratic peace.
The department currently offers a Minor, and a Concentration in International Relations and will be offering a Major soon. The Minor and Concentration are ideal for students who seek a ‘bridge’ discipline that can supplement and further develop their understanding of how the world works, providing them with intellectual baggage that they can then apply to other fields of study and in their future careers.
Ashoka University’s Department of International Relations offers undergraduate programmes which equip students with a thorough knowledge of theories,…
The department offers students a chance to submit a 15,000-word dissertation under the Advanced Scholars Program. This is…
The IR Department has 8 Permanent faculty and 3 Visiting Faculty who are at the cutting edge of various aspects of the discipline: evaluating leadership norms; challenging Eurocentric frames of reference for understanding IR; and the influence of geopolitics on the making of foreign policy. Scholars in this department have also pioneered the field of analyzing how an archivally grounded analysis of foreign policy making is critical to the discipline. Collectively, their research shapes the broader discussion and analysis of South Asia’s internationalist dilemmas, both within India and outside.
Being Ashoka's newest academic society, Ashoka Society for International Affairs (A.S.I.A) has a very simple but ambitious goal: to bring the field of International Relations to the student body. To that end, they seek to explore both traditional (war, peace, etc.) and constructivist (gender, psychology, etc.) angles to IR. They have tons of exciting events lined up every semester which includes thrilling panel discussions with journalists, policymakers and ambassadors (including the occasional lunch sessions), simulation games, sessions on the languages of IR, conversations with students writing thesis papers, curating academic archives, and so much more. They seek to establish A.S.I.A as an avenue to understand the massive span of the field of IR.
In conversation with the noted journalist and author Nayan Chanda, Associate Professor of International Relations, Ashoka University.
Assistant Professor Bann Seng Tan talks about the causes and effects of democratisation on interstate conflict behaviour and the effective…
For any queries regarding International Relations programmes, please contact: -
If you have queries specific to the History and International Relations interdisciplinary major, please reach out to:-