Get ready for Fall 2025 course registration by exploring some of our exciting Global Affairs classes! Whether you're new to the program or continuing your studies, we have a wide range of classes that address key global issues like Globalization, Human Rights, and Environmental justice. Find full course descriptions here: Global Affairs Courses and Syllabi.
GLOA 101: Introduction to Global Affairs
Fulfills Mason Core Global Contexts. This is an introductory course designed to offer an overview of globalization, its histories and qualities, and its presence in the world today from a variety of perspectives, including the economic, political, and cultural. The course will introduce the roles that international organizations, transnational corporations, and other institutions play in globalization and will cover topics as diverse as the environment, health, the media, food, government, and migration.
GLOA 387: Human Security, Globalization, & Development
This course examines human security and its connection to international development. We will address the origins of the ideas of human security and international development and how they intersect in the global Sustainable Development Goals (and before them the Millennium Development Goals). We will also examine some of the relevant international institutions such as the European Union and African Union. The course takes a case-study approach to these topics and include in-depth examinations of human security and development in sub-Saharan Africa.
GLOA 396: Globalization in/of Asia
Asia is generally considered a `winner' of globalization due largely to the region's miraculous economic success in the past decades. Not discussed as frequently are 1) the challenges each society in the region faces in political, economic, and/or cultural fronts and 2) the diverse ways in which such challenges are perceived in different countries. In this class, we tackle these two large issues by identifying what these challenges are in general and by discussing how each of the countries in the region fares on those challenges.
GLOA 615: Globalization & Human Rights
The course examines the historical origins of the concept of human rights, its international legal underpinnings, and the political and other dynamics that have driven the expansion of the human rights regime, as well as those factors, particularly within globalization, that have undermined or constrained it. Specifically, in terms of human rights, the course focuses mainly on the principal international actors operating under the auspices of the United Nations such as the Security Council and the Human Rights Council.
GLOA 615: Justice & the Global Environment
What does justice mean in the context of global environmental challenges? From the unequal distribution of environmental harms based on race, ethnicity, or gender to the often-exclusionary processes through which decisions about environmental protection are made, ideas of (in)justice are core to explaining environmental degradation and efforts to address it. This course will examine the origins of the concept of environmental justice and its uptake by social movements across the globe in the context of diverse environmental problems.
GLOA 615: Globalization & Human Rights
This course provides a critical overview of the issues of human rights and globalization, taking full account of the phenomenon of globalization and how it has affected individual and social rights alike. The course examines the historical origins of the concept of human rights, its international legal underpinnings, and the political and other dynamics that have driven the expansion of the human rights regime, as well as those factors, particularly within globalization, that have undermined or constrained it. Specifically, in terms of human rights, the course focuses mainly on the principal international actors operating under the auspices of the United Nations such as the Security Council and the Human Rights Council.
March 17, 2025