Politics - 2019

Politics is an excellent discipline for learning about the interrelationships in the human world, and for acquiring a diverse range of interpretive, analytic skills. The discipline is engaged in critical debates about governance, policy creation and administration, social behaviour and political action including electoral processes, the management or resolution of conflict, including relations between states. The study of politics is ultimately concerned with important questions about the nature of power, authority and governance, and the relationship between theory and practice.

Politics at Monash aims to offer students an understanding of many aspects of the contemporary world, coupled with a solid intellectual grounding in the key debates, texts and traditions of inquiry in which the discipline is immersed. The politics program at Monash emphasises three broad areas:

• government, policy and leadership
• international relations and comparative governance
• political philosophy and political psychology

Students are encouraged to explore the different facets of political studies.

Availability

Politics is listed in A2000 Bachelor of Arts at Clayton as a major and a minor, and in A0502 Diploma of Liberal Arts at Clayton as a major.

Outcomes

In addition to achieving the broad outcomes of their course, students successfully completing this major will be able to:

• recognise, interpret and analyse conceptual perspectives on politics with regard to key elements of power and public institutions, freedom and transformation, closed and open political systems
• critically discuss and evaluate outlooks on key political debates concerning power, governance, freedom and political change at global, regional, national and local levels
• critically relate political theories and ideas to major contemporary issues of human rights, political violence, value conflict and cultural difference
• understand how the institutions of governance work.