The Department of Politics teaches courses on the Caulfield, Clayton and Peninsula campuses. The department specialises in five broad areas: Australian culture and politics, international relations, Asian and regional studies, contemporary political cultures, and social and political theory. Students may specialise in one or more of these areas, but are encouraged to choose their subjects so as to explore the different approaches to political studies.
Politics is a very broad discipline which tends to overlap continually with all the other major humanities and social science subjects. It is, therefore, an excellent subject for learning about the interrelationships which exist in the human world, and for acquiring a diverse range of interpretive, analytic, and synthetic (especially conceptual) skills. The discipline is not just concerned with the study of government, policy or political institutions; it also studies resource allocation, decision making, social behaviour and political action, the management or resolution of conflict, power struggles, the struggle for political freedom, ideologies and political movements, the nature of the state and relations between states. It is especially concerned with the nature of power and authority, with `practical understanding', with the relations between theory and practice and with the series of arguments which are created by the continual struggle by human beings to maintain their social existence and to devise more desirable and more satisfactory forms of human community.
Politics at Monash aims to offer students up-to-date coverage and explanation of many aspects of the contemporary world, developed and underdeveloped, coupled with a solid intellectual grounding in the key debates, texts and traditions of inquiry which one finds in the humanities and social sciences.
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