Issues on international political analysis

For several weeks I will be directing a course on international political analysis. If I had to name the course with just a word, I would chose development. Why do I consider that development is crucial today? First of all, because the division between developed and developing countries is of little use nowadays. And secondly, because development is a challenge today as big for the western world -facing a strong crisis of underlying values, liquidity and finance- as for the emerged world, facing challenges of institutional building and sustainability.

Development was in fact the focus of the Master of Arts I got at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1994 and the focus of my thesis on Brazil.

Today we are at what western economists name as crossroads. However, from an analysis based on a long term perspective, we are entering a very interesting time in history, one in which developing countries are no longer detached from the so called developed world.

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We will be using “Global Turning Points: Understanding the Challeges of Business in the 21rst Century” by Mauro Guillén and Emilio Ontiveros as a reference text. In each session, we will be departing from an introduction, and then we will be working on complementary materials and references.

Introduction