The BIR undergraduate program includes a broad set of integrated courses designed to provide the training and perspective required for future careers in the field of International Relations. Its teaching objectives are to maintain the crucial balance between theory and practice and to ensure that every student is exposed to the latest understanding of all the key international relations issues. Conceptual and analytical frameworks underlying these issues are also included.

A hightened interest in studying international relations has changed our traditional student profile. In the past the majority of students in our program aimed to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, international organizations, think tanks and academia. Recently, students have been choosing to study international relations because they recognize the need to have a better grasp of the complex realities of world politics in an age of rapid globalization. International politics, it seems, has become more interesting than in previous decades, not only for IR scholars, but also for our undergraduate students. In response to the change in our student profile, a change that is likely to continue given current trends in world politics, the goals of our department include training students not only for state and international organizations but also for growing private sector opportunities in the media, banking, finance and marketing. Accordingly, our department's educational goals include catering to a wide variety of student interests while providing them with the basic competencies they will need in the rest of their lives, notwithstanding the diversity in the jobs they will come to hold.

Our curriculum has been designed with these objectives in mind. To prepare our students for the theoretical and intellectual aspects of the field of international relations and to equip them with the knowledge and skills required to find employment in Turkey and abroad are our main goals. Thus, the core set of courses provides the fundamentals of the field of IR to our students. Also, a wide variety of elective courses, which can be taken from the IR department as well as from the departments of Political Science, Economics, Management and so forth, permits students to develop a program that will satisfy personal interests and specific career needs.

Our curriculum content aims to change the way students think about the world by:

• Providing students with basic knowledge and understanding of the key concepts in our discipline;
• Providing them with competence in International Relations specialties such as International Law, Security and Conflict Studies, Diplomatic History, International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, Global Issues and Area Studies;
• Stimulating interest in issues of International Relations beyond students' immediate focus;
• Enhancing students' ability to relate theories of International Relations and foreign policy analysis to the practice of world politics;
• Bolstering students' intellectual courage to move from theoretical discussions in the classroom to real-world experience and learning.

Our skill objectives include:

• Cultivating students' transferable (oral, written and research) skills;
• Developing students' ability to read, absorb and critically assess a significant amount of complex material;
• Developing students' ability to question ‘how’s and ‘why’s of a given situation without taking the information provided to them at face value;
• Sharpening students' analytical skills;
• Developing students' conjectural thinking;
• Broadening students' intercultural understanding by increasing student awareness of the values, political/strategic cultures and decision-making environments of myriad actors in world politics;
• Cultivating students' sense of moral responsibility regarding the developments in the world beyond their borders.

Undergraduate students are required to complete a minimum of 129 credits to earn their B.A. degree. Their normal course load over four years is 44 courses, 34 of which are compulsory and 10 of which are elective. Students can take up to 4 semesters' work of courses in one foreign language to satisfy a fraction of their elective credits. However, any extra language courses that are taken thereafter would not count towards graduation.

Students from other departments who wish to take IR courses as electives are recommended to complete certain compulsory IR courses before enrolling in upper level IR courses. While electives lack pre-requisites, most upper-level IR courses assume that students possess the basic theoretical background knowledge provided by the International Relations I&II and International Relations Theory courses.

For more information about the undergraduate program, please contact the departmental secretary: Pınar Kılıçhan Şener.

For more information about the University orientation program, click here.