BA International StudiesAdd to shortlist

Programme profile

This programme [new for 2012] offers you a unique combination of regional studies, placed in an international setting and provides you with the opportunity to learn a foreign language.

After a broad introductory semester, you specialise in one of nine world regions and one of its languages. You analyse your area of choice from cultural, economic, historical and political angles and compare them within an international perspective.The programme is designed around three elements: core courses that introduce disciplinary concepts and that analyse the international setting, area courses that analyse the situation in a selected region from a disciplinary, and increasingly interdisciplinary, perspective and language courses that prepare students for access to the cultural context in the relevant language.

The core concepts, ideas and methods are taken from four broad disciplinary approaches: History (mostly modern history); Cultural Studies (modern cultural phenomena in their societal settings); Economics (and the concepts from International Political Economy); Political Science (and Sociology and Anthropology).

The regions offered in the degree, and their corresponding languages are: East Asia [Chinese, Japanese, Korean]; Latin America [Spanish, Portuguese]; Middle-East [Arabic, Persian, Turkish]; north America [French, Spanish]; Russia and Eurasia[Russian]; South Asia [Hindi]; Southern Africa [Afrikaans, Swahili]; South-East Asia [Indonesian, Spanish] Western Europe [Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese].

Programme content

Year 1: Configuring the World; World History; Introduction to Area Studies; Introduction to Areas; Introduction to Academic English . After the first semester, throughout the rest of the first and second year, all students follow one non-native foreign language related to their area of study.

Year 2: In the third semester, the regional modules analyse cultural and economic phenomena in your areas of specialisation. At the same time, the core modules provide an international setting for the culture course. A further core module starts a new disciplinary cycle with an introduction to comparative politics. The fourth semester again has the regional and core modules building on the basis laid by the comparative politics module given in the previous semester, as well as the module on the international economic setting. The core and the regional modules now offer a range of electives from which students select topics for further specialist study.

Year 3: Half the fifth semester is taken up with research (and writing) of the bachelor thesis. Students are encouraged to spend this semester studying or working abroad in their region of specialisation. In the sixth and final semester students take part in one of the thesis seminars, combining students with closely aligned thesis topics, where they will be required to place the thesis in an international comparative context.

In this year, you are allowed half a year of study to be taken outside the regular teaching program (Discretionary Space), which could be to increase your language proficiency, to undertake academic courses abroad from those offered by partner universities, to undertake an internship either in the Netherlands or abroad or to follow a second regional trajectory.

Progression

The university offers related Masters programmes, taught through English, in the following areas:

Public Administration;
Public International Law;
International Relations and Diplomacy;
Political Science;
Area [Regional] Studies

Entry Requirements