INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (IR) is the study of politics across national borders: between states, international organizations, and transnational political actors and activities of all types.At UMass Amherst, we are particularly interested in the politics of transnationalism: transnational actors (markets and firms, advocacy networks, scientific experts, international organizations, NGOs and social movements), as well as transnational phenomena and threats not only to national but to human and planetary security (technological change, epidemics, climate change, environmental change, refugee flows, humanitarian crises, and trans-state security threats).We are methodologically eclectic, with faculty whose work includes qualitative and quantitative approaches, including content analysis, process-tracing and case studies, ethnography, quantitative modeling, qualitative comparative analysis, experimental survey methods and network analysis.And we aim for policy-relevance: we conduct theoretically informed work which often has policy implications, asking and answering questions that matter to real-world policy-makers, regularly engaging stakeholders, and publishing both in top journals and the mainstream press.The Department's approach to the discipline of political science is consciously eclectic, based on an assumption that the study of politics cannot be reduced to any one theory or a single set of methods. Mutual appreciation among faculty members with diverse interests and approaches characterizes the intellectual atmosphere of the Department. With more than 30 faculty members, the department covers a wide array of methodologies and research interests, including the study of theory, institutions, political behavior, and political development. UMass-Amherst offers PhD and accelerated MA degrees in six fields of political inquiry: American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Law. In addition, while each field is its own thriving research community, your studies can involve multiple research clusters whose work crosses subfields, including Conflict, Violence and Security, Political Economy, Global Forces, Computational Social Science, and Ambiguities of Democracy. You’ll also choose methods training appropriate to the questions you are asking—from statistical modeling and network analysis to ethnography and textual analysis—and enjoy mentorship by scholars often across diverse subfields and methodological orientations.
