SCHOOL OF WORLD POLITICS

of the Institute for the U.S. and Canadian Studies
Russian Academy of Sciences

The School of World Politics was established in September 1999 under the auspices of the Institute for the U.S. and Canadian Studies (ISKRAN) and constitutes a department of the Russian State University for Humanities — the educational branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The University comprises 8 departments — Schools of Sociology, Law, History, Political Science, Philosophy, Economics and World Politics — each based in a leading research institute in its field.

The School of World Politics offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in international relations and area studies (USA and Canada). The School focuses on educating and training highly qualified professionals with a strong theoretical and practical background in international relations and security. The second educational track pursued at the School is North American studies, encompassing the history, economy, politics and culture of the United States of America and Canada. School's curricula are designed to enable its graduates to compete successfully for administrative and analytic positions in the government, business, media, academia and higher education.

The School is officially accredited by the Russian Ministry for Higher and Professional Education and issues standard state educational certificates.

The School draws upon the rich academic resources and expertise of the Institute for the U.S. and Canadian Studies — a renowned Russian research center for international affairs and North American studies which forms a part of the core Russian foreign policy advisory community.

This unique position at the heart of cutting-edge research in international relations provides SWP students with an opportunity to get hands-on experience in policy analysis. Graduate students may be involved into Institute's activities with a view to occupying research positions with ISKRAN. All students are encouraged to participate in discussions in the framework of round-tables and seminars conducted at the Institute. They also attend frequent lectures and presentations by prominent speakers from politics, business and academia organized by ISKRAN.

The Institute provides SWP students with access to library resources and is examining opportunities to develop computer labs and Internet facilities.

The School of World Politics is the only Russian civilian center offering a comprehensive insight into the various issues of world politics and international relations with a special emphasis on international security. We see our mission in providing Russian governmental agencies (Foreign, Defense and other Ministries) with a new generation of qualified experts whose proficiency would meet the highest international standards.

The major "breakthrough" the School's project seeks to implement is introducing new curricula in international security studies in order to go beyond traditional "hard" security approaches by means of encompassing economic, informational, ecological, humanitarian and other new aspects of security agenda including uncontrolled migration flows, terrorism and drug-trafficking.

The project is a unique endeavor in Russia because of its comprehensive nature. Existing schools of international relations in Russia have a long-standing tradition of teaching students and therefore they are relatively conservative with regard to new approaches in the field of security. As an educational center, our School is fundamentally new since it is based on ISKRAN which has been able to follow the conceptual evolution in security studies over more than 30 years of its research activities.