Global Challenges Course Description

Global Challenges is a year-long, non-ideological, colloquium-based course in which students examine the critical global issues of our time, including human rights, corruption, civil war, environmental collapse, cybersecurity, terrorism, migration, demographic challenges, poverty, resource scarcity, and public health. This course sharpens students’ analytical skills and deepens their understanding of the complexities of global interdependence. It challenges students to suspend their preconceptions, and it strengthens their understanding of global affairs. Students enrolled in this multi-speaker course engage with renowned scholars, government officials, security analysts, ethicists, activists, civil society leaders, scientists, technologists, investigative journalists, and frontline photojournalists.

The course focuses on the many complex threats to human security, from “great power” rivalries to the dilemmas of terrorism and counter-terrorism, asymmetrical warfare, nuclear proliferation, the militarization of space, surveillance and digital security, as well as the challenges posed by failed states, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and forced migration. Students will consider the emergence of new threats in a borderless world, such as severe environmental stress and the effects of growing populations on development, on inequality exacerbated by corruption, and on refugee flows and global migration. We will also examine virulent pandemics and the specter of bioterrorism on the world order and security, and the disruptive artificial intelligence technology on democracy, warfare, and human evolution.

Global Challenges will serve as an incubator for Sai University’s immersive international programs and global research and internship opportunities beyond the first year.

FINAL ESSAY PROMPTS:

1. As a member of staff of a diplomat on assignment in Beijing, you have been asked to draft a policy memo that will be presented to Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar on India's approach to managing its relationship with China in the coming decade. Your proposal may touch on issues such as the Russia-China alliance, the principle of sovereignty, democracy and civic rights, the treatment of minority groups, the QUAD, India-Pakistan relations, demographic change, climate change, and long-term economic competition.

2. A number of former Islamic State fighters of Indian origin and their family members have been detained upon their return to India, while others have been imprisoned abroad or refused the right to return. You are a junior staff member of a special committee comprising the Ministries of Home Affairs, External Affairs, and Law & Justice that has been tasked with investigating the issue. You must draft a background paper examining the legal, political, moral and psychological issues involved in the repatriation of citizens who have gone abroad to join terrorist organizations, and to articulate a principle for a national policy. You may use the experiences of other countries in Europe and Central Asia to support your analysis and recommendation.

3. In light of Russia's violation of the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine security from conventional attack in exchange for its handing over of its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal, a number of non-nuclear countries are considering abandoning their policies of relying on the guarantees of others and developing nuclear arsenals of their own. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Turkey in particular are debating the merits of relying on the nuclear protection of the U.S., but the economic costs and regionally destabilising effects of acquiring nuclear weapons have given these countries pause. Despite the danger to humanity and civilization of nuclear weapons, the prospect of global denuclearization in accordance with Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) appears low. Take a position on whether such countries ought to pursue nuclear weapons or not.

4. You are a junior staff member of a new international legal team seeking to bring top Russian officials to trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes committed in Ukraine. Your assignment is to draft a memo to serve as the basis for an indictment for violations of the international laws of war regarding jus ad bellum (just cause) and jus in bello (just means), using the UN Charter, the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Convention, and the Rome Statue of the ICC as the bases for the case.

5. You have joined the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights as a research associate to support one of the legal teams working on the following cases: Vladimir Kara-Murza in Russia, Hussayin Cecil in China, Wang Bingzhang in China, Nasrin Sotoudeh in Iran, the Badawi siblings in Saudi Arabia, Maria Lourdes Afiuni in Venezuela, and Dawit Isaak in Eritrea. Write a briefing paper in which you provide the history of the case, the nature of the human rights violations involved, and possible legal or political remedies for the individual. Lastly, discuss the case within the context of the broader 'political pandemic' of resurgent authoritarianism described by Prof. Irwin Cotler and documented by such research organisations as Freedom House.

6. Should climate justice between developed and developing nations inform the distribution of the burden of mitigating global warming and other forms of climate change among nations? Discuss India's position at the Paris Climate Accords and COP 26 on this question.

- Cody Valdes, Lecturer and Senior Tutor