Rutgers Political Science and the World

The Center for Global Security and Democracy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Rutgers University Department of Political Science and embodies the breadth and variety of area, field, and methodological interests of department members.

Rutgers political scientists in both comparative politics and international relations are engaged in the critical effort to understand the dramatic political changes we confront today. We have witnessed and need to explain the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the global spread of the market, and the emergence of democracies around the world, as well as the proliferation of acts of terror, gross violations of human rights, and civil and ethnic wars. To a very important degree, our work blurs traditional field distinctions as we approach these issues, but we still have our differences of emphasis.

The comparativists among us are united by a common interest in the dynamics of political change and a professional focus on the prospects for the development of more democratic and representative forms of government throughout the world. They have examined these and other related issues at the local and national levels in Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Their approaches can be divided into two basic theoretical categories: political culture and political economy. Rutgers has arguably the strongest group of scholars working from a political cultural paradigm in any political science department in the country. Collectively their work represents all of the major cultural approaches, e.g. cognitive, phenomenological, hermeneutic/interpretive, and Gramscian/hegemonic. The political economy group is also exceptionally strong. It explores the relationship between politics and economics in developed and third world nations and international affairs. It explores the power relations involved in economic production and distribution and the economic foundations of political life.

The IR faculty focus more tightly on the manner in which states and other actors interact in the global arena in the relative absence of institutions which facilitate efforts to get people to work together in harmony. At Rutgers, the field is distinguished by a common regard for the importance of theory and generalization. Faculty research and teaching have focused on some of the more interesting and innovative areas of the field, including international political economy, especially as it involves transitional states and late development, theories of foreign policy, the causes of war, especially how ethnic conflict, and uniquely how civil wars end.