International Politics Centenary

The Centenary provides the occasion to celebrate both our exceptional legacy and its contemporary and future reinventions. It also provides the occasion to celebrate not only the Department at Aberystwyth University but also the extraordinary community of students and faculty who have passed through Aberystwyth and who now compose a global network of alumni within the Department's tradition.

The Department was founded in 1919 as a response to the extreme violence of the First World War in which millions of people from around the world lost their lives. The founding constituted an intellectual response to a global event with a normative end: understanding the diverse facets of world politics (politics, law, economics, ethics) in order to mitigate organised violence. 100 years on, this rationale remains at the centre of the department’s identity for the 21^st Century and will, we hope, provide its intellectual and academic purpose for the next 100 years. With globalisation processes, the study of violence has become of course more complicated. In addition to the continuing threats of nuclear proliferation, inter-and intra-state violence and international terrorism, the new interlocking challenges of the global economy, global health, climate change, resource scarcity, and migration point to the increasing importance of a both empirical and normative understanding of international and global violence, security and freedom. The Department’s Centenary will frame in various ways our specific understanding of this pivot from the 20^th century to the realities of the 21^st.