Modules

Easily missed among all the full-semester classes at Fletcher are a select group of half-semester modules.  The second half of the fall semester started last week, and students were offered the chance to register for modules that will run from now through the last day of classes.  This short list of five classes brings into clear focus the breadth of the Fletcher curriculum.  From Transitional Justice to Emerging Pathogens, a multidisciplinary approach to international affairs means there will be students for whom each class is the perfect addition to their personal curricula.

Here are the late-semester offerings:

Adapative Leadership and Managerial Communication, Professor Mihir Mankad
Adaptive Leadership and Managerial Communication is a new module course that is intended to sharpen your skills around practical, impactful, and often challenging verbal communication across a range of adaptive leadership and managerial scenarios.  Through your experiences, you will further develop your public speaking and presentation skills, and better understand the concept of adaptive leadership and its communication.  You will also get exposure to both personal and organizational communication case scenarios, including crisis communication.  As with Arts of Communication, this module course should also further your journey to becoming a more persuasive, motivating and effective public speaker and media communicator.

Transitional Justice, Professor Cecile Aptel
This seminar considers the range of processes and mechanisms available to ensure accountability for large-scale human rights violations and achieve reconciliation, including criminal justice, truth and reconciliation commissions, and mechanisms, which incorporate local custom, such as gacaca in Rwanda.  It reviews some of the philosophical, moral and political considerations pertaining to the challenge of reconciliation in these contexts.  This course is taught remotely by the professor.

International Arbitration, Professor Jeswald Salacuse   
This half-credit module explores the nature and application of international arbitration as a method of dispute resolution in international economic and political relations.  A widely used but not generally well-known process, international arbitration is basically a method of dispute settlement that involves the referral of the dispute to an impartial tribunal or panel for a binding decision according to agreed-upon norms, often on the basis of international law. It is applicable to three general types of disputes: 1) disputes between states (interstate arbitration); 2) disputes between states and private parties (e.g. investor-state arbitration); and 3) disputes arising out of international business transactions either between private parties or between private parties and governmental entities (e.g. international commercial arbitration).  This module will examine all three types of international arbitration and will consider their legal basis, their methods of operation, and their potential advantages and disadvantages both for the disputants and the wider international community.  A student’s final evaluation in the course will be based on a paper of not more than 3000 words (65%) and participation in class sessions (35%).  The course is relevant to the academic interests of LLM students, because of its legal component, MIB students, because of arbitration’s key role in the settlement of international business disputes, and MALD students with interests in international conflict resolution.  The course is listed in the fields of Public International Law and International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and has no required prerequisites.

Political Economy of the Global Arms Trade, Professor Sam Perlo-Freeman   
The arms industry and trade sits at the intersection of global economics, security, and politics. Access to armaments, whether domestically produced or imported, is necessary for states and armed groups to develop military capability; thus the arms industry and trade is a key instrument of state policy and international relations.  At the same time, the arms industry is an economic enterprise, in most countries a private, profit-seeking one. It depends on general national economic, industrial and technological development, and is often seen—debatably—as an important source of industrialization, jobs, and trade.  But military spending, including arms acquisition, carries an opportunity cost, and how states choose to allocate limited resources between civilian and military priorities is the outcome of numerous economic, political and security factors.

Health, Human Security and Emerging Pathogens, Professor Nahid Bhadelia   
With increasing globalization of trade, travel and terrorism, public and individual human health have become topics of global concern, involving sovereign nations, international organizations and the scientific community.  Threats from emerging infectious diseases outbreaks exemplify this trend.  In contrast to the traditional idea of national security, the field of human security focuses on the individual, rather than state, as the nexus of analysis and takes a multidisciplinary approach through which to analyze the challenges related to community, national and global response to emerging infectious diseases epidemics. This course will start by examining human security literature and practice as it applies to infectious diseases threats.  It will examine factors leading to increasing frequency of outbreaks due to novel pathogens, such as climate change and environmental degradation, and the concept of One Health.  It will then look at the intersection between scientific research and related ethical issues, disease surveillance and global biosecurity issues.  Further, the course will examine the historical basis for International Health Regulations and other frameworks for modern global health governance as they apply to outbreaks.  Lastly, the class will utilize case studies to examine how outbreak preparedness and response have been managed during recent epidemics such as SARS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola and Zika.  This course is meant to foster interdisciplinary perspectives by bringing together practitioners from international law, human development, public health and clinical care.