International Relations – (B.A.)

Bilkent International Relations (BIR) undergraduate program includes a broad set of integrated courses designed to provide the training and perspective required for future careers in the field of International Relations. Its teaching objectives are to maintain the crucial balance between theory and practice and to ensure that every student is exposed to the latest understanding of all the key international relations issues. Conceptual and analytical frameworks underlying these issues are also included.

A hightened interest in studying international relations has changed our traditional student profile. In the past the majority of students in our program aimed to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, international organizations, think tanks and academia. Recently, students have been choosing to study international relations because they recognize the need to have a better grasp of the complex realities of world politics in an age of rapid globalization. International politics, it seems, has become more interesting than in previous decades, not only for IR scholars, but also for our undergraduate students. In response to the change in our student profile, a change that is likely to continue given current trends in world politics, the goals of our department include training students not only for state and international organizations but also for growing private sector opportunities in the media, banking, finance and marketing. Accordingly, our department's educational goals include catering to a wide variety of student interests while providing them with the basic competencies they will need in the rest of their lives, notwithstanding the diversity in the jobs they will come to hold.

Our curriculum has been designed with these objectives in mind. To prepare our students for the theoretical and intellectual aspects of the field of international relations and to equip them with the knowledge and skills required to find employment in Turkey and abroad are our main goals. Thus, the core set of courses provides the fundamentals of the field of IR to our students. Also, a wide variety of elective courses, which can be taken from the IR department as well as from the departments of Political Science, Economics, Management and so forth, permits students to develop a program that will satisfy personal interests and specific career needs.