Undergraduate & Graduate Schools of International Relations

School of International Relations

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In recent years, international relations have become more complex, raising a variety of challenging issues. Thus, the languages, cultures, and other aspects of the various regions of the world need to be understood and respected, and efforts need to be made to address specific problems from a global perspective. The School of International Relations instills in students critical thinking skills, deep insight, and broad knowledge by training them to view relations among nations from a range of perspectives and to adopt approaches from various disciplines. The School fosters in students an understanding of the dynamics of the international community. The School also connects people from many nations and cultural backgrounds, fostering individuals who can cooperate to address global and regional issues.

Graduate School of International Relations

Globalization may appear to be homogenizing our ways of life, but it is in fact diversifying and complicating them, due to various counter-globalization trends such as traditionalism, nationalism, localism, ethnicity, and religious extremism taking place in contemporary international contexts. For this reason, both global and international studies and local cultural or area studies are equally needed and inseparable from each other to resolve a wide range of complicated issues today. To foster highly trained specialists and active practitioners fully equipped with global as well as local knowledge of the international and multicultural arenas, the Graduate School of International Relations fosters students with the ability to apply a relevant combination of multidisciplinary approaches and comparative methods. The School also strongly encourages students to conduct fieldwork to approach the lived experience and realities of the people concerned through the full use of the researcher’s own senses. The graduate program is supported by three research centers attached to the School: the Center for Korean Studies, the Wider Europe Research Center, and the Center for Global Studies.