Great Powers

The course aims to provide, first of all, those conceptual and theoretical tools necessary to understand what the great powers are and what they do, what their choices in foreign policy are determined by and, finally, why not only the stability of the international system, but even the future of the human species depend on these titans of power (anthropower).
To this end, a geopolitical-realist framework will be presented which will allow to decipher, in particular, the ethology of the great powers in the light of the theoretical assumptions of the realist tradition of international relations and the traditional obsession of classical geopolitics for the hoarding of resources of power, for which a taxonomy will be provided.
In a second phase, the course aims to analyze the morphology and mechanics of the current unprecedented tripolar international system and, subsequently, the power trajectory that the three main poles (United States, China and Russia) have followed in the post-bipolar phase. To this end, the course aims to understand whether this type of international structure should be considered a triarchy in the process of definitive adjustment, a transitional stage towards a Sino-American bipolar structure, similar to the Russian-American global antagonism of the Cold War, or, rather, a preparatory phase for a return to that American-led unipolar structure that characterized the first twenty years of the post-89 era.

Ability to apply knowledge and understanding: the knowledge acquired will allow the student to address, understand, analyze and interpret the identity and ethology of the great powers, especially in the post-bipolar period; the morphology and functioning mechanism of the new unprecedented post-bipolar international system and the different potential strategic structures that it could take on; finally, the trajectory of power that the main state protagonists have so far demonstrated and, predictably, will demonstrate in the years to come, a trajectory that seems to make the hypothesis of an efficient concert of the great powers increasingly difficult and that of a collapse of the global governance highly plausible.