Liberal Arts and Sciences: Governance Major

Regardless of the majors they choose, all students participate in the Core Program, a characteristic feature of the Freiburg LAS degree. Focusing on current global challenges, it merges the students’ training in personal skills, research methods, and general epistemology into a comprehensive framework that has social applicability, intellectual depth, and personal relevance. Governance studies what happens when many people live together and depend on each other. It is about the negotiation and achievement of common goals, such as peace, prosperity, and happiness. The major ‘Governance’ is not a program in political science, international relations, or the law. It covers a broader range of disciplines and is oriented around three major areas of inquiry: communities, states, and markets. It will not give you a solid background in only one area but will enlarge your horizons by looking at these three areas from different perspectives. Talking about communities, we will see why and how people organize themselves into groups, societies, and states, and how they define and attain individual as well as common goals. By studying states, we will see how they are organized, what government does and what the tasks of administration are, and – internationally – how states manage to live together without waging wars too often and how they even often succeed in achieving common goals. Looking at the markets, we will try to understand how the national economy functions and how these processes work internationally, and how the growing flows of workers, goods, finance, and capital are managed. Departing from these basic questions, we will arrive at more complex ones: Is the financial crisis a political or an economic problem? Are political parties outdated? Can public administration be managed like a company? Are we beyond the nation-state? Are there just wars? The major gives you opportunities to delve into the search for answers to such questions, but you also will be able to choose which questions interest you most and focus on those. This major draws on several disciplines in answering the complex questions about communities, states, and markets: political science, including political philosophy, political theory as well as comparative politics; international relations, in their political, economic, and cultural dimensions economic, including international, globalized economics; law, national and international, including the workings of international organizations and courts; sociology, with the focus on political sociology and social theory; The main building blocks of the major Governance are courses on the theoretical bases and methods of social and political sciences, and introductory courses in law, economics, and government. With this background, you will be able, from your second year of studies, to choose courses of your liking to specialize in one of these areas. Many of the courses offered will combine several social science disciplines as well as insights from the humanities, life sciences, and environmental sciences. Thus, you may study the governance perspective on environmental changes, or combine insights from history, international relations, and sociology in studying diplomacy or the dynamics of peace and conflict. In general, the major is structured in a way to enable you to understand crucial current problems and, on this basis, to make relevant and insightful contributions to dealing with them. On the basis of your personalized Governance curriculum, carved out with the help of your student advisor, you will be prepared for a wide range of MA programs within the social sciences, particularly interdisciplinary programs.