About the Department of Political Science and International Relations

Since it was set up within the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities in 2010, the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Necmettin Erbakan University has continually developed, becoming one of the major departments offering B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in the areas of political science and international relations. The Department left this faculty in 2017 and was included in the Faculty of Political Sciences.

Today, with its 11 full-time instructors, it provides a variety of courses to students who are selected through a highly competitive national exam. While the language of instruction in the BA program is English, the graduate programs are conducted both in English and Turkish. Its academic program covers four major subfields in the discipline: political history, international relations, international law, and European Union.

The Department of Political Science and International Relations aims to provide students with the knowledge and skills through which they can evaluate developments in the world at a national and global level from an analytical and critical perspective. In other words, the main objective of the Department is to provide students the opportunity to question contemporary issues and conduct extensive research on them. Such a goal necessitates the students to be equipped with a knowledge of political theory, history as well as of political economy, and scientific methods in social sciences. An expert staff including professors from abroad offers a wide range of elective courses in order to allow students to specialize in areas of their choice.

The Department has adopted an interdisciplinary perspective and provided students with the intellectual depth and the analytical skills that are required in a dynamic and challenging world. A wide range of courses are offered including international relation theories, international law, foreign policy analysis, international organizations, and Turkish foreign policy. Besides these main fields, to better examine the role of international actors in global and regional relations, the historical processes affecting their behaviors and social, cultural, and economic issues that characterize the present era students are offered courses within the scope of regional studies including the Middle East, Caucasus, Central Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

Faculty members, all of whom have obtained their degrees from prestigious higher educational institutions, are in constant interaction with colleagues and institutions in many countries of the world. Exchange programs carried out with several foreign universities within the scope of Erasmus and Mevlana exchange programs give undergraduate students the chance to study in different parts of the world for one semester or more.