Today’s guest post is by Dr. Susana de Sousa Ferreira, Lecturer in International Relations at Complutense University of Madrid and Academic Secretary of the Department of International Relations and Global History. Feel free to contact her at https://www.ucm.es/relhis/susana-ferreira
Teaching human rights and gender in International Relations can be an uphill battle. These topics are often treated as marginal to the discipline, and depending on the composition of your classroom, you may run into resistance from students who see gender as a “soft” or secondary issue compared to security or interstate politics. Last year, I decided to tackle this head-on in my optional course “International Human Rights and Gender Relations Regime” in the IR degree program at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, with the added twist that 70% of my 33 students were international Erasmus students from different cultural and geographic backgrounds.
Alongside the regular lecture syllabus, I built in a project-based learning (PBL) component that ran for the whole semester: lectures introduced the theoretical framework, and the project gave students a hands-on way to put that theory into practice. Each student group adopted one human rights article (equality, prohibition of slavery, prohibition of torture, freedom of expression, right to work, right to education) as their “beat” for the entire term. This let groups build depth instead of skimming through unrelated topics and gave them ownership over their material.
The project unfolded in three stages. First, groups mapped the global state of “their” right through a gender lens, using a SWOT framework to identify Strengths (progressive policies, advocacy networks), Weaknesses (implementation gaps, cultural resistance), Opportunities (new norms, international cooperation), and Threats (political backlash, armed conflict, economic crisis) — always asking how gender and other axes of vulnerability shape who actually gets to exercise that right. Second, groups moved to the UN system, selecting at least two real complaints filed with bodies like CEDAW or the Committee against Torture, and analyzing the context, the specific violation, the gender dimension, and the international response. Third, they repeated the exercise for a regional system (the Inter-American Court, the European Court of Human Rights) to compare how protection plays out across jurisdictions.
In this new blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month we continue with Andrew Judge’s Daybreak, a game about climate change and international cooperation.
In this new blog series Drs. Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison (all University of Glasgow) explore how board games can be used as effective pedagogical tools to bring abstract concepts to life in the classroom. Each entry focuses on a specific game, outlining its mechanics, practical classroom applications, and any possible adaptions or limitations to its use within a standard seminar set up. In examining individual games, they aim to provide a support resource for educators seeking to experiment with games as part of their classroom activities, as well as engage critically with when and why we might use games within teaching. This month, we begin with Michael Toomey’s review of Tammany Hall, a political boardgame about power, patronage, and competition.
How does it work:
Tammany Hall is based on the eponymous political machine of late-18th and 19th century New York City (for 3 – 5 players) . Players compete with one another to accumulate political support (and more importantly, political favors) among four contemporary immigrant communities (Irish, English, Germans, and Italians) in Manhattan, aiming to gain and to maintain control over the city’s mayoralty. In essence, Tammany Hall gamifies the process of securing power in an imperfect democracy and utilizing that power to reward allies and punish adversaries.
The Serious Play Review Board: Michael Toomey, Andrew Judge, and Jenny Morrison
It is a surprisingly rich and dynamic game. Early on, the Irish immigrant population is dominant, encouraging players in the early stages to focus their efforts on appealing to this constituency. However, as the game progresses, the Italian population becomes increasingly important, replicating the demographic shift that happened in the city throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and forcing players to respond to this influx. The game mechanics are relatively straightforward and easy to get into, but with enough flexibility that it can be re-engineered to connect to other concepts or issues from Politics and International Relations.
Applications for teaching:
Tammany Hall is directly adaptable to teaching several political concepts and issues. This is not particularly surprising, as it was designed specifically by its developers to connect and relate to contemporary politics. At its most basic level, it can be used to teach the dynamics of political contestation amidst an electoral campaign. Going deeper, it is readily usable for classes teaching the concepts of corruption, patronage, and clientelism. In the game, players are rewarded with political favour from particular immigrant communities for providing them housing and support. This favour can then be leveraged during elections to control power- a clientelist dynamic which is replicated in many polities throughout the world. Alternatively, the in-game practice of dominating an electoral constituency through the use of “ward bosses” to exercise influence on your behalf (and those of your supporters) directly replicates political practices in countries and contexts as different as modern Ireland and pre-2022 Russia (to name just two).
The game can also be used to teach classes on the politics of immigration. On one hand, it can be used as part of a lesson on how politicians might appeal to immigrant communities for votes. Perhaps even more useful and interesting would be its usefulness for understanding how rivalries and hostility might subsequently emerge between these groups, and how political actors oftentimes play different ethnic demographics off against one another. More abstract concepts can also be illustrated with it- it would not be too difficult to connect the game to a lesson on the politics of grievance, for example, or even to illustrate theories such as Selectorate Theory. In all these instances, the teaching benefits are most sharply accentuated when followed up with a debriefing session, where the lecturer can highlight the specific points, they wish to draw out, and/or where students can reflect on the real-life relevance of the game.
Adaptations and setup:
The game takes between 60-90 minutes to play the whole way through (both according to the developer’s estimates, and to the reviewer’s own personal experiences playing the game). As such, it is likely that a game would need to be truncated to include an effective debrief session. This is not too complicated: the game is divided into four distinct phases (each replicating a single electoral cycle), so there are natural points at which the game can be stopped. This does hinder the possibility of fully simulating the demographic shift that occurs later in the game, potentially curtailing one of the more interesting features of the game, but this can perhaps be compensated for by starting the game at a later phase with a pre-set distribution of communities across the board.
The basic game mechanics, centred around building support among a given community of actors within a set period or cycle of time and then leveraging this to attain and wield political power, can be re-imagined illustrating various Politics/IR concepts or issues without much adaptation. However, the game board might need to be re-designed somewhat if being used to illustrate more abstract or conceptual dynamics. A single copy of the game can easily accommodate groups of between 3-15 students (organised into teams of up to three players). Larger teams might also be possible but can become unwieldy and/or may lead to some students being marginalised.
Conclusions:
Many boardgames are most useful as framing devices or as icebreakers to provoke broader discussion in a classroom but are less useful for simulating specific behaviours or more complex concepts. Ironically, Tammany Hall probably functions best for the latter but is less suitable as a framing device or as an icebreaker. It is most useful for helping students apply and analyse what they have learned about cronyism, patronage, and clientelism (or whatever behaviours or practices the instructor is teaching) in a gamified setting, but is maybe less useful for achieving lower order steps on Bloom’s Taxonomy. All in all, though, Tammany Hall is a highly useful and adaptable boardgame with plenty of application in a variety of Politics and IR classrooms.
Early this semester, my department head bust into my office and said, “Pigeon! Want to teach a game design course in the Spring?” I asked if I could think about it, stared into the middle distance for about three seconds, then heartily replied, “game on!”
Per Dr. Daum’s guidance, my only strict criterion was that the course must be through the lens of international relations theory. This way, it leverages my existing IR credentials and counts distinctly toward Colorado State University’s Global Politics and Policy concentration. However, it is open to any political science major who’s taken at least one of the foundational 200-level courses in any concentration, history and international studies majors who’ve completed specific foundational courses in their disciplines, and other majors with my approval after reviewing their transcripts.
I used my US Air Force Academy wargaming design course syllabus as a starting point, but that iteration was laser-focused on addressing national security questions. For CSU, I’ve widened the aperture to address questions across international relations.
Aye, the reading list is breathtaking for an undergraduate course. How I’m couching it to students, though, is that these are actionable, hands-on readings: they’ll be applying concepts in their game prototypes almost immediately.
By the end of the course, student teams will complete playable, functioning game prototypes, with live play and critique as part of their assessment. Their grades won’t be simple letters; they’ll represent a tangible, tactile product they can be proud of — and even publish!
I’ve attached a 99.9% syllabus draft below for your review and nefarious use (I don’t expect substantial changes at this point, but I certainly won’t sneeze at anyone’s feedback). More to follow as the course unfolds next semester!
In the same vein as Pigeon, I have been absent from ALPS because … work, grading, life admin, and an upcoming move to start a new position. You know the drill: summer can be either quiet or ridiculously busy. But as I am leaving my position at Colgate University, I wanted to share a brief anecdote from my teaching life and rolling with the punches when things don’t go exactly as planned. It was such a strange student event that I had to share it for the archives. Hopefully, you’ll get at least a chuckle out of it.
This guest post is by Dr. Ruairidh J.Brown, the Head of Politics and International Relations at Forward College, where he teaches International Political Theory and International Relations. His research interests include phenomenology and hermeneutics, existentialism, the philosophy of amity and friendship, the philosophy of obligation, and developments in international political theory. Ruairidh was awarded the University of Nottingham’s Lord Dearing Award in 2019 for his pedagogical work in China. You can reach Dr. Brown at ruairidh.brown -at- forward-college.eu.
Editor’s Note (Pigeon, that is): I assess this is a useful and sober addition to the AI in the classroom debate. I’ll admit that I count myself as an AI skeptic, aligning with Ruairidh’s concerns below. Ruairidh’s article highlights the importance of expertise, as he had the necessary training and experience to evaluate ChatGPT’s efficacy in this exercise. Now on to the article!
I emailed my students last week to tell them the EU had plagiarised our Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) seminar.
I was prompted by the story that European diplomats had used a ‘Starmer chatbot’ – an AI trained to respond like Kier Starmer – to practice and prepare for the ‘Brexit-reset negotiations’.
I was joking (in case you hadn’t guessed), but I was struck by how uncanny the EU preparation strategy was to some of my experimentations with AI this year.
I have been, admittedly, quite the AI sceptic – or perhaps even AI apathetic. A lot if this was due to how the need to adapt to AI has been framed in academia: overtly defensive, negative, and usually focused on the need to prevent students from cheating in coursework and exams. When it was suggested to me as a positive, it was usually in a way I found distasteful. In Political Theory, for example, as a means to summarise the works of Hobbes or Thucydides and thus save students the time and bother of reading the originals – something I found, personally as a political philosopher, blasphemous, and pedagogically, as a teacher, a sure way to doom future students to nothing beyond surface level understanding of the material.
Nevertheless, I have been increasingly curious about utilising AI in another module I teach, FPA. Unlike Political Theory, where a deep, nuanced grasp of philosophical ideas is essential, in FPA, a much more strategic and applied understanding is required. For example, students do not need a deep hermeneutic grasp of the concept of ‘harmony’, exploring its development across Confucian thought, as they would in political theory, but rather a grasp of how and what aspects of the idea influence and are leveraged in Beijing’s approach to other States.
Scenario role plays are thus a perfect tool for FPA as they train students not to consider ideas in abstractum but as part of a strategy. I had, in addition, been keen to introduce some digital gaming models for FPA to make these classes more dynamic, and had been inspired by articles about using such games as Diplomacy.However, I found Diplomacy interface too clunky and a game far too complex to set up.
I thus decided to embrace AI. Afterall, I thought, surely the games I loved as a youngster, like Total War used some kind of AI for their non-player characters (NPCs)? Maybe I could embrace ChatGPT as an NPC for my seminar and see what it could bring to class.
I subsequently created two classes with ChatGPT involved. The first was on North Korea and nuclear weapons. The class was split into three groups of ‘US ambassadors’ who had to try and convince Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear program. North Korea was played by ChatGPT, and whom students would subsequently have to negotiate with.
The second was on economic diplomacy, with the case study of China’s relations with Central and Eastern Europe (ECC). One group would play China and would need to get as many ECC countries to join a new fictitious economic alliance as they could. If China could get, and keep, a majority by the end of the class, they won. ChatGPT played the role of a ‘random events generator’ with the face of Sky News, announcing events such as corruption scandals, civil unrest, and responses from the US in the form of social media posts by President Trump as he reacted to student actions.
These classes, especially the second one, exceeded my expectations.
Firstly, from a technical standpoint, it was incredibly easy to set up and offered incredible flexibility in design. I told ChatGPT what I wanted and how it was to be done, which it not only understood and executed exceedingly well, but even came back which greatly enhanced the class. It was a fraction of the time and effort spent working out Diplomacy.
Secondly, it provided a solid anchor to my seminars. As anyone who has used role plays in classes will know, some student roles require more heavy lifting than others. If a student allocated this role has a certain ‘out-the-box’ perspective, or simply does not do the prework, it can sink the whole class before it sets sail. You can, of course, mitigate this by giving such responsibilities to the same ‘reliable’ student, but this becomes obvious and can create resentment. By giving a key role, like Pyongyang, to an AI however, it allows you to create a reliable anchor and control mechanism on the class and keep it on course. I, for instance, asked it to be tough, which quickly resulted in students who were more unsure or had done less prework finding themselves on the backfoot to an ‘assertive’ North Korea.
Thirdly, it gave the classes more dynamism and kept them alive. We have all designed role plays where the issue is solved, or students get bored, in five minutes. The ‘Sky News’ interventions however kept the scenario in rapid flux, teaching ‘Beijing’ it harder to hold an alliance together than make it and give students in the process a more ‘realistic’ experience of constantly adapting to a ‘live situation’.
However, what the unexpected revelation was for me was the Trump interventions. ChatGPT did this so well, you would have thought it really was Trump watching and responding to our seminars, adding an incredible level of immersion (Trump, of course, works well for such tasks, as there is so much of his rhetoric online for the AI to build a convincing persona on). Indeed, so ‘Trump-like’ was it, students would respond and react to the AI. This resulted in subconflicts developing with the US, which added another level of complexity to the main game. The level of complexity, dynamism, and immersion (as well as, importantly, fun) that resulted from this was remarkable to me.
In short, therefore, inviting AI to my class was much easier than I imagined; gave a firm anchoring and control mechanism; and provided a dynamism and immersion beyond what I expected. Responding to a live situation also gave a sense of stakes and realism to the class. That EU negotiators are also using AI to game plan real negotiations was just an added cherry of realism on top, one I could not but help pointing out to my students.
Tomorrow (15 May) is the last day to submit to the Teaching Day at ISA, an effort to have a no-added-cost mini-conference within a conference at ISA 2026 in Columbus. Our inaugural event focused on four great roundtables on various teaching topics; this year, we are shifting to an interactive teaching demo model, and are looking for micro lectures, activities, workshops, simulations/games, classroom discussions, and other formats for sharing effective teaching practices. The event is free to ISA attendees and will be held concurrent with the first day of ISA panels. This is a joint effort between the Pedagogy Conference Planning Committee, the Education and Learning Section, and the Teaching Centric Institutions Caucus. I’m chairing the planning committee, and I’m really excited to have this event to share, reflect on, and adapt what we are doing in our classrooms. See the CFP and submit your proposal here: https://www.isanet.org/ISA/Governance/Committees/Pedagogy-Conference-Committee/Teaching-Day
Additionally, since we know many people will not are able to attend ISA in person next spring, we are looking to put on some virtual events during the year as well. So please feel free to use the link to submit your proposal for a session as part of ISA’s virtual programming.
The learning objective in the article might be niche (European identity-making), but for the broader Political Science nerds here, I want to highlight some of the exciting things that I do (and write) in the article:
(1) Virtual fields in Political Science are relative underused and rare. Part of that stems from a misconception that (a) knowledge acquisition and retentions is not as high as they are on traditional field trips, and (b) they lack a sense of authenticity. I show in the literature review that the (limited) research on it actually shows that when intentionally designed (as all experiential learning opportunities should) acquisition and retention levels are the same as on traditional fieldtrips. Not only that, but virtual field trips have the ability to change political attitudes and conceptions about political realities. Additionally, virtual field trips overcome geographical, economic, and ability obstacles thus generating a more inclusive teaching environment for our students. As for authenticity: true, a virtual field trip does not provide the opportunity to smell the streets and feel the wind on your face (and other “out-of-curriculum” learning opportunities); but there is something to be said about virtual field trips – as they provide a certain kind of access and at times limitless exploring, which might not be possible on a traditional field trip (which usually involves a specific itinerary).
(2) Utilizing the virtual opportunities of the House of European History in Brussels, I design a three-step virtual field trip to the museum. I provide a guide how a virtual field trip can be conceptualized and institutionalized into your classroom framework (including prep work for the students and the educator). The three-step framework that makes up the trip focuses on individual, group, and debrief class work, thus allowing students to engage at different levels with the information and field trip site.
(3) This is for the European Union Politics folks: Most of our experiential learning opportunities focus on “how-a-bill-becomes-a-law” games or simulations focused on specific EU policy concerns/EU institutions. This leave little room to experientially engage with more abstract concepts like identity-making in the European Union. I initially designed this exercise during the Covid days to change up the virtual classroom dynamic, but this exercise also works (and has worked for me) in the traditional classroom space. It allows my students and I to approach European Identity from a tangible angle that goes beyond “just” scholarly readings and approximations, which I think makes these abstract concepts a bit more “real” and “workable”.
I am curious to see if anyone here is working on virtual field trips or has done them in their classrooms. Feel free to reach out and share!
Today’s guest post comes from Dr. Brooklyn Walker at Hutchinson Community College, Kansas!
When teaching Introduction to International Relations, I lean on the framework provided by Frieden, Lake, and Schultz’s World Politics. The authors provide a III framework, defined by Interests, Interactions, and Institutions, which they then apply to various issues in IR. This framework is also helpful for students to compare and contrast the grand theories.
My students have at times struggled to see how this framework might help them analyze issues in international relations, so I turned to one of my favorite board games, Catan. Catan is an area control game in which players collect resources which they use to build settlements and cities, roads, and armies. The aim of this strategy game is to collect more points than your competitors; there are many different paths to winning.
The Set-up:
The day before we are scheduled to play, I bring a copy of the game to class. We slowly work through the rules and play a few turns so students get a sense of what the board looks like. On Canvas, I also create a collection of links to resources to learn the game. This list includes the official rule book, websites that summarize the rules (here and here), a website to play a sample game, links to YouTube videos that teach gameplay (here, here, and here), and some strategy guides for motivated students (here and here). I tell students that they can use whichever resources they find helpful, but that they need to be able to answer these questions:
What are the different hexes? What do the number tokens mean?
What resources are available, and how do you get resources? How do ports change your access to resources?
What do you use resources to purchase? What’s the distance rule for settlements/cities?
What are the special cards?
What is the robber, and what does it do?
What are the stages of a turn?
What is the maximum number of resource cards you can hold in your hand?
What is a victory point, and how do you get them?
When does the game end?
On Game Day, I arrive early and set up the game boards according to the Starting Map for Beginners (in the Catan rule book). After the students arrive, we take a rules quiz. Students initially resisted the idea of a rules quiz, but later admitted that it incentivized learning how the game is played. And I’ve found that game day runs more smoothly when I’ve assigned a rules quiz. We quickly review the major rules, and then the fun begins!
As students play, I circulate, answering questions about the rules, suggesting strategies to players. The first time students play, one full game of Catan usually takes 45-60 minutes. Because we often don’t have time for both a rules quiz and a full game, I bring Ziploc baggies to class. When class time is running low, students put their pieces and cards in a baggie and take pictures of the board. When they return for Day 2, they set up the board using the pictures from the previous class.
Students in Dr. Walker’s class playing Catan.
The Debrief:
Once the games are finished, I distribute a worksheet for students to complete. It asks students to reflect on their game, and I invite them to complete the worksheet with the other students at their table. By discussing the questions together, they generate specific examples from their game of the concepts from the III framework. We then conclude with a full class discussion of the worksheet, and I make explicit comparisons between aspects of the game and what we’ve been learning in the class.
Catan Worksheet Questions
What types of interests are you thinking about as you play? What do you care about maximizing, and why?
Which kind of IR actor is a player most like, and why? How would you redesign the game to include other types of actors?
How does your geography help or hurt you?
Which aspects of the game resemble bargaining interactions?
Which aspects of the game contain opportunities for cooperation? Why cooperates with who, and why?
Does anyone (intentionally) break the rules? How did your table handle enforcement of rules? Did you follow the rules in the rule book, or did your table negotiate new norms?
Does Catan best support a liberal or realist view of the world?
Challenges and Considerations:
There are a few challenges to using the game, though. One challenge is cost. Catan is not a cheap game, and it accommodates up to 4 players (though it is possible to purchase additional pieces to expand the game to 6 players). While it’s ideal to allow each person to play independently, students could play in pairs. Black Friday is a great time to pick up copies of the game at major retailers for as little as $25. I’ve also crowdsourced the game and found copies to borrow from friends and co-workers. And local game shops often have copies of Catan they allow patrons to play; I’ve borrowed copies and, in return, let students know about the game shop’s community game nights. A second challenge is that, for many students, Catan will be a new game with a more complicated set of rules than they are used to. My students reported that the rules quiz equipped them to play. But they also said that, if given the opportunity to play again, they would approach the game differently.
I’ve used this activity several semesters now, and students consistently describe it as a highlight of the course. Students reported that it was a hands-on application of the III framework that gave them a deeper appreciation for the strategic nature of international relations. And my students have said that this activity was a highlight of the semester for them, so much so that they sought out other opportunities to play the game and encouraged other students to take the class. I’ll take that feedback as a victory!
I am writing this post more so as a brief reflection about how I approached speaking to my classes today (11/6) after the results of the US presidential (any many other) elections. This post may be rough and brief, but I think for those of you who are teaching Political Science (broadly) or engaging with your students in some capacity today or in the next few days about the US election, this might be interesting to consider. This post might not be relevant anymore next week – or it could help in general facilitate a conversation about any “touchy” current issues that we feel necessary to clue our students into.
