The course provides students with an interdisciplinary introduction to the ideas, historical processes and events, policy debates and practical interventions that are shaping the economic, social and political direction of international development today. The major questions to be addressed by the course are: How central is politics to economic development? How do political institutions determine policy choices? How do economic structures in turn impact on politics? The main topics of the course relate to the problems associated with: the processes of building an international order with the help of economic tools, explaining, describing and interpreting the international order and the impact of development policies on the international order. At the end of this course, and having completed the essential reading and activities, students should be able to: describe, explain and interpret examples of economic success of selected world power, solve hypothetical problems of imposing a development model for other states, formulate research hypotheses on world order models and evaluate the pattern of international order.