A four-course sequence in diplomacy, international finance, public-private partnership, and intergovernmental relations
Most curricula in these fields teach the declared purpose of institutions and then, separately and much later, the record of what those institutions did. Students learn the Charter in one course and the interventions in another. They learn what a public-private partnership is for in the finance sequence and what happened at the concession in the history sequence. The gap between the two is the actual subject, and it falls between the courses.
This program puts the gap at the center and gives students an instrument for measuring it.
One method, carried across all four courses, so a student in the fourth is still using what they learned in the first. Every course teaches it and every assessment requires it.
The declined case is the load-bearing assessment in this program. Any student can be taught to find a pattern. The discipline worth a credential is knowing when the record will not carry one, and saying so in writing, at cost to their own argument.
Each course carries two counter-week sessions, eight across the program, marked in red throughout the schedules. In these weeks the strongest opposing case is taught on its own terms, from its own best authors, with no rebuttal offered in the same session. Students are examined on their ability to state that case in its strongest form before they are permitted to argue against it.
This is pedagogy and it is also institutional durability. A course whose syllabus is its instructor's thesis does not survive a curriculum committee, an accreditation visit, or a hostile student. A course that assigns Ikenberry against Hudson, Eichengreen against the monetary thesis, and the atrocity-prevention case against sovereignty absolutism is defensible in any room in the building. The frame is stronger for having been tested in front of the students rather than around them.
| Component | Weight | What it examines |
|---|---|---|
| Document annotation set (4) | 20% | Close reading of primary texts. Nominal and Effective isolated in the margin, on the page, with line references. |
| Forensic node portfolio (3) | 30% | Position, narrative, present. Verdict taxonomy applied to every claim. Chicago footnotes. |
| The declined case (1) | 15% | A case investigated and refused, with the reasoning for refusal. Graded on rigour, not on outcome. |
| Adversary brief | 15% | The strongest case against the course's own frame, argued to win. Graded by whether a proponent would accept it as fair. |
| Terminal instrument | 20% | A ledger, a chain of custody, or a costed option table built from primary sources and defended orally. |
No timed final examination in any course. The instruments are the examination, and they are the artifacts a student can show an employer.
The four courses are designed to stand alone but they compound in order. IGR 1 (Sovereignty) supplies the floor: what an actor claims to be before anything is measured. FIN 2 (Substrate) supplies the medium through which position is held. PPP 3 (Chartered Hand) supplies the mechanism by which a state's work is done at a remove. DIP 4 (Doctrine) supplies the documents in which all three are declared and codified, and is the natural capstone because it reads the other three back as text.
Level. Built for upper-division undergraduate or early graduate. Reading load runs 90–140 pages per week with two primary documents. For a first- or second-year undergraduate audience, cut to one primary document per week, replace the terminal instrument with a guided version supplying the register schema, and drop the adversary brief to a structured debate.
Program shape. Written as four distinct courses. If Boyce wants a single named concentration with a capstone, the terminal instruments consolidate into one year-long build and I would add a fifth zero-credit methods lab.
Intergovernmental relations · What a state claims to be, and what the record shows it to have been
The course begins where the concept begins, in political theory and canon law, and then measures the concept against the practice of the institutions built to protect it. Students finish able to read a Charter provision, a Security Council resolution, and an intervention record as three columns of one table.
| Wk | Session | Primary text | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | What sovereignty claims to be | Philpott, SEP entry; Bodin, Six Books, selections | Triad introduced. Nominal defined. |
| 02 | The founding story, and its falsification | Peace of Westphalia, treaty text; Osiander, Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth | First worked example of a Gap: the origin story does not match the document. |
| 03 | Recognition | Montevideo Convention 1933; Kosovo advisory opinion, ICJ 2010 | Constitutive vs declaratory as a live test. |
| 04 | Sovereignty held in escrow | Covenant of the League, Art. 22; a Class A and a Class B mandate instrument | Verdict taxonomy introduced. |
| 05 | The Charter as text | UN Charter, Arts. 2(1), 2(4), 2(7), 51, Ch. VII | Annotation set 1 due. Operative vs declaratory. |
| 06 | The case for the order counter-week | Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan; the interdemocratic peace literature | Taught to win. No rebuttal this session. |
| 07 | The Council and the veto | Selected vetoed draft resolutions, 1946–2026 | Nameable absence: what the veto record shows about what was never voted. |
| 08 | Conditionality as governance | IMF Articles of Agreement; two structural adjustment letters of intent | Sovereignty constrained by contract rather than by force. |
| 09 | Intervention without mandate | NATO 1999 statements; the Independent International Commission report on Kosovo | The "illegal but legitimate" formula examined as an instrument. |
| 10 | R2P: adoption to overreach | World Summit Outcome 2005, ¶138–139; UNSCR 1973 (2011); the Council record after Libya | Node portfolio 1 due. Mandate terms against operation conduct. |
| 11 | The regional body | North Atlantic Treaty; AU Constitutive Act, Art. 4(h); SCO and BRICS founding documents | Comparative charter reading. |
| 12 | Coercive measures and legality | UNGA resolutions on unilateral coercive measures; the Special Rapporteur's reports | Bridge to FIN 2. |
| 13 | Sovereignty as shield counter-week | Rwanda: the Independent Inquiry, 1999; Srebrenica, the Netherlands Institute report | The strongest anti-sovereignty case, taught on its own terms. |
| 14 | Verdict week | — | Terminal instrument presented and defended. Declined case due. |
Terminal instrument. A sovereignty ledger for one state across one century: recognition status, treaty obligations entered and exited, external conditionality accepted, interventions received or conducted. Every entry sourced and carrying a verdict.
International finance · The medium through which position is held
A course on the international monetary system that treats the payment rail, the reserve asset, and the settlement layer as instruments of state rather than as neutral plumbing, while assigning the orthodox account of why the system works in full and in its own words.
| Wk | Session | Primary text | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | What a reserve currency is | IMF COFER methodology; BIS triennial survey, current | Triad applied to a monetary claim. |
| 02 | Bretton Woods, and the road not taken | Articles of Agreement 1944; Keynes's bancor proposal; the White plan | Two designs, one adopted. What the choice settled. |
| 03 | The structural contradiction | Triffin, Gold and the Dollar Crisis, selections; his 1960 Congressional testimony | A falsifiable prediction, checked against outcome. |
| 04 | The window closes | Nixon address, 15 August 1971; Smithsonian Agreement; Jamaica Accords 1976 | Annotation set 1 due. |
| 05 | Recycling, and a correction | Treasury and Federal Reserve records on the 1974 arrangements; the declassified files | Taught as a worked correction. The popular "binding compact" account does not survive the documents. Students see a thesis fail. |
| 06 | The orthodox account counter-week | Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege; Setser on reserve stickiness | Network effects, market depth, and rule of law as the sufficient explanation. Taught to win. |
| 07 | The heterodox account | Hudson, Super Imperialism, selections | Assigned after the orthodox case, never before it. |
| 08 | Where money comes from | Werner, empirical credit-creation study; Bank of England, Money Creation in the Modern Economy (2014) | The mechanism, established from a central bank's own publication. |
| 09 | The rail | Messaging cooperative governance documents; correspondent banking and clearing structures | Node portfolio 1 due. Infrastructure described as neutral. |
| 10 | First disconnection | EU Council Regulation 267/2012; the cooperative's own statement, March 2012 | The precedent, read in the instruments that created it. |
| 11 | Custody as contingent | 2022 immobilisation measures; the immobilised-asset and windfall-profits instruments | Property, custody, and the difference between them. |
| 12 | Measuring the response | COFER series; World Gold Council central-bank demand; CIPS and mBridge published volumes | Students build the meter. Floors not ceilings enforced. |
| 13 | The dollar is fine counter-week | Reserve-share data on its own terms; the "no viable alternative" literature | Direction real, pace slow. Both propositions defended. |
| 14 | Verdict week | — | Terminal instrument. Declined case due. |
Terminal instrument. A drift meter: one measurable property of the monetary system tracked across a defined window from published series, with the finding stated at its most conservative and the counter-reading given a full section.
Public-private partnership · Delegated sovereignty, from the charter to the concession to the consortium
The distinctive course in the sequence. Public-private partnership is normally taught as a technique of infrastructure finance beginning around 1992. Here it is taught as the current form of a four-century instrument: the delegation of sovereign function to a private body, and the attribution architecture that delegation produces.
| Wk | Session | Primary text | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | What a charter is | VOC charter 1602; EIC charter 1600 | Delegated sovereignty, isolated clause by clause. |
| 02 | The company that made war | EIC and Mughal instruments; the Diwani grant 1765 | Where the company's power becomes governmental. |
| 03 | The concession | D'Arcy concession 1901; Red Line Agreement 1928 | Annotation set 1 due. Term, territory, royalty, recourse. |
| 04 | Nationalisation and the counter-instrument | Mexican expropriation decree 1938; Iranian nationalisation act 1951; Chilean copper amendment 1971 | Three states, three responses to the same clause. |
| 05 | The consortium form | Iranian Consortium Agreement 1954; Caspian Pipeline Consortium shareholding and 2026 record | Adversaries as co-owners. The live case. |
| 06 | The case for partnership counter-week | World Bank PPP Reference Guide; Engel, Fischer & Galetovic, The Economics of PPPs | Value for money, risk transfer, delivery capacity. Taught to win. |
| 07 | Risk allocation, done properly | A live PPP contract with its risk matrix | Technical week. Students build a risk matrix and locate residual risk. |
| 08 | Investor-state dispute settlement | ICSID Convention; a model BIT; one full award | Node portfolio 1 due. Sovereignty priced as a clause. |
| 09 | The domestic application | A PFI hospital and a toll-road concession, with their audit reports | The instrument turned inward. Auditors as the best source. |
| 10 | The state as investor | Santiago Principles; two sovereign fund mandates and annual reports | The reverse direction: public capital in private structure. |
| 11 | The delegated hand | Montreux Document; contractor and military-services procurement instruments | Function delegated where attribution is hardest. |
| 12 | Beneficiary and hand held apart | Two attribution cases with their official findings and their gaps | The architecture named and tested for falsifiability. |
| 13 | It is only contracting counter-week | Principal-agent literature; the transaction-cost account of delegation | The deflationary reading, argued in full. |
| 14 | Verdict week | — | Terminal instrument. Declined case due. |
Terminal instrument. A delegation ledger for one partnership: function delegated, recourse retained, risk allocated, residual risk borne, and an entanglement column recording where any party's equity sits inside infrastructure its own policy affects.
Diplomacy · How states write down what they intend, and how to read it
The capstone. A course in reading the documentary genres of statecraft: the strategy document, the planning guidance, the option paper, the doctrine of hemispheric or regional priority. Students finish able to open an unfamiliar strategy document and place it accurately within a documentary lineage.
| Wk | Session | Primary text | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | The document as artifact | Three strategy documents from three states, unattributed | Genre identification from internal evidence alone. |
| 02 | Geography as argument | Mackinder 1904; Mahan, selections; Spykman, The Geography of the Peace | The map as a claim, not a fact. |
| 03 | A leak against its revision | Defense Planning Guidance, February 1992 draft and May 1992 revision | Annotation set 1 due. Two versions, one objective. What changed and what did not. |
| 04 | Anarchy explains it counter-week | Jervis on the security dilemma; Mearsheimer, Tragedy, selections | Structural realism as the sufficient explanation. Taught to win, and it is a strong case. |
| 05 | Applying the map | Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard | The failure condition an author names against himself. |
| 06 | The option paper as genre | Brookings, Which Path to Persia? (2009), full ladder | pre-confessed Where narrative and operation appear in one column. |
| 07 | Scoring the option | RAND, Extending Russia (RR-3063-A, 2019) | Benefit, cost, risk, likelihood. The analytic form itself. |
| 08 | The missing column | The same report, audited | build Students supply the reflexive-cost column the instrument omits. |
| 09 | Codification | National Defense Strategy 2018 and 2026; National Security Strategy 2025 | Node portfolio 1 due. Standing doctrine as text. |
| 10 | Doctrinal descent | Monroe message 1823; Roosevelt Corollary 1904; the 2025 hemispheric formulation | A prohibition converted to a licence while claiming descent from the prohibition. |
| 11 | Chain of custody | The five strata assembled | build Custody constructed. Causation withheld. The standard for each stated. |
| 12 | The alliance as instrument | Burden-sharing communiqués; AUKUS instruments; ministerial statements 2025–26 | Doctrine applied to friends. |
| 13 | Continuity is hindsight counter-week | Bureaucratic-politics and organisational-process accounts; the case against pattern-finding | The methodological attack on this entire course, argued at full strength. |
| 14 | Verdict week | — | Terminal instrument. Declined case due. |
Terminal instrument. A chain of custody on a doctrine of the student's choosing: four to six dated public texts, each joint characterised as declared or inferred, with an explicit statement of what the chain does not establish.
Boyce may not have settled on term length. Each course is built so the spine survives compression and the counter-weeks are never the thing cut.
| Format | Method | What holds, what goes |
|---|---|---|
| 16 weeks | Add two workshop sessions | One mid-term instrument clinic and one peer-review session on the declined case. This is the best version; the declined case improves enormously with a workshop. |
| 14 weeks | As written | Reference build. |
| 12 weeks | Pair two adjacent sessions in each course; drop one counter-week to a co-taught half-session | Retain: both counter-weeks in some form, verdict week, both build weeks. Drop: the comparative or survey session (IGR 11, FIN 08, PPP 10, DIP 02). |
| 10 weeks | Run the spine only | Retain: primary-text weeks, both counter-weeks, one build week, verdict week. Reduce node portfolio from three to two. The declined case is never cut. |
The program does not teach students what to conclude. It teaches them to open a document, isolate what is claimed, measure it against what the record supports, name the distance between them, and say plainly when there is not enough to say anything at all.