Politics is a broad area of study that tends to overlap with all the other major humanities and social science disciplines. It is an excellent discipline for learning about the interrelationships in the human world, and for acquiring a diverse range of interpretive, analytic and synthetic (especially conceptual) skills. The discipline is engaged in critical debates about resource allocation, decision-making, social behaviour and political action, the management or resolution of conflict, power struggles, ideologies and political movements, and the nature of the government and the state, including relations between states. The study of politics is ultimately concerned with important questions about the nature of power and authority, with the relationship between theory and practice, and with trying to understand the nature of social existence and the conditions needed for establishing more desirable forms of human community. Politics at Monash aims to offer students an understanding of many aspects of the contemporary world, coupled with a solid intellectual grounding in the key debates, texts and traditions of inquiry in which the discipline is immersed. The Politics program at Monash emphasises three broad areas: politics and governance: Australia and the world international relations and global politics political theory and philosophy.

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