The Georgetown University School of Foreign Services’s International Politics program will no longer offer trans-state actors as an IPOL concentration, according to an e-mail that Dean Bryan Kasper of the SFS sent to IPOL majors.

The change, Kasper wrote, will not affect juniors or seniors pursuing a TSA concentration, but members of the classes of 2012 and 2013 will not be able to concentrate in TSA, and sophomores who elected to concentrate in TSA will need to choose a new concentration by the end of this semester.

The IPOL Field Committee (the SFS faculty members who manage the major) made the decision to eliminate it in the final weeks of the Fall semester. Here’s the logic behind the change, according to Kasper:

“The TSA concentration as a distinct object of scholarly analysis in International Politics has become anachronistic. All of the research questions of the concentration are now commonly, and more appropriately, studied under the other three concentration fields. In the twenty years since the end of the Cold War, trans-state/trans-national actors have become as common and as important as nation-states.

“Because of the shift in International Political scholarship and practice, the Committee found the TSA concentration to have lost its coherence, becoming a ‘catch all’ concentration for students. The IPOL major and its students and faculty are better served by more precision and coherence within the curriculum.”

The courses offered under the TSA concentration will still be available to juniors and seniors pursuing that concentration, and other IPOL students may take those courses as major electives until the classes are redistributed among the three other concentrations in IPOL: International Law, Norms, and Institutions; International Security; and Foreign Policy and Policy Processes. TSA had the smallest number of IPOL students of the four concentrations that the IPOL major offered.

Read the full e-mail, after the jump.

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