The Government and International Affairs Program offers two graduate degrees: a masters degree, or the Masters in Public and International Affairs (MPIA), and the doctoral degree, or the Public and International Affairs (PIA) Stream in the Environmental Design and Planning Ph.D. program, which is a college-wide program in which most of the departments, programs, and schools in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies now participate. The MPIA and EDP PIA PhD degrees also have individual faculty collaborating with the GIA faculty from four other colleges: Agriculture and Life Sciences, Science, Natural Resources, and Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. The goal of these two GIA graduate programs is to prepare SPIA graduates for a life-long, rich, and full engagement in public activity, continuing professional development, and effective service as academics, government officials, journalists or technical experts in the vitally important fields of government and international affairs. The overall unifying focus of the School of Public and International Affairs is politics, policy, planning, and practice. Therefore, GIA students will work closely with faculty and students in the school’s two sister programs--Public Administration and Public Policy as well as Urban Affairs and Planning--and those departments in the other collegiate units at Virginia Tech that can assist them with their education.

As part of their graduate education, each student will accumulate a stock of substantive knowledge, acquire the appropriate research skills, and achieve a sophisticated level of ethical awareness about the world’s most important political processes, spatial dynamics, social institutions, and cultural practices at the local, national, and global levels of operation. The GIA program, then, sees itself meeting the following objectives for its students in the School of Public and International Affairs:

1. Give effective in-depth training in the many disciplines needed to understand government and international affairs—ranging from cultural studies, economics, geography, and history to political science, sociology, technoscience, urbanism, and world systems—through course work and research projects that integrate the most up-to-date theoretical frameworks, methods of analysis, and discursive practices from both quantitative and qualitative schools of analysis.
2. Cultivate a deep knowledge of the key concepts and basic facts about the political system of the world’s major nation-states, including their constitutional and legal foundations, major political ideals and values, government institutions, forms of economy, structures of social influence and cultural power, and distinctive policy-making processes in order to understand their critical role in the world today during the post-Cold War era.
3. Develop this comparative knowledge of the world’s many diverse political systems as well as the dynamics of globalization in order to provide grounded empirical area-specific knowledge and theoretical understanding of the complexities behind international affairs, which are understood to be culturally, economically, politically, socially, and technologically challenging problematics in the private and public spheres of action.
4. Provide students with extensive critical awareness of classical, social, modern, ethical, and cultural thought to reveal the fundamental values and perennial issues contested in governance, and of the struggles by women, racial minorities, workers, religious groups, consumers, nationalist movements, and others to articulate alternative moral/ethical frameworks, which examine disparities caused by work, race, income, gender, and culture, for interpreting and evaluating political discourse in governance and international affairs.
5. Provide students with useful knowledge of the major problems and the leading policy and legal issues confronting all contemporary political systems, but particularly for the U.S.A. in the new struggles of the 21st century over globalization.
6. Cultivate the ability to understand and appreciate many facets of human diversity, which will help students analyze and debate the full-rage of competing perspectives on contemporary policy issues, to communicate their ideas clearly and effectively in their professional research, public debate, and personal development as they engage themselves as active citizens in community life -- locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.
7. Provide masters students with many diverse opportunities to develop their research and writing skills through course work and research projects that link the theory and practice of government and international affairs to actual problem-solving as they specialize their studies of global security, NGOs, the non-profit sector, health policy, environmental policy, labor policy, and information policy.
8. Prepare doctoral students with a systematic sense of the government and international affairs through specialized knowledge and analytic skills in at least three major subfields, and provide advanced training in governance research, scholarly writing, and professional skills that will prepare them either for further advanced research work or for their chosen professional careers in academe, government, not-for-profit organizations, consulting groups, corporate life, or the media.