Courses

There are numerous historical cases of strategic nonviolent conflict, also called civil resistance or people power, with dynamic and recent examples from across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring. Yet while the study of violence has long defined the field of international security, scholars have only recently began to examine the causes and effects of nonviolent conflict. This course is designed to overview these movements of nonviolent, antigovernment dissent, including their emergence, movement dynamics, and outcomes.

This course addresses the political causes and consequences of the use of terrorist violence as well as the variety of methods employed by the state in response to this violence. Graduate-level requirements include reading three additional documents and critically reviewing them as instructed.

This course is intended to be a survey of the political science literature’s understandings about how terrorist campaigns come to a close.  Prior to tackling questions of the end of terrorism head-on, we will first survey the literatures on definitions and theories of terrorism. Our survey of the various fates of terrorist groups and campaigns will explore; how governments use force to try to end terrorism, occasions when governments and terrorist participate in negotiations to find a solution to their incompatibility, outcomes in which groups achieve victory or are defeated, and scenarios in which groups opt to reorient away from violence into other legal and illegal activities. 

This course is intended to be a survey of the general dynamics of civil wars, with a complementary focus on this form of unrest as it plays out in African countries. Modules address various aspects of civil wars (e.g. onset, duration, termination, recurrence, ethnicity, natural resources), and then examines those aspects in the context of a conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Students will have an opportunity to explore in-depth a conflict of their choosing, applying the general theories covered in class to their specific civil war of choice.

This course examines the relationship between democracy and security. Each week, students will learn about how democracy interacts one of many different security challenges. We will conceive of security broadly and, therefore, will consider how democracies fare when it comes to: war, crime, human security, corruption, and the military as an institution.

Islamist extremism has been a focus of policy makers in the post- 9/11 era. However, before concrete strategies can be formulated to deal with this concern, the nature and dynamics of Islamist mobilization itself must be understood. To do that, this course will benefit from the knowledge generated through years of study in different parts of the world and in various disciplines in identifying: What is it? What causes it? What motivates an individual to join an Islamist group and possibly use violence? Under what conditions will these groups moderate, and when will they radicalize? Overall this course is designed as a resource for students of political science and international security studies as well as broad audiences in the social sciences seeking to understand the emergence, evolution, and possible futures of what commonly called political Islam.

This course is designed to give you an overview of armed conflict in its many forms, with a focus on interstate and intrastate war. The course will begin by considering the concept of armed conflict and its many forms, and the empirical trends in armed conflict across time and space. Theoretical and empirical work will then be drawn upon to address the question of why armed conflict occurs and what explains the onset of war, as well as what explains the conduct of opposition forces during war along with war's severity, duration and conclusion.