GOVT 85.41 Political Violence
This seminar surveys the causes, effects, and consequences of political violence across several empirical domains, including civil war, interstate war, insurgency, coups, rebellions, and organized crime. Given the explosion of research on political violence over the past decade, the course is not (and cannot be) a comprehensive review of the literature. In truth, each of the weekly topics could be the subject of its own dedicated course. Instead, the seminar offers a curated view of some of the core works in the field as well as emerging research areas. Particular attention is paid to recent scholarship (mostly within the past five years) to identify conceptual, theoretical, or empirical gaps in existing studies that might inspire your own research efforts. The course is deliberately interdisciplinary: we draw on political science, behavioral economics, social psychology, history, and anthropology, along with some research in natural sciences. It also bridges the disciplinary divide separating comparative politics and international relations by drawing on both civil and interstate wars, as well as violence at lower levels of intensity and scale. Selected readings also span multiple levels of analysis, ranging from sweeping cross-national comparisons across hundreds of years of history to subnational within-country comparisons to organizational and individual-level approaches. Equal weight is given to theory and research design when discussing these readings.
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Instructor
Lyall