17 Jan 2019

International Security

by Shawna K. Metzger

shawnakmetzger.com/wp/notes/international-security/

Accessed December 21, 2024. Last modified January 17, 2019

Full title: International Security
Course number: GOVT 329
University/Department: W&M, Government
Offered: Spring 2019 (2 sections).

International Security is the upper-level security course at William & Mary. Instructors are given leeway to focus on different parts of international security, if they so choose. My course follows my research interests, and is constructed around interstate conflict. It uses Fearon’s 1995 canonical bargaining model of war for its overall organizational structure. After the introduction, the course has two major components–factors that affect actors’ cost of fighting and factors that affect actors’ probability of winning a fight. The course then concludes by discussing escalation, expansion, and termination of militarized conflicts.

Course Description

This course focuses on phenomena related to international security, and how scholars investigate questions related to these phenomena. Political scientists who study international security ask things like: what factors affect whether states employ military force toward one another? Do the same factors affect whether things escalate to war? What does it mean for states to be at war in the first place? Why do states form alliances, and with whom? Do these alliances affect whether militarized conflict breaks out? Do states’ disagreements over different issues have different patterns of militarized and peaceful settlement attempts?

In this course, we focus on the quantitative study of phenomena related to interstate conflict. Political scientists taking this approach are known as positivists, because they use observable data to assess propositions about how the world works. With this approach, our overarching goal is to propose (and test) an explanation regarding a particular phenomenon’s occurrence, with that explanation being as simple but generalizable as possible so that we can apply it to understand future occurrences of the same phenomenon. We will then also discuss how political scientists use quantitative analyses to test their proposed explanations.

Syllabus (Spring 2019)

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