Political Violence and Conflict

This seminar treats political violence as a strategic interaction problem, asking why governments, armed groups, and civilians make the choices they do across civil wars, insurgencies, terrorism, and nonviolent resistance, and what those choices produce downstream. You'll work through current scholarship each week, write short response essays and a longer term paper, and present twice as you build toward an original research agenda on some slice of conflict. Methodologically it spans quantitative and qualitative work at micro, meso, and macro scales, so it functions as a launchpad for thesis-level research in security studies rather than a survey of headlines.