Conflict, Violence, and Peace

A graduate seminar that treats conflict not as pathology but as a structural feature of social life, drawing on sociology, social psychology, anthropology, political science, and classical philosophy to ask why groups fight, when violence escalates, and what makes peace stick. You'll read across disciplines each week, write an essay and a term project, present orally, and sit an open-book final, with participation tracked across all fourteen sessions. It pairs naturally with work on comparative politics, IR, and political sociology, and gives you the theoretical scaffolding to read empirical conflict literature critically rather than just consume case studies.