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GOVT-369 International Security
Offered academic year 2010-2011
Staff
Violent conflict has marked relationships between nations, societies, and cultures since at least the beginning of recorded history. War’s prevention, conduct, and resolution are inevitably the essential first challenges of every state. These challenges may be met by mobilization and belligerence, surrender and submission, or alliance and interdependence. Each of these options can be credited with either the survival or the disappearance of nations and societies throughout history.
The central framework for both studying and implementing security is strategy. The term is often misused to describe what are actually tactics or, at best, the collection of tactics into an operational plan. True strategy is a nation’s systematic, balanced application of all state powers and capabilities toward the development, maintenance, defense, and advancement of national interests. It involves obvious components of military power, diplomacy, and economics. It also involves a nation’s natural resources and geography, demographics, public health, education system, domestic political institutions, political culture, and other factors –although not routinely considered when one thinks of security—that historically have been crucial to national survival.
Given the comprehensive nature of security, its study must encompass every aspect of political science—alliances, political economy, diplomacy, international organizations, domestic politics, budgeting , philosophy, international law, etc., etc.—as well as a wide range of other disciplines, to include history, geography, psychology, economics, physics, philosophy, biology, and anthropology. It is reasonable to suggest that political science is a subset of security studies, rather than the reverse.
Analogies and parallels can be made from age to age; but, for each conflict, there are unique, context-dependent dimensions that make it extremely risky to rely on one fixed and unchanging set of rules and procedures. Despite the absence of a ‘magic template’, there are procedures for analyzing, balancing, and applying all the elements of a state’s strengths and weaknesses. Data will change; priorities will shift; circumstances will vary. What remains constant is the need for a comprehensive national strategy that reflects dangers as well as opportunities.
Student course objectives include:
* Identifying and discussing the historical and philosophical foundations of the study and practice of international security
* Identifying and explaining why and how these foundations have been either altered or sustained over time
* Applying lessons learned to specific historic and contemporary case studies
* Identifying future security challenges
* Determining strengths and weaknesses in existing security literature while developing coherent, informed, alternative hypotheses
* Identifying and acknowledging what is not yet known or understood, whether by the individual student or by the discipline as a whole
* Never losing sight of the great risks, failures of good intentions, human flaws and strengths, and enormous human tragedies that result in, occur during, and define the aftermath of war
Course requirements include:
* Presentation of a one-page journal review
* Two, six-page book critiques
* Policy making/debate exercise conducted in small groups
* Final examination
* Active participation in class discussions
Full syllabus and reading schedule will be posted prior to fall term. The syllabus currently posted for spring 2007 can be used as a reference, but prospective students are cautioned that assigned texts, reading schedules, and formal requirements will change.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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