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International Relations (IR) theory is often thought of as an esoteric branch of knowledge far removed from daily life. On the contrary, this course provocatively suggests that the contending philosophies of history at the root of IR theories are deeply embedded in our societies and culture, especially in the games we play. All those hours you’ve spent at the computer or a game console were not just fun, you were practicing international relations theory.
This course has two objectives. First, it will introduce students to key theories and debates in the field of international relations. Students will have a chance to read and discuss the writings of mainstream IR theorists and practitioners, ranging from Thucydides to Joseph Nye, as well as non-Western and feminist approaches. Today the field of IR has broadened to embrace new questions, a multitude of new actors, and an expanding definition of what counts as “international.” The types of problems that IR scholars seek to mitigate are likewise becoming more diverse, including international crime, trade disputes, under-development, human rights violations, and environmental degradation. At its most ambitious, the study of IR can be understood as a multifaceted project to devise, test, and implement an economic, political, and social framework for ensuring the survival of human civilization. Students will be asked to critically evaluate these frameworks. Which of these futures do you want to live in?
But if each theory of IR imagines a unique type of world order that is attainable through specific actors and processes, so too do the games we play. The second objective of this course is to reinforce students’ theoretical understanding of international relations concepts and practices by exploring the various ways they are embedded in a wide range of computer, mobile, and tabletop games. Games are not just entertainment, they are often IR texts in disguise. This class will enable students to critically re-interpret these texts and conduct a detailed analysis of their rules, mechanics and narratives from an IR perspective. What kinds of international relations are our games simulating? What kinds of international relations are they not simulating? Do these games merely echo IR theories or are they reimagining them in innovative ways? This critical reinterpretation will be done through class discussion, written assignments, and group work designing a tabletop simulation that will be shared at the end of the semester. Some of the games we will investigate include classic board games like Settlers of Catan and Pandemic as well as the influential Civilization and Europa Universalis series of computer games.
Although approaching games as IR texts is useful as a learning tool, their significance goes much deeper. Students will be shown how states, international organizations, civil society, and even terrorist groups use simulations and games for training, recruitment and planning. One of the texts we will examine is the US Army’s Decisive Action Training Environment, an 800-page description of a fictional world. Another example is the new genre of activist games, which seek to highlight global issues and reshape our behavior. In short, contemporary debates over the gamification of violence, work and activism serve as strong reminders that our games are political texts worthy of closer investigation.
In 1381, as related in Froissart’s Chronicles, the preaching of an obscure priest spread across England like a “pestilence” and culminated in the Great Peasants Revolt. Centuries later, the malignant power of rumours and conspiracies has seemingly returned with a vengeance. Fake news was widely blamed for shaping the outcomes of the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union and the US presidential election in 2016. This time the pestilence is digitalized and embedded in the same transnational social networks and informational flows that are celebrated for making our world a better place.
But what is fake news? Who gets to define it? This course will take students beyond today’s headlines as it encourages them to critically explore the fake news controversy and evaluate possible solutions. The first step will be to situate the issue in a historical perspective, which requires a journey through a rich literature on rumor, manias, and panics. Students will also be introduced to primary and secondary texts that showcase prominent examples of fake news in the past, which will be discussed in class and analyzed in a series of written commentaries. Since this is a writing and critical thinking course, special emphasis will be placed on excavating the links between our modern conventions of academic writing and their origins in Greco-Roman, Christian, and Islamic scholarship. Are citations the best antidote to fake news? How was trust or the authenticity of a document established in premodern societies that lacked the possibility of technological verification? Are these techniques still useful today?
Students will also be introduced to emerging threats, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and bots. In an era where texts, images, and even entire conversations may be increasingly the result of machine-generated content, what happens to conventional understandings of truth and falsehood?
A strong grasp of the origins and nature of fake news will help students evaluate proposed solutions to the problem. The second half of the course will include a survey of recent attempts by states, non-profit groups, and corporations to combat fake news through new laws, educational programs, economic incentives, and technologies. These measures, which range from Germany’s Act to Improve Enforcement of the Law in Social Net to automated programs like Unbiased Crowd, are often controversial or possess possible dangers of their own. Students will be required to consult a wide variety of sources, including public hearings, laws, white papers, social media sites, and academic research as they critically evaluate these proposed solutions in seminar discussions and a final research paper. What are the political, social, and economic consequences of these countermeasures? If fake news, to evoke Froissart’s colorful language, is a pestilence, what is the best way to inoculate ourselves?
The World Economic Forum’s 2018 World Risk Report underscored the growing prevalence of fake news around the world and likened it to “digital wildfires.” By introducing contemporary debates over fake news, critically examining disinformation techniques, and surveying possible countermeasures, this course will help students develop the tools for identifying these wildfires and putting them out.
Today, we stand at the cusp of a new technology revolution that promises to transform how we live, work, communicate, and learn at a pace and scale that may be without precedent in human history…
Microsoft, A Cloud for Global Good (2016)
Klaus Schwab, the chairman of the World Economic Forum, believes that we are entering a period of unparalleled technological, social, and economic transformation, which he calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Characterized by rapid improvements in automation, connectivity, and new types of materials, business models, and forms of work, the 4IR is simultaneously a great opportunity as well as a growing risk. Critics are already suggesting that we may be facing widespread job losses, existential levels of inequality, and new forms of human rights violations. Nevertheless, governments and private companies around the world are hastening to invest in the key technologies of the 4IR, such as pilotless aerial vehicles, 3D printing, robotics, block-chains and big data. The future is coming sooner than we expect.
This course is an introduction to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a phenomenon that is expected to impact everyone, regardless of job, gender, or location. The course will help students answer the following questions: What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution? What are the debates surrounding the concept? Who will be the likely winners and losers? Above all, students will be encouraged to critically ask themselves what impact it will have on their own lives. However, truly understanding a global economic transformation from the inside is difficult. Thus, this course draws upon a deep historical perspective to put the 4IR in context. In truth, this is not the first time that humanity has stood on the precipice of a complete transformation of the economy, society, and politics. Looking at earlier “revolutions” will help us better understand how economic transformation occurs, its social consequences, and equip us to better evaluate the promise and perils of the 4IR. This journey, which will cover tens of thousands of years of history, from the first domesticated animal to the dawn of artificial intelligence, is a story of human resilience and adaptability in the face of profound change.
This course will introduce students to the comparative study of women’s movements and encourage a critical analysis of their role and efficacy in transforming global politics. Why have women’s movements emerged? How have they been organized? What impacts have they had in changing public policy? To what extent are Western paradigms of women’s empowerment applicable to the political and economic contexts of developing countries? The first weeks of the course will contextualize these issues by introducing students to major feminist interpretations of international relations. How does gender matter in world politics? How are women’s movements different from other kinds of social movements? Subsequent weeks will flesh out this theoretical picture by examining prominent cases of successful and failed women’s movements around the world. Although gender is a powerful overarching variable, students are encouraged to pay attention to the organizational and ideological diversity that characterizes these movements. Case studies from the Asia-Pacific, in particular, demonstrate that there are important regional differences as well as similarities in how women organize and seek empowerment. Overall, this course is meant to foreground the importance of women, not simply as victims of global inequality or poverty, but as vibrant political actors on the world stage. As Cynthia Enloe (2011: 9) reminds us, “If one fails to pay close attention to women—all sorts of women—one will miss who wields power and for what ends.”
More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.
-President Harry Truman’s Inaugural Address, January 20, 1949
US President Truman’s famous Four Points speech, given in 1949 as the world was recovering from the ravages of World War II and establishing global economic and security institutions, optimistically predicted the eradication of poverty through technology transfer, productivity growth, and international cooperation. Yet, almost seventy years later, our confidence in solving the problem of poverty has been tempered by persistent challenges in ensuring political stability, economic growth, and the equitable distribution of resources. A sobering indication of this was driven home by Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who investigated the United States in late 2017, provocatively asking if extreme poverty in the country was a violation of human rights. The visit itself was an apt reminder that development, far from being inevitable, requires a delicate mix of policies, empowerment, and participation.
This course introduces students to the key concepts and theories of development studies. A broadly multidisciplinary field, with roots in economics, political science, and sociology, among others, development studies is broadly concerned with several key questions. First, why are some countries and societies richer and more empowered than others? Answering this question not only demands measurement of the exact differences between countries and individuals but also building causal explanations for why such differences exist. Second, what can be done to help countries and societies catch up to their more developed counterparts? Moreover, after decades of spending effort and money on foreign aid, why has convergence consistently failed to materialize? This class introduces students to key theoretical debates and encourages students to critically evaluate both the discourses, practices and objectives of international development. If humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of the world’s poor, what is standing in the way?
Drawing upon recent literature that explores the interconnections between science fiction and the theories and practices of international relations, this class encourages students to explore major scifi depictions of climate change alongside the future imaginaries generated by large bureaucracies, such as international development agencies, militaries, and corporations. Some of these texts include novels such as Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, and Ian McEwan's Solar. They will be compared with policy texts such as the reports issued by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the chapters dealing with climate change from the diplomatic, military, and environmental white papers of national, provincial and local governments around the world. A separate week will also be dedicated to movies and video games about climate change, including Fate of the World, a video game using real climate data to simulate the evolving geopolitics of a changing world. How are we, as societies and as scholars, imagining the unimaginable? At what point do works of popular culture, which reach audiences far larger than ever attained by academic papers or corporate white papers, have policy implications? What theories of international relations are embedded in these popular works of speculative fiction? At the same time, students are asked to consider some of the ways that these streams of cultural and academic imagination overlap. Especially, do they reflect the famous criticism by Nordhas and Schellenberger (2007) that the environmental movement is overly reliant on complaint-based nightmare scenarios? How do we translate our imaginary futures into meaningful action to create sustainable futures? Through intensive readings and classroom discussion, students will have the opportunity to answer this question for themselves.