In recent years I’ve taught the courses described below.  Each of these has an active, information-packed website that students can access via Canvas.

Government 5: Introduction to International Politics

An introduction to the study of politics among states and other actors on the world stage. Its purpose is to help you develop the analytical skills and knowledge you need to think critically about international affairs.Beyond the basic but important goal of conveying essential information about international relations (e.g., how the UN Security Council or the World Trade Organization works), the course aims to:

• Enhance your understanding of the big questions in the study of international politics. Why do actors go to war instead of resolving their differences peacefully?  Why don’t states and other international actors cooperate to solve common problems when it appears clearly in their interest to do so?
• Enhance your ability to think in the abstract i.e. theoretically.
• Sharpen your reading skills.
• Practice generating implications (theoretical, empirical, policy) from theoretical priors/concepts.
•  Enhance your understanding of how to use data to test conjectures about how international politics works.

You will participate in an intensive simulation exercise designed to explore seemingly abstract theoretical propositions about international relations in an intense interactive setting.  The last section of the course invites you to apply the knowledge gained to address salient current issues such as the global environment, human rights, humanitarian intervention, and the future of U.S. grand strategy.

INTS 15 Violence & Security

One of the four core courses in the International Studies minor, Violence and Security is a multidisciplinary introduction to scholarship on the causes and possible prevention of armed violence between groups.  Using multiple social science disciplines, we examine what propels armed violence within, between and across states, ranging from civil war, “ethnic” conflict, insurgency, and inter-state war.  We then take that knowledge and tackle the question: what, if anything, can people do about it?  How can people organize or intervene to prevent violent conflict or reduce the costs of those that occur?  The course addresses the trade offs created by different political solutions to the problem of insecurity, and features a group simulation exercise to explore the challenges faced by governments and non-governmental organizations when they seek to ameliorate it.

GOV 52 Russian Foreign Policy

This course introduces you to the international politics of Eurasia—a new international subsystem comprised of the states that emerged from the former Soviet Union.  Russia is the major focus, but we consider key issues in all of the main Eurasian regions: Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan); the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan); the Baltic (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) and East-Central Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova).

The course is divided into three main sections

1.  Foundations, which introduces the grand theories, major historical themes, and key recent history without which you cannot analyze Russian foreign policy.
2. State-building, Nationalism, Security, which addresses the interconnection between domestic state-building strategies and regional conflict and cooperation.
3. Russia and the World, in which you will master key theoretical tools for analyzing foreign policy, conduct a strategic tour of Eurasian horizon, and focus on analyzing the foreign policy of the Eurasian state of your choice.

Your culminating experience in the course is a 10-page analytical and prescriptive policy memo on the foreign policy choices of any of the 14 non-Russian post-Soviet republics.  This memo leads into class activities, such as mini-crisis simulations or presentations.

Gov. 85.2 Leadership & Grand Strategy

This seminar is to introduces you to the theory and practice of grand strategy— a set of ideas about how a state or other actor can best enhance its interests given the resources it is likely to have, the strategic environment, and the goals and resources of allies and adversaries.  The seminar will introduce you to classical and modern theoretical writings on strategy and grand strategy, and then analyze a series of historical and contemporary case studies of leadership and grand strategy.  These immediate objectives serve a larger purpose: to make you a better strategist and more sophisticated analyst of strategic decision-making.   The empirical focus of the seminar is on states and their problems, but its basic precepts are applicable to other domains as well.  For each major case we study, we engineer simulations in which you get to play out how your preferred strategy might have worked out in a historical case.  The culminating experience is a major paper that will require you to craft a grand strategy for a real leader confronting a real strategic dilemma in a contemporary or historical case.