• Juon Andreas

Violent conflict remains a defining feature of world politics. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the wars in the Middle East, and continuing civil conflict in Sudan and Myanmar illustrate its devastating consequences around the world. This raises the central puzzle addressed in this course: why does political violence erupt despite its substantial costs to all involved parties? And why does it erupt in some cases but not in others?  

In this seminar, we examine competing explanations for these puzzles, sequentially focusing on different major types of political violence. In a first part, we introduce the central theoretical puzzle of the course and introduce rationalist explanations for war, including bargaining failures, commitment problems, and information asymmetries. In a second part, we discuss different types of political violence in turn, including interstate war, civil war, terrorism, and communal violence. In a third part, we synthesize these discussions and discuss what these findings mean for broader theoretical efforts to explain conflict behavior, including institutional, economic, and identity-based explanations.  

In each week, we read theoretical and cross-national research articles or book chapters that introduce key arguments in the literature. These readings are complemented by empirical illustrations from contemporary conflicts, with a focus on recent and contemporary cases of conflict from Eastern Europe and post-Soviet space. Through these case discussions, students critically assess how well general theories travel to specific contexts.

Students actively participate in the seminar through short written reflections, in-class discussions, and a presentation of the causes of a specific conflict using a combination of established conflict datasets and case-based research. In addition, students critically evaluate a conflict explanation generated by generative AI and assess it in light of the academic literature discussed in class. Through this seminar, students gain an overview of the main theoretical approaches to explaining political violence and learn how to apply these approaches to real-world conflicts.  

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Par présentation et petits travaux écrits 

Par présentation et petits travaux écrits 

Par présentation et petits travaux écrits