POL3841: The Consequences of War

War - both between and within states - is often horrific. With good reason, when the field of international relations emerged in the wake of the world wars, it was centrally preoccupied with shedding light on the causes of war so as thereby to prevent another one. But both interstate and civil wars are remarkably complex affairs. Notwithstanding wars' alarming human costs, their consequences are varied, often cross-cutting, and sometimes contradictory, and they resist our efforts to narrate their consequences in simple and straightforward ways. Wars can increase executive authority and strengthen the state, but they can also undermine inequitable international and domestic political orders, empires, and regimes, and make it possible for more just ones to take their place. Wars can permit repression and exploitation along the lines of race and other categorical identities, but those same experiences can also inspire those groups to demand first-class citizenship. In the name of insecurity and war, governments sometimes trample upon liberties, especially those of the politically weak and unpopular, but those measures may eventually come to seem unwarranted and even provoke a backlash that expands human liberty. War is filled with privation and trauma, but its horrors can also inspire veterans and victims to mobilize and promote more humane norms. We are properly taught to hate war, to avoid it at all costs. Yet social and political good has sometimes, surprisingly, come out of war too. This course explores the consequences of violent conflict in all its dimensions - the threat of conflict, mobilization for conflict, and the experience of warfare - on, among others, international order and norms, the fate of states and empires, population movements, state-building, nationalism, democracy, civil society, the citizenship struggles of racial minorities and other groups, gender roles, economic growth and inequality, the military-industrial complex, public health, and political culture. At this course's end, you will emerge not only with greater substantive understanding of war's consequences, but also with greater appreciation of war's complexity. For better or worse, you will never look at war the same way again.

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