POLI 457

This course is an advanced undergraduate seminar on the causes and patterns of conflict processes in the international system. We begin with the assumption that there may be recognizable patterns of behavior that influence the occurrence of conflict. Our task is to evaluate the scholarly attempts to uncover these patterns and the underlying causes of war and its termination. In this course, we will primarily focus our attention on so-called “rationalist” theories of conflict. These theories, many of which use a bargaining perspective, assume that conflict processes are driven by the strategic decisions of rational actors.