Section and Course Guidelines

Teaching Assistant: Iris Malone

422 Encina Hall West

Email: irismalone@stanford.edu

Office hours: Mon. 2-3 p.m., Thursday 2-3 p.m., or by appointment

Sections

Wednesday 3.30-4.20 p.m., Building 260 Room 002

Contact

Email is the best way to contact me. I promise to respond to your emails within 24 hours. All email contact should have a subject line that begins with PS114.

Office Hours

Office hours and location are listed above. Please feel free to drop-in to talk about the assignments, course material, or anything else you need. If the listed hours above do not work, contact me, and we’ll find an alternative time to meet.

Suggestion Box

Please feel free throughout the quarter to give your anonymous input about what you’d like to see or do in section here:

Suggestion Box for Section

Week 1. The State of War.

• Cheat Sheet to Understanding Clausewitz’s "On War""

• Everything You Need to Know about Basic International Relations Theory in 3 Minutes

Additional Resources.

• Overview of Clausewitz’s Argument

• Frequently Asked Questions about Clausewitz

Week 2. The Changing Character of War

• Cheat Sheet: The Changing Character of War

• AF: Heuristics and Biases in Military Decision-Making

• Politico: Pick Your Prism – A good article from 2014 about how US policy makers use historical analogies to evaluate the Crimean Crisis and threat of ISIS.

Boko Haram

• NYT: Explaining Boko Haram, Nigeria’s Islamist Insurgency

• BBC: Who are Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamists?

• Al Jazeera: Africa Agrees to Send 7500 Troops to Fight Boko Haram

• BBC: Boko Haram Crisis – US Agrees to Send Troops

• Washington Post: Boko Haram is not Al-Qaeda

War in Donbass

• BBC: A Timeline of the Ukraine Crisis

• Political Violence at a Glance: Irregular Forces in Ukraine

• The Economist: Who are the Ukrainian Rebels?

• The Economist: Russian President Stepping up both War in Ukraine and his Confrontational Rhetoric

• Washington Post: Why the Ukraine Separatists Screwed Up Badly

• NYT: Russian Groups Crowdfund War in Ukraine

Week 3. Changing Technology and the Ethics of War

• Simulation Assignment Survey – Please fill out by Wednesday, January 27

• Cheat Sheet: Just War Theory (from CUA) – This is a 1-page cheat sheet taken from a Philosophy course on the ethics of war at a separate university.

• Cheat Sheet: The Politics of Nuclear Weapons

• Atomic Aversion? – Professor Sagan’s paper challenging the nuclear taboo. In section, we talked about the results highlighted in Figure 1b and 2.

Additional Resources.

• The Moral Case for Drones

• Can We Wage a Just Drone War?

• Atlantic: Hiroshima, 70 Years Later – Why was the decision largely amoral?

• Rolling Stone: The Kill Team – Article referenced in Professor Sagan’s ethics lecture about US war crimes against Afghani civilians.

• Addendum: How Does Game Theory Explain Nuclear Deterrence and Brinkmanship?

Week 4. Nuclear Weapons

• Study Guide for the NPT Review Conference Simulation

• Debate Rules

• Nuclear Threat Initative: North Korea

• Nuclear Threat Initiatve: Russia

Addendum.

• Cheat Sheet: The Science of Nuclear Weapons
• NYT: Stopping North Korea’s Nuclear Threat
• WP: Russia to Increase Nuclear Arsenal
• Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: It is Still Three Minutes to Midnight

Week 5. Simulation Prep

• Memo Rubric
• History of the NPT (Review Conference)
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Ministry of Defense: Politics of Nuclear Weapons Cheat Sheet
• Ministry of Energy: Science of Nuclear Weapons Cheat Sheet

Starter Kit for Research

• Reaching Critical Will: A website devoted to documenting all aspects of the NPT Review Conference including a history, working papers, Final Document drafts, and more

• NPT Review Conference Report

• Nuclear Threat Initative Country Profiles: Quick and easy resource with country-specific profiles about nuclear history, policy, and concerns.

• PBS Frontline Interview: What are Nuclear Weapons? A simple, scientific interview with a nuclear physicist from the Argonne National Laboratory

Week 7. Terrorism and Insurgency

• Midterm Rubric

• Cheat Sheet: Insurgencies vs Terrorists vs Guerrillas

• Interactive Timeline of the U.S. War in Afghanistan

• WP: Here are the 5 things you need to know about the 2016 fighting season in Afghanistan

Additional Resources.

• Serial Season 2 – Follows the case of Bowe Berghdal, the Taliban, and the difficulties of COIN in Afghanistan. Ongoing.

• International Security: How the Weak Win Wars by Ivan Arreguin-Toft – Under what conditions, can asymmetric wars lead to the stronger actor winning? The weaker actor?

• How can humans win an alien invasion? A fun application of theories about asymmetric warfare to alien invasions from the blog “Political Violence at a Glance”

• Why are Civil War Ceasefires so Difficult to Achieve?

Week 8. Outside Intervention and the Syrian Civil War

• Cheat Sheet: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency

• Cheat Sheet: A Brief Look at the Syrian Civil War, 2011-2016

• Debate Instructions

The Hawks

• Clinton: We Should Have Intervened Earlier

• NYT: Obama Waited Too Long

• Rubio: If I were President, We Would Have Never Gotten to This Point in Syria

The Doves

• Should Obama Have Intervened in the Syrian Civil War? Or would US military involvement have made a disaster worse?

• WP: Arming the Rebels Would Make No Difference

• Obama: Intervention Would Make No Difference

• What the Evidence on Interventions Really Tells Us About Syria

Week 9. ISIS

• Congressional Research Services: The Islamic State Crisis and US Policy

• Congressional Research Services: Armed Conflict in Syria: Overview and US Response

Second Simulation Required Reading.

• Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Request to Congress for Authorization of Force Against ISIL,” White House: Office of the Press Secretary, February 11th, 2015.

• “National Security Strategy,” White House, February 2015, Pg. 9-10, 26.

Additional Resources.

• New York Times Special Coverage: ISIS

• Al-Jazeera America Special Coverage: ISIS

• BBC Special Coverage: The ISIS Conflict

• NYT: How ISIS Works

• Frontline: The Rise of ISIS

• Obama’s War on ISIS: Let the Debate Begin

• Council on Foreign Relations Reports: ISIS

• Brookings Institute: ISIS

• RAND Corporation: ISIS

• Heritage Foundation: Terrorism – Includes information on terrorist organizations in the Middle East including Al-Qaeda and ISIS

Week 10. The Future of War

• Cheat Sheet: PS114 Overview

• Rubric Final Exam

2016 Future of War Conference.

• The Future of War: Adios Clausewitz!

• Future of War Conference

Rising Security Threats.

• NYT: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Test Ballistic Missiles

• Washington Post: Despite U.S. airstikes, a Somali militia is rising again

• NYT: Tunisia Clash Spreads Fear that Libyan War is Spilling Over

Additional Resources.

• Nuns and Nuclear Security – New Yorker article about Megan Rice and the Y-12 National Security Complex

Created for: POLS114. International Security in a Changing World.

Stanford University – Winter Quarter 2016.

Last Update: 8 March 2016