Selected Topics in IR: Post-Conflict Politics and Policing in Comparative Perspective

This graduate seminar focuses on fragile states, especially post-conflict states, to consider politics in these contexts. We will examine how the design of state security institutions change and can then contribute to peacebuilding in post-conflict environments. Post-conflict orders are especially prone to failure. But we will also think beyond these states that have had civil conflict. Indeed, most civil conflicts recur shortly after they end. There is a special focus on policing in these contexts.

In this course, taking the comparative perspective seriously, all graduate students will develop case studies on how policing structures and controls change at pivotal moments of conflict termination and then how those changes affect outcomes such as citizen trust and cooperation. Graduate students may also work with us to code variables about post-conflict state policing, rebel demobilization, and peacekeeper patrolling into the PRIO-GRID dataset if they wish for a mixed-method approach. Much of the class will be helping students learn how to write case studies including through intensive workshopping of their work.