Psychology of International Security

This course provides an in-depth engagement with the political psychology of international security. We first take up fundamental political questions — like “what is power?” and “what is war?” — and engage the diverse answers that psychological international relations scholarship currently provides. Noting that war is the most destructive invention in human history, we then use these lenses to engage the value-add of psychological explanations for why states fight. The final third of the course uses all of this theoretical and empirical knowledge to examine security and war in our lifetime, beginning with the emergence of “terrorism” as a security issue in the post-Cold War era and looking forward to questions like China’s reemergence.