SSP-100 (045) Waging War, Making Peace

Roy Ginsberg, Professor of Government

Wars have taken 140 million lives in the past thousand years. Is war inevitable? This timeless question is the central focus of this seminar. We begin by exploring the political, economic, and other major causes of war and its effects on individuals, cultures, environments, and nation-states. It continues by examining how and why nation-states make peace through such means as diplomacy, treaty, reconciliation, and regional integration. The key concept of this seminar is international learning—the process by which the publics and political leaders in the world’s nation-states learn to avoid the mistakes of wars past. Students analyze case studies of war and peace through a wide variety of creative media such as art, biography, film, novel, photography, and poetry.