Political Science 281
World Politics
Fall 2011
Bill Moul
"[T]wo
essential questions of history: (1) What is power? (2) What force produces the
movements of nations?" Leo Tolstoy
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite
exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct
economist [political scientist]. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the
air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years
back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated
compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas” John Maynard Keynes
"There is no more vicious theorist
than the (wo)man who says 'I have no theory;
I just let the facts speak for themselves'." Charles Lerche
"You may not carry a sword
beneath a scholar's gown." Learned Hand
"Ever tried.
Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett
“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson
"The past
is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." William Faulkner
“History is
lived forward but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the
beginning, and we can never recapture what it is to know the beginning only.”
C.V. Wedgwood
“It’s tough to make predictions,
specially about the future.” Yogi Berra
Billions of people live
together in various degrees of disharmony in the anarchy -- an, without, archos,
governor -- of world politics. Some people live lives of
utter material misery; some gloat that they have so much; others worry what to
do with so much stuff. Some war and live under the threat of war; others in
conflicts of interests do not consider violence at all. Why this is so is one
of our major concerns. We study the 'who, what, where, when and why' of the
patterns of power, of peace and war, of cooperation and conflict around the
globe.
Political Science 281
should: 1) provide you with some basic historical and current information on
world politics; 2) examine patterns, arguments and explanations made by
students and practitioners of world politics; and 3) encourage critical or
careful assessment of competing accounts of aspects of world politics. The
course is theoretical in the broad sense of understanding the whole subject and
in the narrower sense of understanding specifics such as interstate peace and
war, varieties of states, and brutality and poverty in some states, not in
others.
Understanding is something
people do and is not something others in packages for you simply to pick up, to
carry in your head for a while then to leave on an examination paper.
Understanding is not merely the accumulation of facts, one piled atop another
and may the highest pile reach "A". Understanding is, and results
from, the confrontation of explanations in an endless cycle of conjecture and
refutation. Much of this course is built that way -- built on arguments,
which are often cast in stories, on errors, followed by better arguments and
stories. A basic purpose of the course is to teach you to argue matters
honestly and effectively. You must follow and engage in such arguments in order
to do well and so that we can enjoy ourselves. If you have trouble, ask me
“what’s going on?” in class or outside of class. If you have trouble and do not
wish to ask for assistance, you should drop this course.
As the Tolstoy quotation at
the top of the outline indicates, "power" is an essential part of the
arguments and "power" has many faces. Consider five we will use here
more or less in order: first, A is more powerful than B because A has more
"stuff" than does B; second, A is more powerful than B because A wins
in a dispute with B; third, A is more powerful than B because A gets its way
without a dispute; fourth, A is powerful because A shapes the interests and
identity of others; fifth, the power of an organization is the capacity to work
effectively. Lectures are built around these notions of “power” and will
introduce more subtle distinctions as they become necessary.
Office Hours: Monday 10-12, Tuesday and Thursday
2:30-3:30. Otherwise, when I am in my office (HH 310) and I am not busy with
someone else, make yourself known with a knock on the door. My extension is
36569 and e-mail address is wbmoul@uwaterloo.ca.
If you use this address, please put “PSCI 281” in the subject line. I prefer
that you use ACE to contact me about 281 matters.
Note on examinations: The
only acceptable reason for missing a midterm examination or the final is that
you are too ill or otherwise incapacitated (please give me a doctor’s note) or
suffered a very recent family tragedy or family emergency (please explain in
writing and, if possible, document what happened). If you miss a midterm or the
final for any other reason, the grade is “0”. The final examination period is
December 9-22. If travel plans made for this period conflict with a scheduled
examination, the examination comes first: a conflict between travel plans and
an examination is not an acceptable reason to miss an examination date/time or
to request an alternative examination date/time.
PACS: Political Science 281 is a Peace
and Conflict Studies (PACS)
Content Course, which fulfills requirements in the interdisciplinary Peace and
Conflict Studies plan.
Readings and
(Tentatively) Annotated Lecture Topics
IMPORTANT: Items marked with "e-J" can be found in
the e-Journals in the
Library. Many of the other required readings are available in a Courseware
package. Other readings can be found on the internet
using the hyperlinks in the online version of this outline.
I expect you to examine the
links and to read the assigned texts and any lecture notes I send to you during
the relevant week or weeks. I will try to have power point slides ready to
print before the relevant lecture.
Print them, 4 or 6 slides to a page, and annotate them in during the
lectures. The lectures do not repeat what you read, but you should read as
directed in order to follow many of the lectures. Please, if you do not
understand something, tell me so at the time or in our next class or via ACE or
in my office. If you do not tell me of difficulties, and if enough of you
appear to get the point, I will move along. Sometimes I will check to see that you
do get the point by asking you what has been said and where you would expect
the argument and evidence to go. If you read, ask and answer questions, and
seek help when you should, there should be no confusion. The lectures and
readings should be ‘good to think’. The lectures are not and are not supposed
to be dictation. My job is to teach you to think effectively about world
politics.
September 13-15
Week
1) What is it we are to explain and how we are to do it
Reading and preparations: Choose the book you will discuss
in the first book review essay and start reading. You will find that you must
read and re-read in order to write a good paper. You should find George Orwell's classic "Politics and
the English Language" helpful. Heed the rules that Orwell lists near
the end of his article. Worthwhile reading is Clive James on a
perfectly bad sentence. Also read Deirdre McCloskey, "Economical Writing: An Executive Summary,"
in her How to
Be Human Though an Economist, pp. 131-136, (originally in the Eastern Economic
Journal, Spring 1999). She is writing for professional economists but you
should not be put off by remarks to be understood only by economists. The sense
and good advice are plain and worthwhile. More good general advice for
Political Science students is found here.
Note: I will not accept a paper from
anyone who has not worked through the “Academic Integrity” site (take the hyperlink)
and who has not confirmed that he or she has done so by sending me a message
via ACE stating something to the effect ‘I clearly understand what is and what
is not an academic offence’. Both electronic submissions and hard copy required. Put hard copy in
the HH Political Science Drop Box.
After illustrations (link lifted from
D.A. Welch) of what is and what is not
plagiarism, we begin the study of world politics with three images: Durer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Klee's
painting that inspired Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History"; and
Salvador Dali’s “Geopoliticus
Child Watching the Birth of a New Man”. Where and when do the Four Horsemen
-- plague,
war (between and within states), famine, and death
do their work? (Have a look at the charts here
and here.) Why there and then and not
elsewhere? Why
the overall decline? These are basic questions that we attempt to answer.
A crude but very useful
summary measure of miserable and less miserable places is the Human Development Index. This and the next hyperlink take
you to sites that allow you
to do all sorts of wonderful things with the statistics. After you know how the
index is defined, compare the ranks with the absolute values of the index.
Follow some cases over time: such as Iceland, Canada, and Botswana. Next,
compare the top 30 countries to the bottom 30. Why do you think the countries
fall where they do? Your answer to the question is a "theory," and
such theories are the subject matter of the course. Print the HDI scores, study
them, and be
prepared to tell a theory or two to me and to your classmates. We will
begin to illustrate the merits of the epigram from Samuel Beckett: "Ever
tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” The list is
useful but pictures wild
and interesting.
September 20-22
Week
2) Roots of
Guatemala’s Forgotten Genocide: 1954 - Conjectures, Comparisons, and
Refutations
Readings: Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope:
The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954, pp. 361-387. Courseware.
Susanne Jonas, “Guatemala:
Acts of Genocide and Scorched-Earth Counterinsurgency War,” chapter 12 in
Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, (eds.), Century of Genocide (London: Routledge,
2009), pp. pp. 377-411 discusses what followed. Courseware. Skim.
Also use the “Guatemala”
hyperlink above and have a look at National Security Archive’s pages.
Film: “Coup Made in
America”, by Alan Mendelsohn and Nadine Pequeneza.
September
27-September 29
Week 3) ‘Realisms’: Good
questions and good, wrong, bad, and useless answers
The answers to the question
of why the United States overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954 lead to
“spheres of influence” and “empire”, which are “Realist” notions. We examine
snaps of the life and work of Hans J. Morgenthau who remains the most influential
of American “Realists”. Much of the course is riding to the ground some of the
basic “Realist” notions, stories, and arguments in order to see what works,
what does not work, and what could not work. That Morgenthau’s “Realism” would not allow
good explanations of the two political issues to which he devoted himself in
his last decades of his life – Vietnam and ‘conventionalization’ of nuclear
‘weapons’ – is ironic.
Readings: "Bernard Johnson's Interview
with Hans J. Morgenthau," in Kenneth Thompson and Robert J. Myers (eds.), Truth and
Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau, pp. 333-386, Courseware.
John Mearsheimer "Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus
neo-conservatism," Open Democracy.
Or
Brian C. Schmidt and
Michael C. Williams, “The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservative
versus Realist,” Security
Studies (2008), 17: 191-209.
October 4-6
Week 4) Realisms: Old stories, essentials
such as balances of power, balances of terror
After listing the basics of
“Realism”, we
examine critically the usual stories told to illustrate the wisdom of
“Realism”, and we raise some good uncommon questions. The advent of
thermonuclear weapons marked a fundamental change argued Morgenthau and many
others. What I have dubbed the “Jervis square,” after
Columbia University political scientist Robert Jervis, helps make differences
between balances of power and of terror clear and leads to good questions about
war/peace.
Reading: Thucydides’ Melian
dialogue, Hobbes
on “state of warre”, Rousseau’s
stag hunt, Prisoner’s dilemma, “the
Jervis square”, “human nature”.
Thomas Schelling, “The
Diplomacy of Violence,” chp. 1 of his Arms and Influence. Courseware.
Thomas Schelling, “The
Legacy of Hiroshima: A Half-century without Nuclear War.” (Skim)
Other (Optional) Reading: Robert M. Sapolsky
and Lisa J. Share, “A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and
Transmission,” PLOS
Biology, April 2004.
Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel
Bowles, “The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War,” Science, 26 October 2007.
MIDTERM MIDTERM MIDTERM October 11 MIDTERM MIDTERM MIDTERM MIDTERM
October 13-18
Week 5-6) ‘Realisms’:
stories and statistics of great power war and peace.
The good questions about
war and peace raised last week are examined here; there are some good answers to
some of them. Much hinges on the meaning/measurement of “balance of power”: we
will begin with an all-purpose measure by a CIA and US Department of State
analyst Ray
Cline in order to learn the uselessness of an all-purpose measure of power. The inability to
measure with any precision is the key to Morgenthau’s argument and the Simmel-like
alternative.
Reading: Vladislav M. Zubok, “Gorbachev’s
Nuclear Learning,” Boston
Review, April/May 2000.
Adam Roberts, “An
‘incredibly swift transition’: reflections on the end of the Cold War,” Cambridge History
of the Cold War, vol. 3, Endings, chapter 24, pp. 513-534. Electronic version ‘in’ Library.
Yang Shaohua, “How Can Weak
Powers Win?,” Chinese Journal of International Politics, vol.
8 (2009), Table 1, pp. 343-347, bottom of 349 -371.
BOOK REVIEW ESSAY DUE before 8 p.m. Friday October 21
October 20-25
Week 6-7) What then of war
and peace other than war and peace among great powers?
We examine aspects of two
very long 20th century wars (Iraq versus Iran; why so long when we
would expect a short war? Vietnam; why the weak defeated the strong?). Recall
that the Vietnamese war pre-occupied Morgenthau in the1960s. We begin with his
explanation for the US-Vietnamese war and see that basic “Realist” tenets are
inadequate to account for the “imprudence” of so many government officials.
Loren Baritz prompted one theme when he turned a line from Orwell’s Animal Farm
into “Strength is Ignorance”. Ignorance led to defeat and to horrible
destruction. A second theme is adapted from the “First Law” of an much under-rated and long-forgotten political scientist,
C. Northcote Parkinson.
Parkinson’s Law is that there is no relationship between the size of an
organization and the amount of work done.
Reading: Kevin Buckley, "Pacification's
Deadly Price," Newsweek, June 19, 1972 (Operation Speedy Express).
Fredrik Logevall, “’There
ain’t no daylight’: Lyndon Johnson and the Politics of Escalation,” in Mark
Philip Bradely and Marilyn B. Young, Making Sense of the Vietnam War: Local, National
and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
pp. 91-108. Courseware.
John Gates, “People’s War
in Vietnam,” The
Journal of Military History, vol. 54, no. 3 (July 1990), pp. 325-344. e-J
Note for any Vietnam
junkies”: the complete Pentagon Papers just released online http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB359/index.htm.
October 27-November
1
Week
7-8)
Sovereignty: Empires, States, “Races”, and Nations in the Expansion of European
Society of States
We begin with the so-called
“Second Westphalia” in December 1960, go back to the original Westphalia in
1648 (when the signatories literally could not agree what the day was), and
then move crudely from 1648 to the 2001 “Responsibility to Protect”. Stops
along the way include Berlin in 1884, Paris in 1919 and San Francisco in 1945.
The key notions are “sovereignty”, “empire”, “nation”, “race”, and “society of
states” and various processes of state formation.
Reading: United Nations, General Assembly, Resolution 1514, "Declaration on the granting of independence to
colonial countries and peoples," 14 December 1960. (Courseware)
George Sorensen, “War and
State-Making: Why doesn’t it work in the Third World?” Security Dialogue 32 (2001): 341-354. e-J
Robin
Fox, “The Kindness of Strangers,” chapter 3, pp. 55-82 in his The Tribal Imagination. Courseware.
November 3-8
Week 8-9) States are
organizations and organizations vary in power
After “Pray the Devil Back
to Hell” and the discussion of variations in “power”, which yield important
variations in strength of state organizations, we return to the theories of the
good or the miserable life courses (HDI) discussed in the second lecture. After
a few cycles of conjecture and refutation, we will settle on a good answer and
then test/illustrate the merits of the answer. This is the way to arrive at the
story of the flogging of Phineas McIntosh, a wagon driver in a southern African
backwater. The backwater became a world success story told in terms of economic
growth and an African success story in terms of political democracy.
Reading: Toby Dodge, "Iraqi Transitions:
from regime change to state collapse," Third World Quarterly, vol. 26 (2005), nos. 4-5,
pp. 705-721. e-J
Michael Chege, "Sierra
Leone: The State that Came Back from the Dead," The Washington Quarterly, 25:3 (Summer
2002), pp. 147-160 e-J
Film: Pray
the Devil Back to Hell
MIDTERM MIDTERM MIDTERM November 10 MIDTERM MIDTERM MIDTERM
November 15-17
Week
9-10)
Brutality and misery in a Strong State: Rwanda
1994
We
begin with Genesis
9, follow some adventures of verses put terrible uses….
Reading:
Rene Lemarchand,
“The 1994 Rwanda Genocide,” chapter 15 in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons,
(eds.), Century
of Genocide (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 483-504. Courseware
Michael
Barnett, “The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda,” Cultural
Anthropology, vol. 12, no. 4 (November 1997), pp. 551-578. e-J
BOOK REVIEW ESSAY
DUE before 8 p.m., Friday, November 18
November 22-24
Week
11)
Brutality and misery in a Weak State: Congo 1960 until
this day
Reading: Sara Meger, “Rape of the Congo:
Understanding sexual violence in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of
Congo,” Journal
of Contemporary African States, 28:2 (2010), 219-235. e-J.
Dena Montague, "Stolen
Goods: Coltan and Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo," SAIS Review 22
(Winter-Spring 2002), 103-118. e-J.
or
William Reno, "Congo:
from state collapse to 'absolutism', to state failure," Third World
Quarterly, vol. 27 no. 1 (2006), pp. 43-56. e-J
November
29-December 1
Week
12) States
of peace and of ‘warre’ and worlds to come
Reading:
Nicholas Taleb
Nassim and Mark Blyth, “The Black Swan of Cairo,” Foreign Affairs, May/Jun2011, pp. 33-39. e-J.
Aaron Friedberg, “Hegemony with Chinese
Characteristics,” The National Interest, June 21, 2011. e-J.
or
Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums: Urban Involution
and the Informal Proletariat,” New Left Review (2004) 26: 5–34. e-J.
______________________________________________
Grades
First
Book Review Essay 25%
Second
Book Review Essay 25%
First
Mid-term (October 13) 10%
Second
Mid-term (November 11) 15%
Final
Examination 30%
(I know this adds to 105%)
Dates and Deadlines
First Book Review Essay October
21 (by 8 p.m.)
Second Book Review Essay November
18 (by 8 p.m.)
If your essay is
later than 8 p.m. on the date due, the penalty is 10% per day late, Saturdays
and Sundays included. No electronic
submissions: hard copy only in the Political Science Drop Box.
Books for Review
Essays
Two of Joe Sacco, Palestine; Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia;
Footnotes in
Gaza; and Ari Folman and David Polonsky, Waltz with Bashir (the chosen two to count as one book)
Peter Andreas, Border Games
Gerard Prunier, Rwanda
Samantha Power, A Problem from
Hell
Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and
Revenge
Stephen
Kotkin, Uncivil
Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment
Adam
Hochschilds, King
Leopold's Ghost
Kevin Bales, Disposable
People: New Slavery in the Global Economy
Margaret MacMillan, Paris, 1919
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower
Yasmin Khan, The Great
Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
Robert Marks, Origins of the
Modern World
Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis
John Tirman, The Deaths of
Others
Filip Reyntjens, The Great
African War
Glenn Carle, The Interrogator
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
John Tirman, The Deaths of
Others: The fate of Civilians in America’s Wars
Jason Stearns, Dancing in the
Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
Sven Lindquist, "Exterminate
All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the
Origins of European Genocide (should know Conrad’s novella to
write on this book)
Assistance
with Writing Book Review Essays
President George W. Bush’s decision to
invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most
profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy. The
consequences…won’t be clear for decades, but it is already abundantly apparent
in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid
international support and on the basis of incorrect information – about weapons
of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda’s
terrorism – and then occupied the country negligently (3).
Academic
Integrity:
In order to maintain a culture of academic
integrity, members of the University of Waterloo are expected to promote
honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility.
Discipline:
A student is expected to know what constitutes academic integrity, to avoid
committing academic offences, and to take responsibility for his/her actions. A
student who is unsure whether an action constitutes an offence, or who needs
help in learning how to avoid offences (e.g., plagiarism, cheating) or about
“rules” for group work/collaboration should seek guidance from the course professor,
academic advisor, or the Undergraduate Associate Dean. When misconduct has been
found to have occurred, disciplinary penalties will be
imposed under Policy 71 – Student Discipline. For information on categories of
offenses and types of penalties, students should refer to Policy 71 - Student Discipline,
http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/policy71.htm
Grievance:
A
student who believes that a decision affecting some aspect of his/her
university life has been unfair or unreasonable may have grounds for initiating
a grievance. Read Policy 70 - Student Petitions and Grievances, Section 4, http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/policy70.htm
Appeals:
A
student may appeal the finding and/or penalty in a decision made under Policy
70 - Student Petitions and Grievances (other than regarding a petition) or
Policy 71 - Student Discipline if a ground for an appeal can be established.
Read Policy 72 - Student Appeals, http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/policy72.htm
Academic
Integrity website (Arts): http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/arts/ugrad/academic_responsibility.html
Academic Integrity
Office (UW):
http://uwaterloo.ca/academicintegrity/
Note for students with disabilities: The Office for Persons with Disabilities (OPD), located in Needles
Hall, Room 1132, collaborates with all academic departments to arrange
appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities without compromising
the academic integrity of the curriculum.
If you require academic accommodations to lessen the impact of your
disability, please register with the OPD at the beginning of each academic
term.
