Teaching

My current teaching lies at the intersection of Security, Peace and Conflict and Political Economy.

Political Violence, Repression, and Organized Crime (POLSCI 364)

This course introduces students to the research agenda on political violence, broadly defined to encompass sub-state armed conflict, state repression, violent and non-violent extremism, and organized crime and criminal violence. The primary focus of the course is on understanding: (i) the sources, drivers, and dynamics of sub-state political and criminal violence; (ii) how violent groups recruit and maintain control over their members; how and why their internal institutions and their strategies of violence vary; and what the consequences of these patterns are; and (iii) how political and criminal armed groups interact with the state and the civilian populations. The course will engage with a variety of analytical tools, empirical cases, theoretical approaches, and research methods that will familiarize students not only with cutting-edge research on these issues, but also their relation to ‘big debates’ in the political economy of conflict research, international relations, and comparative politics.

Political Economy of Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding in Fragile States and Developing Countries (POLISCI 599)

This is a graduate seminar course that tackles some major questions in contemporary research on the political economy of conflict, development, and peacebuilding in fragile states and developing countries. It provides students with a broad theoretical architecture for thinking critically about these and other important questions in conflict, development and peacebuilding. The course also introduces students to current policy debates from practitioners about these issues, engaging with a variety of theoretical and empirical work pertaining to key themes, with the view to testing abstract theories and concepts using empirics and in-depth knowledge of specific case studies. The course is organized around three main parts that build upon each other. The first part focuses on the big picture and general understanding about the connection between conflict, development, and peacebuilding as well as some comparative understanding of political and economic development in fragile states and developing countries writ large. Part two discusses the role of social forces such as social identities, civil societies as well as geography and resources endowments as either enhancers of or challenges to development and stability. Part three discusses the causes and consequences of different forms of violence in these settings, ranging from insurgencies and civil wars to state-sponsored violence and military coups to the Arab Spring protests and violence to terrorism and violent extremism, among others. It will also cover readings that address the role of international interventions in conflict and development processes.

Core Seminar in Security, Peace and Conflict—SPC (POLSCI 760)

This course is a Field Survey for first-year PhD students, typically taught in rotation by most SPC Faculty. It introduces students to foundational literature and research agendas related to security, peace, and conflict studies in international relations. Through the readings and discussion, students get a sense for where the literature has been and where it is going. The course also covers a wide array of theoretical and methodological approaches to both interstate and intrastate conflict and cooperation and engages with a wide range of empirical approaches. The goal is to expose first year PhD students to a variety of cutting-edge research designs and some best practices in the field and help them develop skills needed to complete their own original scholarship. By the end of the course, students are expected to have honed their ability to quickly analyze the research in the field and to identify its contributions and potential flaws. As students move forward with their studies, this course will help students develop a fuller sense of the context in which other work they read is situated. Students will also be able to better understand the contribution of new work, including their own. The final Research Paper in the course is typically intended to help students move from the role of being a consumer and critic of research to a producer of research. Students are typically expected to construct falsifiable hypotheses from the literature that can help advance our understanding of international security, peace and conflict and then propose a rigorous research design to test those hypotheses and ideally conduct original empirical testing of the hypotheses.