This graduate seminar addresses the phenomenon of “political violence.” Why do politics sometimes turn violent? How is violence used to achieve political objectives? Who participates in political violence? What are the long-term legacies of violent conflict? How can social scientists study political violence systematically and ethically? We will examine these questions in the context of intra-state conflict, including civil war, insurgency, policing, and riots. The goal of the course is to introduce you to key debates and methodologies so that you can critically engage with existing research and find inspiration for your own work.

A major question facing political scientists and economists today is how to spur economic growth and reduce poverty around the world. This course has two main goals.

The first is to address important substantive questions in the study of economic development: What factors led some parts of the world to be richer than others? How do political institutions, resource endowments, and social conditions affect growth? What can governments and non-governmental organizations do to reduce poverty?

The second main objective of this course is to improve your understanding of the tools needed to evaluate policies that are supposed to increase economic growth. The course introduces students to how researchers and practitioners leverage data to learn about development and about the impact of interventions.

Domestic armed conflicts are one of the leading causes of human insecurity around the world today. This course addresses a number of key questions about these conflicts, including: What causes civil wars to start? Why are these conflicts so difficult to end peacefully? What tactics do armed groups and governments use to fight each other? When do they work? When do governments and armed groups use violence against civilians? After addressing concepts that apply to civil conflicts more generally, we will focus on recent conflicts in Afghanistan and the Philippines.

This course provides a foundation for understanding international relations, politics, and human interactions of many types. Students will acquire tools to better understand and explain a variety of international phenomena including war, terrorism, globalization, trade, environmental cooperation, and human rights practices. The primary objective of this course is to introduce you to major topics, concepts, and challenges in international politics. We will achieve these goals through course readings, lectures and discussion, quizzes/homework, and exams. Classes will be held in person. By the end of the course, you will gain a better understanding of some of the central dilemmas in world politics and know ways to address these dilemmas.

With the rise of online social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it has become increasingly important to understand how social networks shape political behavior. But political networks don't just exist online or even just between individuals. Scholars and policymakers increasingly rely on quantitative Social Network Analysis (SNA), a set of statistical methods designed to understand how relationships between actors such as states, firms, businesses, and terrorist organizations as well as individuals shape real-world outcomes. In this course, students are introduced to existing applications of these methods and learn to analyze and visualize network data using statistical software. The course focuses on how to clearly communicate findings to a professional audience and culminates with an independent research project in the student's area of interest.

Thanks to the digital age and advancements in computing, scholars in disciplines across the social sciences are increasingly relying on quantitative, data-driven methods to conduct groundbreaking research and answer important questions in their field. This course provides an introduction to the study of politics through quantitative reasoning and data analysis. We will cover fundamental statistical principles underlying empirical research in the social sciences while also learning to analyze data through basic programming in R. Moreover, this course will introduce important concepts in statistics - like causality, measurement, and prediction - and will equip students with the tools and techniques commonly used in quantitative political analysis. Finally, the course will introduce two cutting-edge methods used for “discovery” - social network analysis and text-as-data. Students will leave the course with a foundational set of skills necessary for conducting empirical research in the social sciences and for evaluating statistical claims and hypotheses.

This class, in particular, places an emphasis on teaching students how to conduct basic data analysis using a computer. A significant amount of your time inside and outside of class will be dedicated to learning how to manage and manipulate data in order to compute descriptive statistics in a statistical computing environment called R. Thus, you will be learning to code in the R language, which is a very powerful and widely-used programming language for data analysis. The class emphasizes these coding and computing skills - as opposed to more theoretical statistical modeling skills - because the ability to work with and make sense of data at a basic level is not only a skill that you will find valuable immediately as a student of politics, but is also a skill that is increasingly demanded in analytical careers commonly pursued by government majors.