War, the State, and the Transnational Foundations of Conventional Violence

3 Credits.

We are used to thinking of the state and war as fairly self-evident concepts and as the bedrock of so much work, not only in academic international relations, but also in policy discourse. It seems straightforward that states wage war, and war in turn may make or break states. Under conditions of rapidly advancing globalization, however, the relationship of these concepts is anything but straightforward. This class builds on historical investigations into state formation, the relationship of the military instrument to the state, the progressive globalization of the defense industrial base, the changing practices of military establishments, and related phenomena to question notions of state and security and to better understand the past and present fault lines of conflict.