Zook

Fall 2010
Office hours: Tu 1:30-3, Weds 1.30-3 (121 Stephens)
Email: zookeeper@berkeley.edu

PACS 10: INTRODUCTION TO PEACE AND CONFLICT STUDIES

GSIs
Perrin Elkind (email: perrin@berkeley.edu)
Noor Dawood (email: ndawood@berkeley.edu)
Andy Kohnen (email: akohnenster@gmail.com)

Please note: Discussion sections will start on Monday, August 30th.

Office hours and discussion sections for each GSI will be announced during the second
week of classes.

Course description

War and other forms of organized violence have been a rather depressing constant in
human history. So many writers and thinkers and observers have written page after page
detailing the horrors of war, often in the hope that later generations could learn from
these horrors and not repeat the same mistakes. And yet, here we are in the twenty-first
century, and war is still very much with us. If war is such a horrible thing, why has there
been so much of it?

Peace, too, has its own long history, and many writers throughout history have described
times of peace as being prosperous and even happy times. Across cultures, rulers who
have managed to cultivate peace are praised for their wisdom and their generosity. Peace,
it seems, is a good thing, preferable to war. Why, then, if peace is such a good thing, has
there not been more of it?

War and violence on the one hand, and peace and prosperity on the other, come in a
variety of different shapes and sizes, and much of this course is devoted to introducing
and analyzing all of these different versions. Understanding how individuals, groups, and
countries come to oppose each other, and come to the decision that no other option except
violence will resolve the issues at hand, is central to analyzing conflict.

Understanding how a conflict starts is also part of understanding how peace ends.
Although we often think of peace as merely the absence of war, peace is actually a
complex phenomenon that occurs in different ways in different settings. Just because a
country is not at war does not mean that peace necessarily exists; even in peaceful times,
individual experience can be marked by conflict, suffering, repression, and other forms of
institutional violence.
 This course will address these issues through four interrelated sections. The first section
will introduce the basic and primary elements of peace and conflict studies as a field. The
second section will introduce a variety of theoretical models for understanding peace and
conflict; so-called classical theories will be covered and compared, alongside alternative
models drawn from other cultural contexts. The third section of the course will cover
contemporary transformations of peace and conflict around the world, and will include
topics such as the changing nature of warfare, terrorism, non-state actors, globalization,
and human rights, among other things. The fourth section will put all of these pieces
together and discuss new understandings of peace and will offer critical discussions of
policy and practice as the field of peace studies responds to and informs an ever-changing
political landscape.

Learning Goals
PACS 10 combines is meant to provide a foundation for an informed discussion of
complex events in global politics, with an emphasis on issues of peace and security.
There are three simultaneous approaches that are engaged to build this foundation:
+ An academic approach to study and examine the most critical and advanced theories of
international relations and inter-state war and peace;
+ A policy approach to evaluate policy papers, reports and documents and to assess
critically the practical tools adopted by international actors;
+ A peer-to peer approach to encourage students to develop and evaluate their own
arguments, and to engage in an ongoing constructive dialog with fellow students.

Assignments and grading policy

Students will be evaluated against the following assignments:

2 Response These assignments will be explained in detail in advance. They 40% (20%
papers will be based on course materials and will require you to each)
formulate a rigorous analysis of a specific issue. (each will be
six pages, double-spaced)
1 Final Project You will choose a country/issue you are interested in researching 40%
further (10 pages, double-spaced)
Participation and You may miss no more than two discussion sections (excused 20%
attendance absences) for the entire semester; any additional absences will
negatively affect your grade.

Due dates for the assignments

First assessment paper 14 October
Second assessment paper 18 November
Final project 9 December

Please note: Deadlines and details for each assignment will be posted on Bspace. Check
each description carefully. Late papers will be accepted (with prior notification) but
escalating penalties will be applied (half-grade per day).
Additional information and guidelines on how to conduct each of the assignments will be
given in due course.

Materials for the course

The required readings for the course have been compiled into a reader that will be
available at Copy Central in Bancroft. No extra books are assigned for this class.
Occasionally, additional material that is relevant, useful, or of particular interest to the
issues of the class will be posted on bSpace.

Program and Reading

Lectures will serve as a framework to understand the reading material assigned for each
day. The readings assigned complement but do not supplement the material covered in
class.

See the following calendar of lectures/readings.

SECTION ONE: Introduction and Fundamentals

Thursday, 26 August
Introducing PACS 10

Tuesday, 31 August
The problem with peace: from the obvious to the complex
Ho-won Jeong, Concepts of peace and violence in Peace and Conflict Studies: An
introduction (Ashgate, 2000): pp.19-30

Thursday, 2 September
The periodic table of peace studies: understanding the elements

Readings assigned
Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty, in Essential Readings in World Politics (Norton,
2004): pp. 142-149
Hedley Bull, Does order exist in world politics in Essential Readings in World
Politics (Norton, 2004): pp. 120-124

Tuesday, 7 September
Acting naturally? The natural and biological history of war and peace
Readings assigned
Margaret Mead, Warfare is only an invention Not a biological necessity
Robert Sapolsky, A natural history of peace, Foreign Affairs (2006), pp. 104-
120
 Thursday, 9 September
Seeing what we want to see: narcissism, identity, and violence
Readings assigned
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs (1993): pp. 22-
49
Amartya Sen, What Clash of Civilizations? Slate (online), 2006

SECTION TWO: Traditional and contemporary theories of war and peace

Tuesday, 14 September
The world as it is and as it should be: Realism and Liberalism

Readings assigned
Stephen M. Walt, International Relations: One World, Many Theories Foreign
Policy (Spring 1998): pp. 29-46
Edward Rhodes, The Imperial Logic of Bushs Liberal Agenda Survival (Spring
2003): pp. 131-154

Thursday, 16 September
Moral politics: Constructivism and theories of justice
Readings assigned
David Cortright, Banning the Bomb in Peace: A History of Movements and
Ideas (Cambridge, 2008): pp. 126-154

Tuesday, 21 September
Radicals and revolutionaries: power from below or grassroots tyranny?
Readings assigned
Miranda H. Alison, Womens Experiences in the LTTE in Sri Lanka, in Women
and Political Violence (Routledge, 2009): pp. 162-185

Thursday, 23 September
In other words: African theories of politics and justice
Readings assigned
Charles Villa-Vicencio, Ubuntu, in Walk with Us and Listen: Political
Reconciliation in Africa (Georgetown University Press, 2009): pp. 113-128
MSC Okolo, Achebe and Ngugi on the African Tradition, in African Literature
as Political Philosophy (Zed Books, 2007): pp. 123-135
 Tuesday, 28 September
Having faith in peace: religious theories of politics and justice
Readings assigned
Tessa Bartholomeusz, First Among Equals: Buddhism and the Sri Lankan State,
in Buddhism and Politics in Twetieth-Century Asia (Pinter, 1999): pp. 173-193
Annette Hornbacher, Global Conflict in a cosmocentric perspective: A Balinese
approach to reconciliation, in Reconciling Indonesia: Grassroots Agency for
Peace (Routledge, 2009): pp. 34-53

Thursday, 30 September
Islands of peace: Asian and Pacific Islander conceptions of politics and justice
Readings assigned
Lin Yuan, Exploring Conflict and Harmony: Hong Kong and Macau, in Peace
Studies in the Chinese Century: International Perspectives (Ashgate, 2006), pp.
163-177

Tuesday, 5 October
From the Cold War to Hot Zones: the changing nature of peace and conflict
Readings assigned
Francis Fukuyama, The end of History? in The National Interest (Summer
1989)

Thursday, 7 October
The world is a stage: new actors, same plot, way too much drama
Readings assigned
Fareed Zakaria, Culture is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew in
Foreign Affairs (1994)

SECTION THREE: The changing architecture of global politics

Tuesday, 12 October
Resource wars and ethnic conflicts: utopias of desire and exclusion
Readings assigned
Philippe Le Billon, The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed
conflict, Political Geography 20 (2001): pp. 561-584

Thursday, 14 October
Case study: the collapse of Yugoslavia
Readings assigned
David N. Gibbs, Origins of the Yugoslav Conflict in First Do No Harm:
Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt, 2009):
pp. 45-75
First assessment paper due
 Tuesday, 19 October
Terrorism and piracy: new challenges and the struggle to respond
Readings assigned
Jessica Stern, Mind Over Martyr: How to Deradicalize Islamist Extremists,
Foreign Affairs (2010): pp. 95-108

Thursday, 21 October
Case study: the collapse of Somalia
Readings assigned
Daniel R. Morris, Waging War through Surprise and Terror: The Madrid Train
Bombings, in The Character of War in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2010): pp.
72-87

Tuesday, 26 October
The laws of war: understanding acceptable violence
Readings assigned
Mary Kaldor, From Just War to Just Peace, in The Price of Peace (Cambridge,
2007): pp. 255-273

Thursday, 28 October
New weapons and tactics: killing us softly?
Readings assigned
Gregory L. Schulte, Stopping Proliferation Before It Starts, Foreign Affairs
(2010): pp. 85-95

Tuesday, 2 November
Human rights in global politics: one step up and ten steps back?
Readings assigned
David Little (ed.), The Power of Organization: Alimamy Koroma, in
Peacemakers in Action (Cambridge, 2007): pp. 278-301
Myriam Denov, Becoming RUF: The making of a child soldier, in Child
Soldiers: Sierra Leones Revolutionary United Front (Cambridge, 2010): pp. 96-
120

Thursday, 4 November
Human Security and the era of R2P
Readings assigned
Keith Krause, Human Security, in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: A Lexicon
(Oxford, 2009): pp. 147-157
Gareth Evans, "The Responsibility to Protect: the power of an idea, Keynote
Address by Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group and Co-
Chair of International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, to
Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley International Conference on the
Responsibility to Protect: Stopping Mass Atrocities, University of California,
Berkeley, 14 March 2007
 Tuesday, 9 November
Globalization, development, and the race to end global poverty
Readings assigned
Jeffrey Sachs, The Development Challenge, Foreign Affairs (2005): pp. 78-90
Joseph Stiglitz: The Multinational Corporation, in Making Globalization Work
(Norton, 2006): pp. 187-210

Thursday, 11 November
University holiday: no class
Readings assigned
No readings

SECTION FOUR: The transformation of peace and conflict studies

Tuesday, 16 November
Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Peacebuilding
Readings assigned
Nicole Ball, The Challenge of rebuilding War-torn societies in Managing
Global Chaos (US Institute of Peace Press, 1996): pp. 607-622
Catalina Rojas, Islands in the Stream: A Comparative Analysis of Zones of Peace
within Colombias Civil War, in Zones of Peace (Kumarian Press, 2007): pp. 71-
89

Thursday, 18 November
Global Health, climate change, and food security: macro challenges
Readings assigned
Laurie Garrett, The challenge of Global Health, Foreign Affairs (2007): pp.14-
38
Bill McKibben: Think Again: Climate Change Foreign Policy (2009)
William Antholis and Strobe Talbott, A Useful Disappointment, in Fast
Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming (Brookings, 2010):
pp. 58-75
Second assessment paper due

Tuesday, 23 November
From the ground up: the promise and problems of micro-activism
Readings assigned
[No readings: work on final projects]

Thursday, 25 November
Thanksgiving holiday (no class)
 Tuesday, 30 November
Where do we go from here? (When everyone is a back seat driver)
Readings assigned:
[No readings: work on final projects]

Thursday, 2 December
Review

Tuesday, 7 December
RRR Week

Thursday, 9 December
Final project due