MIT OpenCourseWare

教學時程

課程單元 重要日期
I. Introduction
1 The causes of war in perspective. Does international politics follow regular laws of motion? If so, how can we discover them? Can we use methods like those of the physical sciences?
II. 33 Hypotheses on the Causes of War
2-3 8 Hypotheses on Military Factors as Causes of War
4-7 Misperception and War; Religion and War

10 Hypotheses on Misperception and the Causes of War

Hypotheses from Psychology; Militarism; Nationalism; Spirals and Deterrence; Religion and War; Defects in Academe and the Press
8-9 14 More Causes of War and Peace: Culture, Gender, Language, Democracy, Social Equality and Social Justice, Minority Rights and Human Rights, Prosperity, Economic Interdependence, Revolution, Capitalism, Imperial Decline and Collapse, Cultural Learning, Emotional Factors (Revenge, Contempt, Honor), Polarity of the International System

Causes of Civil War
III. Cases: Wars and Crises
10 The Seven Years War Quiz 1
11 The Wars of German Unification: 1864, 1866, and 1870; and Segue to World War I
12-14 World War I World War I debate

Paper one due one day after lecture 14
15 Interlude: Hypotheses on Escalation and Limitation of War; and Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Strategy, other Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Causes of War
16-19 World War II World War II/Europe debate

World War II/Pacific debate
20-21 The Cold War, Korea and Indochina Quiz 2 during lecture 20
22 The Peloponnesian War
23-24 The Israel-Arab Conflict; the 2003 U.S.-Iraq War Paper two due one day before lecture 25
IV. The Future of War
25-26 Testing and Applying Theories of War Causation; the Future of War, Solutions to War
Final Exam