In this seminar will introduce students to current empirical research in the field of international relations. Each week students will attend a presentation from Duke faculty and/or graduate students regarding an international relations research project in which they are currently engaged. Presentations will focus each week on a single research project, but students will be asked to do some background reading on each project. Students will act as discussants for each of the presentations and will develop their own research designs or research papers. Students will then present their research designs or papers to one another in a conference panel format at the end of the semester.

Course Requirements:

Student performance will be evaluated on the following basis:

1) Most of our time in class will be spent discussing and analyzing the weekly presentation and readings, so class attendance and participation in the question and answer sessions are essential.  Students will also be asked to act as discussants for two of the presentations. Class participation (and discussion leadership) will count for 20% of your final grade.

2) During the course of  semester each student must submit two short papers (3-5 double spaced, typed pages) that summarize and extend the comments they present as discussants. Students will sign up in advance for the weeks that they wish to write short papers. Click here for a schedule of paper due dates and discussant duties.   In these papers you are to analyze the paper being presented that week.  However, you should not consider these papers to be summaries of the presentation.  Instead, in each paper the student should analyze one or more theoretical or empirical issues in the reading that is being presented, identify some weakness and present a potential solution to the problem.  These two short papers will account for 30% of your grade.

3) The final course requirement is a research paper or research design of approximately 20 pages, which will be DUE ON Monday DECEMBER 7 at 5:00 P.M..  Students are free to analyze any issue related to international politics that is of interest to them.  The goal of this final project is either to develop a research agenda which the student could actually follow up and execute if he or she chose to do so or to move ahead with a research project that the student already has underway. Thus even if the student’s ideas relate primarily to theoretical issues, he or she must specify some appropriate method for testing his or her refined hypotheses.  It is my hope that students may be able to use these research designs as the starting points for future journal articles or dissertation prospectuses, and so on.   The research paper or design will account for the final 50% of your grade.

It is important that students cite the material that they have relied upon in writing these papers. If you have questions about when you need to provide citation for a source, please see the Duke Libraries' guide on avoiding plagaiarism. If you have questions about how to provide citation on your sources, please see the Duke Libraries' guide on citation formats. Use any citation format that you prefer, what is important is that you give credit to the sources you used.

Required Books:

No books are required for purchase for this class. All readings will be made available online through Duke's full-text databases or on e-reserves. Students can obtain the readings by clicking on the links below. Students must be connected to the Duke network or through the Duke VPN client to download and print the readings.

Schedule of Readings - All listed readings are required

August 27 - Organization

September 3 - Christopher Gelpi - International Institutions as Constraints on the Use of Force

Grieco, Joseph, Christopher Gelpi, Jason Reifler and Peter Feaver. 2007. "Let's Get a Second Opinion: International Institutions and American Public Support for War."

Chapman, Terrence and Dan Reiter. 2004. "The United Nations Security Council and the Rally 'Round the Flag Effect. Journal of Conflict Resolution. 48(6).

Simmons, Beth and Lisa Martin. 1998. "Theories and Empirical Studies of International Institutions." International Organization 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 729-757.

September 10 - Joe Grieco - Preferences and Institutional Commitments

Joseph Grieco, Christopher Gelpi and Camber Warren. 2007. "When Preferences and Commitments Collide: The Effect of Relative Partisan Shifts on International Treaty Compliance." PDF Version

Simmons, Beth. 2000. "International Law and State Behavior: Commitment and Compliance in International Monetary Affairs." American Political Science Review 94, no. 4 (December 2000): 819-835.

Von Stein, Jana. 2005. "Do Treaties Constrain or Screen? Selection Bias and Treaty Compliance, (2005), The American Political Science Review, 99 (4): 611-622.

Simmons, Beth and Daniel Hopkins. 2005. "The Constraining Power of International Treaties." American Political Science Review 99, no. 4 (November 2005): 623-631.

September 17 - Scott deMarchi - Empirical Tests of Game Theoretic Models

Michael Laver, Scott deMarchi, and Hande Mutlu. 2007. Bargaining in N-Party Legislatures. PDF Version

September 24 - Camber Warren - Communication Structures and the Onset of Civil War

Camber Warren. 2007. "A House United." PDFVersion

James Fearon and David Laitin. 2003. Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War. American Political Science Review

P Collier and A Hoeffler. 2004. Greed, Grievance and Civil War. Oxford Economic Papers.

October 1 - Alexander Downs - Democracy and Covert Action

Mary Lauren Lilley and Alexander Downes. 2007. Covert Action, Democratic Peace and the Cold War. PDF file

David P. Forsythe. 1992. "Democracy, War, and Covert Action. Journal of Peace Research. Vol. 29, No. 4, 385-395.

Charles Kegley and Margaret Herrmann. 1996. How Democracies Use Intervention: A Neglected Dimension in Studies of the Democratic Peace. Journal of Peace Research. Vol. 33, No. 3, 309-322

October 8 - FALL BREAK - No Class

October 15 - Christopher Gelpi - The Empirical Study of Terrorism

Walter Enders and Todd Sandler. 2005. After 9/11: Is It All Different Now? Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 49, 2:259-277.

Mia Bloom. 2004. Palestinian Suicide Bombing: Public Support, Market Share and Outbidding." Political Science Quarterly 119, 1.

Quan Li. 2005. "Does Democracy Promote or Reduce Transnational Terrorism." Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol 49:278

Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter. 2006. "The Strategies of Terrorism." International Security. 31, 1:49-80.

October 22 - Tim Buthe - Foreign Direct Investment in Developing Countries

Jensen, Nathan "Democratic Governance and Multinational Corporations." International Organization 57, Summer 2003, pp 587–616.

Schwartz, Edward and Michael Tomz. 1997. "The Long Run Advantages of Centralization for Collective Action." American Political Science Review 92 3:685-692

Mansfield, Edward. "The Proliferation of Preferential Trading Agreements." The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 42, No. 5. (Oct., 1998), pp. 523-543.

October 29 - Emerson Niou - The Politics of Alliances (Rescheduled for Tomz Talk)

November 5 - Ole Holsti

Holsti, Ole . Forthcoming. Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy. Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.

Furia, Peter and Russell Lucas. The Determinants of Arab Public Opinion on Foreign Relations." International Studies Quarterly (2006) 50, 585–605

November 12 - Nazli Avdan - Globalization, Border Restrictions, and the Territorialization of States

Andreas, Peter. 2003. "Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-First Century." International Security 28(2): 78-111.

Rudolph, Christopher. 2003. "Security and the political economy of international migration." American Political Science Review 97 (4):603-20.

Neumayer, Eric. 2006. "Unequal Access to Foreign Spaces: how states use visa restrictions to regulate mobility in a globalized world." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (1):72-84.

November 19 - Bahar Leventoglu

November 26 - Student Presentations

December 7 - Research Papers / Design Papers Due at 5:00 PM