War & Peace
A situation where two states each increase their military capabilities in response to the other, unintentionally making both feel less safe
What is security dilemma?
The idea that aggression against one state is aggression against all.
What is collective security?
This strategy aims to prevent an adversary from attacking by convincing them that the costs of doing so would outweigh any possible gains.
What is deterrence?
This is the type of actor that carries out terrorism, according to the core definition discussed in class.
What is a non-state actor?
This document, combining the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ICCPR, and the ICESCR, forms the foundation of international human rights law.
What is the International Bill of Human Rights?
A government facing protests and economic decline uses external conflict to consolidate domestic support. This is an example of which level of analysis?
What is domestic/state level of analysis?
This is the main difference between IGOs and NGOs.
What is membership? (IGO members are states; NGO members are private individuals or entities.)
The non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945 is often cited as an example of this concept, a widely accepted standard of behavior that is not a formal law.
What is a nuclear taboo?
This element of terrorism distinguishes it from ordinary crime: violence or the threat of violence is used to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals.
What is political motivation?
Explain the concept of tragedy of the commons and how it applies to climate change.
The tragedy of the commons occurs when individuals acting in self-interest overuse a shared resource. It applies to climate change because no single state owns the atmosphere, so each has an incentive to emit freely while the collective cost falls on all.
A president's personal distrust of another leader leads them to reject diplomatic solutions and escalate tensions. This is an example of which level of analysis?
What is individual level of analysis?
Scholars use this term to describe competing institutions attempting to solve the same issue.
What is contested multilateralism?
This treaty's main goal is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, promote peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and encourage disarmament.
What is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT)?
Define terrorism using the core elements discussed in class.
Terrorism is the intentional use or threat of violence against civilians by non-state actors to achieve political, religious, or ideological goals.
This concept describes how climate change threatens individuals from disease, environmental harm, and displacement, rather than focusing on threats between states.
What is human security?
This concept refers to the political cost a leader pays at home for backing down from a public commitment in international negotiations.
What is audience costs?
The UN Security Council, the WTO, and NATO are all examples of this broader category of international actor.
What are intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)?
This concept describes the paradox in which nuclear deterrence at the strategic level may actually enable smaller conventional conflicts between nuclear-armed states.
What is the stability-instability nexus?
True or false: from a realist point of view, terrorists act irrationally.
What is False (Realists view all actors as rational, calculating cost and benefit to achieve their goals.)
This enforcement mechanism relies not on a single authority but on a diffuse network of states, NGOs, courts, and public opinion to pressure norm violators.
What is diffuse enforcement?
Under this model, war occurs when two sides fail to reach a negotiated settlement even though conflict is costly for both, often due to private information or commitment problems.
What is bargaining model of war?
This type of activism works from the bottom up to generate political pressure on states and international organizations.
What is grassroots activism?
This doctrine holds that a nuclear attack by one state would result in the complete destruction of both the attacker and the defender.
What is Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)?
Weaker actors use terrorism because they cannot match state power in conventional ways, making it a form of this.
What is asymmetric warfare?
Name one way climate change creates security challenges in international relations.
What is: resource scarcity leading to conflict, climate-induced migration creating border tensions, or extreme weather destabilizing fragile states....