AbstractThe question of whether war can ever truly be accidental has been the subject of much academic debate. To provide my own answer to this question, I use an oft-ignored part of US history—the so-called Indian Wars between Native nations and an expanding United States. Specifically, this research innovation makes use of three militarized conflicts of the nineteenth century—the Black Hawk War (1832), the Cayuse War (1847–1855), and the Hualapai War (1865–1870)—to provide evidence that war can indeed occur accidentally. I conclude that IR scholars should be less confident in asserting that accidental war does not happen and that this possibility counsels restraint for policy-makers, especially in emerging domains of conflict.
To determine whether our undergraduate curriculum fulfills the pedagogical goals of our department, the authors conducted a semester-long curriculum assessment. This article discusses five main lessons and three lingering questions to demonstrate potential benefits of curriculum assessment and to prompt further disciplinary conversation about how undergraduate teaching should be structured. The overarching lesson, however, is that although student needs may be quite diverse, an emphasis on core aspects of the program can yield better training for all undergraduates.
Many introductory courses in International Relations (IR) dedicate some portion of the class to international history. Such class segments often focus on great-power politics of the twentieth century and related academic debates. In this essay, I argue that these international history segments can better engage students by broadening the histories instructors present and by drawing on especially salient histories such as those of the country in which the course is being taught. To elaborate on how one might do this, I discuss how US-based courses could productively examine the country’s rise to great-power status. I outline three reasons to bring this topic into US-based introductory IR courses, and I draw on personal experience to provide a detailed description of the ways one can do so.
Is securitisation normatively undesirable? Many scholars who have studied this process by which issues come to be treated as pertaining to ‘security’ have argued that it is indeed preferable to keep as many issues as possible from being securitised. Rather, most issues ought to remain politicised such that they are seen as the legitimate subject of public debate. By contrast, I argue that we ought not to ascribe any inherent moral valence to securitisation or the reverse process of desecuritisation. Instead, each attempt to (de)securitise an issue ought to be debated on its own terms. To support my argument for the moral ambiguity of (de)securitisation, I examine the US Senate’s debate over whether to transfer the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Department of War to a new Department of the Interior in 1849. I argue that this is an inflection point in a longer desecuritising process by which the United States – acting on a presumed hierarchy – coercively assimilated Native nations into its domestic political order. I conclude that scholars should not discard (de)securitisation as an analytical tool but can instead use work on (de)securitisation to inform public debate on the likely consequences of any particular (de)securitising move, thereby serving a chastening role in public discourse.
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