PSCI 3810 - International Relations Internet Resources (Dr. Paul Hensel)

Introduction to This Page

This page is meant to supplement the syllabus and lectures for my undergraduate course "Introduction to International Relations" (PSCI 3810) at the University of North Texas. It is organized along the same outline as the reading list for the course, to help students who wish to go beyond the original assigned readings.

Obviously, this page -- like any other page on the Web -- is a work in progress. I will do my best to keep it up-to-date throughout the semester. Unfortunately, many of these links may be redirected or even removed from the Web by the end of the semester (one semester I found that over one-third of all of the links on one of my pages broke between September and December). I would appreciate being informed via email if you find any broken links on this page, so that I can attempt to fix or delete the link in question.

World Map Resources

An important part of studying or understanding international relations involves being able to place countries and events in a geographic context. (More to the point of self-interest, this course's three exams each require you to identify countries on a blank map, so it is a good idea to become familiar with countries' locations if you want to pass the class...) The following links cover several of the Web's best sites for maps, as well as several sources offering blank or outline maps that can be used to help prepare for map quizzes on exams:

Collections of Maps and Related Resources

The Perry-Castaneda Map Library at the University of Texas is the supreme Web resource for online maps of countries, regions, or the world; they also offer links to many historical maps showing how the world looked previously.
The CIA World Factbook is a useful source of both maps and information related to IR; besides maps of each country and territory (accessible from the country's web page) they also offer global and regional reference maps
National Geographic's "XPeditions" Atlas allows the user to create good maps of individual countries, although their regional and global maps are generally too small to be of much scholarly use
My web site's Maps and Interactive Geography Tools page includes many more useful links.

Blank/Outline Maps

The following maps are the ones that will be used on the actual exams in this course; these maps are made available by the Florida Geographic Alliance (FGA). Please let me know if these links stop working, so that I can find the new location of the same files, or else I can find something comparable on the Web.

Exam 1: Europe
Exam 2: Central and South America
Exam 3: Middle East (note that the test may cover any country on this map, including countries that you may think of as being located in North Africa or South/Southwest Asia.)
Other blank outline maps are available from the Perry-Castaneda Map Library at the University of Texas.

World News Resources

Another important part of studying or understanding international relations involves being aware of what is going on around the world. The following links offer good coverage of international news; I try to visit most of these sites each day, to get a relatively broad picture of world politics from a variety of perspectives. Note that the point here isn't to endorse news from a particular national or political viewpoint, but to see how major news sources around the world are covering a topic; you will often find that the BBC or Xinhua (for example) are covering stories that aren't in any of the major American papers, and each of these news sources will often provide details that the others missed. Many of these sites also offer RSS/Atom feeds, which makes it easy to follow news headlines automatically in your favorite feed reader/aggregator.

Good World News Sites

BBC News (the UK's public broadcast service, which also happens to be perhaps the best single online source of world news; see also their regional news pages, each of which includes a number of news stories that did not make it onto this main news page)
Christian Science Monitor - World News
CNN - World News
Der Spiegel - International News (Germany's leading weekly news magazine, published in Hamburg)
The Economist (their web site includes some very useful news and analysis; if you are truly interested in international relations, you may want to consider subscribing to their print edition -- it's expensive, but they offer academic discounts, and I don't think there is a better printed news magazine for coverage and analysis of international relations.)
Financial Times - World News (from London; particularly good coverage of economic and financial matters)
Fox News - World News
Itar-Tass - World News (English-language news from Moscow)
Miami Herald (particularly good coverage of Latin American news
New York Times - International News
Times of London - World News
Voice of America (funded by the U.S. government; available in dozens of languages)
Washington Post - World News
Xinhua - World News (English-language news from China; see also their regional news pages, each of which includes a number of news stories that did not make it onto this main news page)

World News Wires

These are compilations of stories appearing on a variety of news wires. The providers generally do not provide free copies of their news online, because their main mission is to sell their news stories to newspapers. Fortunately, some newspapers and other news sources (which pay the providers for access to the news wires) make the content available to end users like you and me:

Agence France Press (AFP) (this feed provided by Yahoo News)
Associated Press (AP) (this feed provided by the Los Angeles Times; see also feeds from the New York Times and Yahoo)
Reuters (this feed provided by the New York Times; see also feeds from the International Herald Tribune and Yahoo)

Resources Related to Course Topics

These resources are meant to give students additional background on concepts or examples that are discussed in class. Many of these -- particularly those from sources like Wikipedia -- should not be taken as definitive scholarly statements on the topics (I do not accept sources like this for research papers in my upper-division courses), and I do not endorse any views expressed in these sources (particularly Wikipedia articles, which can change frequently as different users attempt to shape the articles to fit their own perspective). Instead, think of this page as a place to go for basic background information on topics that you may not have been familiar with, and as a supplement for the material covered in class readings and lectures.

I. BASIC CONCEPTS OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

A. Introduction

1. Background

The following links offer further information about some of the events that were discussed in class:

Ancient Greece: Peloponnesian War and Greco-Persian Wars (from Wikipedia)
19th Century: Napoleonic Wars, Italian unification, German empire, and Scramble for Africa (from Wikipedia)
1900-1945: World War I, World War II, and (from Wikipedia)
Cold War: see CNN's Cold War site, as well as Cold War and Decolonization (from Wikipedia)
Post-1990: Yugoslav Wars (from Wikipedia) and President Bush's 'New World Order" speech (from HistoryPlace.com)

2. Thinking about International Relations

The following links offer excerpts from a few of the classic readings in realist and liberal thought that were discussed in class:

Thucydides, "The Melian Dialogue" (an excerpt from History of the Peloponnesian War illustrating the relative importance of power and justice in realist thought)
Thomas Hobbes, "Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery" (an excerpt from The Leviathan discussing life in what we call international anarchy)
Woodrow Wilson, Fourteen Points speech (his famous 1918 speech to Congress laying out his vision for the postwar order, which reflects many important principles of liberal/idealist thought)
Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, "Power and Interdependence in the Information Age" (a retrospective look back at Power and Interdependence twenty years after its first publication)

B. Actors in International Relations

1. Nations, States, and Nation-States

States

The official list of UN Member States (the ultimate list of "who is in the club" in the post-World War II era)
The U.S. State Department offers a list of independent states, indicating which have diplomatic relations with the U.S.
The Fund for Peace offers a list of failed states, which has been published in Foreign Policy; these are examples of legal states that don't have effective control over significant portions of their population of territory

Nations

The Minorities at Risk project collects and reports data on politically active minority groups around the world, including risk assessments and chronologies for hundreds of groups.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World offers information on languages in each country, among many other useful resources, for nearly 7000 world languages.

Terrorist Groups

A number of government maintain lists of terrorist groups, although these are (not surprisingly) usually viewed by observers as politically motivated. See examples from the U.S. State Department (including both terrorist designation lists and state sponsors of terrorism as well as more detailed country reports), British Home Office, and Australian government.

Other Entities

The U.S. State Department offers a list of dependencies and areas of special sovereignty, which do not qualify as states because they are under foreign rule.
The Palestinian National Authority looks like a state governmnent in many ways, but (as of the start of the Fall 2008 semester) it has not declared statehood and is not officially recognized as a state
The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus looks like a state in many respects, but it is only recognized by Turkey (see also their Wikipedia page).

2. Non-State Actors

Domestic Actors

Some of the more prominent lobbying groups in the U.S. include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (pro-Israel), Cuban-American National Foundation (anti-Castro), and Armenian National Committee of America (pro-Armenian)
President Eisenhower's 1961 military-industrial complex speech describes what many see as an informal lobbying group with a great deal of influence on certain aspects of U.S. military and economic policy

Multinational Corporations (MNCs)

Coca Cola has operations in nearly 200 countries, many with their own local web sites
Nike offers several dozen web sites covering their operations in different languages and different geographic regions
Toyota, headquartered in Japan, has separate web sites for its operations in more than forty countries

Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs)

My international organizations page includes links to numerous organizations, as well as to additional collections of IGO and NGO links
The United Nations is a universal membership, general purpose IGO
The Organization of American States is a restricted membership, general purpose IGO
The International Monetary Fund and World Health Organization are universal membership, specific purpose IGOs
NATO and Inter-American Development Bank are restricted membership, specific purpose IGOs

Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)

C. Power

1. Measuring Power

Economic resources: The World Bank offers national rankings based on population and economic measures
IMF influence: The International Monetary Fund divides up voting power (and thus control over economic decisions) based largely on economic resources.
Nuclear weaspons: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists offers a great deal of information on nuclear stockpiles since 1945
Oil: The BP Annual Energy Review offers data on proven oil reserves, oil production, and oil consumption. (The US Energy Information Administration also offers lists of the top oil producers/exporters and oil consumers/importers.)
Other elements of power: The CIA World Factbook ranks states (and some non-state entities) on a variety of demographic, economic, military, and social indicators.

2. "Major Powers" and Polarity

The list of major powers that we discussed in class comes from the Correlates of War (COW) project's Interstate System data set.

D. Foreign Policy Making

Coming soon.

II. PROBLEMS IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

A. Anarchy and the Security Dilemma

Example: British Reactions to German Naval Acquisitions

The German Tirpitz Plan and the Dreadnought Race (illustrations of the pace and scope of the German naval buildup before World War I)
1909 Speech to Parliament by British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (a good example of security dilemma considerations in the British reaction to the German naval buildup)

B. Armed Conflict

1. Overview / Patterns of Conflict and War

My International Conflict and Cooperation Data page gives access to a variety of databases and lists of current and historical conflicts; see especially the following resources:
The Center for Systemic Peace at the University of Maryland offers analyses of global conflict trends since 1946 and the current status of major armed conflicts
The Uppsala/PRIO Armed Conflicts Data Project from researchers in Norway and Sweden has collected a compilation of data on conflicts since 1946
The Center for Defense Information (CDI) publishes an annual report called the World at War, assessing recent trends in armed conflict as well as examining ongoing conflicts. Earlier versions of this report can be found on their web site.

2. Interstate Conflict

Coming soon.

3. Intrastate Conflict

Coming soon.

4. Realist Solutions to Conflict: Arms and Alliances

Coming soon.

C. Cooperation

1. International Law

International Court of Justice (ICJ/World Court) web site
Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) (information from WorldCourts.com)
Major arms control/disarmament treaties discussed in class:

2. International Organizations

United Nations (UN) web site
- UN History
- UN Charter and Member States
- Main UN bodies: Secretariat (and Secretary General), Security Council, and General Assembly
- UN organizational chart (with links to the web sites for each subsidiary UN agency)
- UN peacekeeping operations
League of Nations resources online

3. Democratic/Liberal Peace

Coming soon.

D. The International Political Economy

1. Trade and Protectionism

World Trade Organization
U.S. Harmonized Tariff Schedule (a detailed list of current U.S. tariffs; from the web site of the U.S. International Trade Commission)
U.S. Trade Agreements (bilateral, regional, and global free trade agreements involving the U.S.; from the web site of the U.S. Trade Representative)

2. Globalization and Interdependence

Cars.com's American Made Index (a ranking of the top 10 most "American" cars based on research and development, parts content, assembly location, and sales)
American Made? (a database from a New York metalworkers union that lists assembly location, union/non-union assembly, and country of ownership for most current car models)

3. Dependence and Development

World Development Reports (from the World Bank)

4. Hegemony and Regimes

Coming soon.

5. Regionalism and Integration

The European Union (EU)

Coming soon.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Coming soon.

Other Examples of Regional Integration

Coming soon.

E. Problems for the Future

1. Demographic Issues

Coming soon.

2. Environmental Issues

Coming soon.

3. Looking to the Future

Coming soon.

PSCI 3810 - International Relations Internet Resources

Dr. Paul Hensel University of North Texas

Syllabus Index

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