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Crawford School of Public Policy · ANU College of Law, Governance and Policy
This course is available for on-campus & remote (online) learning. All students participate in interactive, real-time classes. What is the role of coercion in international security affairs? When should it be used to achieve which national security goals, and under what conditions is it most effective? Coercion is as old as the international system itself, but while answers to these questions remain poorly understood they are only likely to become more important in the contemporary Indo-Pacific. This course aims to assess the different forms that coercion can take and how effective these national security strategies are likely to be under different contexts. It is designed to help students understand the roles and effects of different strategies of coercion such that they can be better consumers and producers of these strategies. The course will also explore what historical cases of coercion teach us about the present, and use an interactive all of class wargame to further illustrate the strategic elements of coercion. Students will explore the challenges of estimating the effectiveness of coercion from theoretical and policy-making practitioner perspectives.
Short assignment (1,000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 3, 5
Major research paper (3,000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
End of semester take-home exam (reflection on wargame, 1,000 words)
Learning outcomes 1, 3, 5
The standard workload for a 6 unit course is 130 hours including class time and independent study.
Readings will be mostly journal articles from leading scholarly journals. One co-edited book that may be assigned is Krause and Greenhill (eds.) Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (NY: Oxford University Press, 2018) Preliminary Reading Krause and Greenhill (eds.) Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (NY: Oxford University Press, 2018) Byman, Daniel and Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Schelling, Thomas, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) Sechser, Todd and Matthew Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017) Cohen, Michael D, When Proliferation Causes Peace: The Psychology of Nuclear Crises (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017) Drezner, Daniel “Bad Debts: Assessing China's Financial Influence in Great Power Politics.” International Security, Vol. 34. No. 2. (Fall 2009): 7-45 Kydd, Andrew H., and Barbara F. Walter. “The Strategies of Terrorism.” International Security, Vol. 31. No. 1. (Summer 2006): 49-80 Borghard, Erica D. & Shawn W. Lonergan "The Logic of Coercion in Cyberspace," Security Studies, 26:3, 2017 452-481