International Relations 101 (#1): Introduction

hi i'm william spaniel today we're going to start a new series of lectures this time entitled international relations 101 you might think that I'm an economist because I do all these game theory videos but that's actually not the case I am a political scientist and I specialize within political science in formal models in relation to international relations so rather than doing pure mathematics in this series of videos we'll be actually looking at applying these sorts of theories into the realm of international relations in this video in particular we'll focus on what we'll be covering in the next few dozen videos over the next month or two months or three months however long it takes so let's start talking about those things so first we're going to start with asking ourselves what is international about international relations so we'll touch on concepts of sovereignty and anarchy which separate interstate action with intrastate action and we're going to ask ourselves specifically why is international relations so strategic and because it's so strategic it allows us to use these these formal models these game theoretical models to help us analyze it but first we need to understand why we're able to do that and why these things are so great for studying international relations and to do that we need to understand sovereignty and anarchy so that's where we're going to start out with then we're going to move on to big broad questions about conflict versus cooperation and why is it so difficult for states to work together given the framework that we live in in international relations and this the state of Anarchy as we'll call it and you'll see what that means shortly and we're also going to see how future punishment induces cooperative behavior today this relates directly to the concept of the prisoner's dilemma and repeated prisoners dilemmas and we'll see that in action then we'll actually start talking about more specific things well we'll get to the big big thing that sort of overtook international relations in 1995 which was an article by a professor at Stanford named James Fearon who wrote an article called rational explanations for war and he just asked a very simple question if war is costly why can't states settle their differences at the bargaining table given that it's going to cost both sides something to fight a war and in this article he lays out this this big research question and then provides a few answers he talks about preventative war and pre-emptive war and how asymmetric an from Asian incentives to misrepresent can cause war and issue indivisibility so we'll talk about this this Wars an efficiency puzzle as its termed now and how these four things at the bottom of the bullet points can lead to States fighting over over conflicts rather than bargaining over them then we'll move in segue into international trade and talk about why States should bother trading why there is so much trade going on in the world today and why tariffs are hard to avoid and how does this international trade reduce the likelihood of war so a little bit of a mixed bag in dealing with international trade but all very important issues we'll talk about how regime type matters a lot of international relations work does not focus on actually what goes on inside of a country but just how States should interact in a strategic setting without looking into those sorts of things but while that first avenue of research is very useful and very relevant it's also important to actually look within the state and see how democracies might act differently than autocracy z' and so forth and so just the big broad question is how do domestic institutions affect international outcomes speaking of international speaking of institutions will also look at international institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund we're going to ask ourselves what these things do and if they do anything at all and what sort of obstacles they have towards actually getting things done in the international realm well look at nuclear weapons this is a big thing going on right now with Iran and North Korea right we'll ask ourselves is nuclear proliferation actually a good thing this is something that was debated heavily during the Cold War but still continues to be an issue today we'll talk about mutually assured destruction which was a doctoring that was also big during the Cold War and we'll go into depth about bargaining over nuclear weapons because after all that's what's going on right now between the United States and Israel and Iran and also the United States and North Korea will conclude things with terrorism which became something that was not too much studied back before 2001 and then of course the September 11th attacks that happened and all of a sudden it became a really hot button issue in relations so we'll ask ourselves can terrorists be rational and why does Terrorism work so that wraps up this summary of what we'll be covering in the next few weeks and I hope you'll join me in these videos which will go into depth and we'll use these formal models that we've been talking about in the past in the game theory videos and actually apply them to something relevant so I hope you join me then and until then take care bye

Channel: William Spaniel

Views: 344,996

Keywords: international, relations, political, science, game, theory, formal, models, sovereignty, anarchy, conflict, cooperation, rationalist, explanations, for, war, regime, type, institutions, nuclear, weapons, mutually, assured, destruction, terrorism

Id: y32cFdicW1U

Length: 4min 48sec (288 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 30 2012