GOVT 50.19 Development Under Fire
This course examines the recent emergence of foreign assistance as a tool of counterinsurgency and post-conflict reconciliation in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Liberia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. The course has three broad purposes: (1) to introduce students to leading research on the motives and dynamics of violence in civil war settings, with a focus especially on the post-1945 era; (2) to develop an understanding of the multiple ways in which different actors - including militaries, rebel organizations (i.e. the Taliban), state agencies (i.e. USAID), non-governmental organizations (i.e. Doctors Without Borders), and international organizations such as the World Bank - have used aid in these environments, and how aid and violence intersect; and (3) to provide students with a grasp of the different approaches that have been used to evaluate aid in these settings, including randomized control trials, quasi-experiments, interviews and focus groups, and survey experiments.
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Note that the course does not presume any background in either political science or economics, though introductory courses (especially in microeconomics and development studies) will prove useful. Familiarity with quantitative social science (i.e. regression analysis) will also be helpful but is not essential.
Instructor
Lyall