International Conflict

Course Description

INR4061 is the course where international relations stops describing wars and starts trying to explain them formally — and where a genuinely useful question gets asked: given that war is enormously costly to both sides, why can the parties not simply agree on the outcome in advance and skip it?

UWF's description puts that question at the centre. The course "examines some of the primary theories of the origins and termination of interstate war," beginning with "the logic and empirical support for a number of popular hypotheses" — "Do leaders start war to divert attention from domestic problems? Does trade promote peace? Do alliances deter or entrap? Do arms races promote peace? Does a balance of power promote peace?" — and then arriving at the real puzzle: "Given that war is costly, why are the contending sides unable to reach a settlement short of the major use of armed force? The course concludes with a discussion of the termination of war."

⚠⚠ That is the bargaining model of war, taught properly, and it is one of the most intellectually satisfying things in an international relations degree. The answer the literature gives has three parts — private information combined with incentives to misrepresent it, commitment problems, and issues that cannot be divided — and once a student has it, a great deal of international politics becomes legible.

⚠ The attention to termination is unusual and valuable. Most courses on war stop at onset. How wars end — why some are settled by negotiation and others fought to unconditional surrender — is a smaller literature, a harder problem, and the one that matters most to anyone who will work on an ongoing conflict.

FGCU titles its version International Armed Conflicts. Its catalogue could not be read for this guide, so its emphasis is not known.

⚠⚠⚠ One thing a student should know before enrolling, because the number's official name promises it: the statewide title and description both promise PEACE STUDIES and POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION, and neither carrier's title suggests they deliver it. See Special Information — and the reason is structural rather than anyone's oversight.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• ⚠ Explain the bargaining model of war: that war is costly ex post, that a bargain both sides prefer must therefore exist, and that the explanatory problem is the failure to reach it.
• Explain private information with incentives to misrepresent as a cause of bargaining failure.
• Explain commitment problems, including preventive war and shifting power.
• Explain issue indivisibility and why it is the weakest of the three explanations.
• ⚠ Evaluate diversionary war theory — the claim that leaders use force to distract from domestic difficulty — against the evidence.
• Evaluate the claim that trade and economic interdependence promote peace, and the counterarguments.
• Evaluate whether alliances deter aggression or entangle members in others' wars.
• Evaluate whether arms races make war more or less likely, and the spiral-versus-deterrence debate.
• Evaluate balance of power and power preponderance as competing accounts of stability.
• ⚠⚠ Explain war termination — why belligerents update their beliefs during fighting, and what makes a settlement possible.
• Explain audience costs, signalling and credibility, and how states communicate resolve.
• ⚠ Assess empirical support for a hypothesis in this literature — what was measured, over what cases, and what the finding licenses.
• Apply the framework to historical and current conflicts.

Optional Outcomes

• ⚠ Analyse conflict resolution, mediation and negotiated settlement — promised by the statewide description; see below.
• ⚠ Analyse post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding — likewise.
• Analyse civil war onset, duration and settlement, which has its own distinct literature.
• Analyse peacekeeping and third-party intervention.
• Analyse nuclear deterrence and crisis bargaining.
• Work with conflict datasets or formal models directly.
• Analyse terrorism and non-state violence within a bargaining frame.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Defining and measuring interstate conflict.
• The inefficiency puzzle and the bargaining framework.
• Information, uncertainty and misrepresentation.
• Commitment problems, shifting power and preventive war.
• Indivisible issues.
• Diversionary war and domestic-political explanations.
• Interdependence and the commercial peace.
• Alliances — deterrence, entrapment and reliability.
• Arms races, the security dilemma and the spiral model.
• Balance of power versus preponderance.
• Signalling, credibility and audience costs.
• Crisis bargaining and escalation.
• ⚠ War termination — updating, settlement and the problem of ending a war.
• Evaluating quantitative evidence in conflict research.

Optional Topics

• Conflict resolution, mediation and third-party settlement.
• Peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction.
• Civil war and intrastate conflict.
• Peacekeeping and intervention.
• Nuclear strategy and deterrence.
• Non-state actors and asymmetric conflict.
• Formal modelling and game theory.

Resources & Tools

• ⚠⚠⚠ James Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War" (International Organization, 1995) — this course is substantially an unpacking of that article. Read it early, read it slowly, and read it again at the end of the term.
• War and Reason (Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman) and Bargaining and Learning in Recurring Crises — the formal foundations.
• How Wars End (Dan Reiter) — ⚠ the best accessible treatment of the termination half, which most courses skip.
• Causes of War (Levy and Thompson) — a broader survey useful as background.
• Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Robert Jervis) — the standard counterweight to purely rationalist accounts, and the course is better for including it.
• ⚠ Correlates of War and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program — free data and codebooks. Reading a codebook changes how you read every quantitative claim in this field.
• Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Organization, International Security and the Journal of Peace Research — ⚠ the last is the one to check for the peace-studies material the course may not cover.
• International Crisis Group and ACLED — current conflict reporting and event data, free, for applying the theory to live cases.

Career Pathways

• Intelligence analysis — ⚠ the bargaining framework is directly applicable to assessing whether a state is bluffing, which is a substantial part of the work.
• Defense and security policy analysis — the Department of Defense, the combatant commands and the federally funded research centres.
• Foreign Service and diplomacy — ⚠ the signalling and credibility material is what negotiation under pressure actually consists of.
• Conflict analysis and early warning — international organisations, NGOs and forecasting programmes.
• Mediation, peacebuilding and humanitarian work — ⚠ though note the coverage caution below; you may need to seek this material elsewhere.
• Political risk consulting and insurance — assessing conflict exposure for firms and investors.
• Think tanks and research institutes.
• ⚠⚠ Graduate study — and this is the course's strongest signal. A PhD in international relations security studies is substantially built on this literature, and a student who can work with formal bargaining arguments is visibly prepared in a way most applicants are not. If a doctorate is a possibility, this is the course to do well in and the faculty member to know.
• Florida context — US Central Command and US Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, US Southern Command in Doral, the associated defence contracting sector, and one of the largest veteran populations in the country.

Special Information

⚠⚠⚠ The number promises peace studies. Neither carrier's title delivers it — and the dedicated number has no carrier at all

This is the finding a student most needs from this page, and it is not anyone's mistake so much as a gap in Florida's provision.

Source	What it promises or delivers
Statewide title	Conflict, Security and Peace Studies in INR
Statewide description	⚠ "security, peace and strategic studies… examines the evolution of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction" — agrees with the title
UWF	International Conflict — bargaining theory of war onset and termination
FGCU	International Armed Conflicts

⚠⚠ The statewide title and description agree with each other, so the state's record is internally consistent — and both carriers appear to deliver the conflict half rather than the peace half.

Now the structural part, which is the useful bit. Florida does number the missing material separately:

Number	Statewide title	Level	Carriers
INR4062	War, Peace and Conflict Resolution in INR	⚠ graduate	⚠⚠ none
INR4333	Introduction to International Security	upper	FGCU only

⚠⚠⚠ So conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction have a dedicated Florida number, it is classified graduate, and no Florida public institution currently carries it. There is effectively no undergraduate home for peace studies in the INR prefix.

What to do about it, because this is actionable rather than merely interesting:

• ⚠ Read the syllabus before assuming coverage. If mediation, negotiated settlement and peacebuilding matter to your plans, check whether they appear as units.
• ⚠⚠ Look outside INR. Conflict resolution is frequently taught under other prefixes — communication, sociology, criminal justice and psychology departments all run negotiation, mediation and conflict resolution courses, and some Florida institutions run dedicated peace and conflict programmes. The subject exists; it is just not reliably here.
• The termination material in UWF's version is the closest thing on offer, and it is genuinely relevant — how wars end is the doorway to why settlements hold.

⚠⚠ Do not confuse it with INR4060 — they are genuinely different courses

UWF carries both, and students routinely assume they overlap.

INR4060 Causes of War	INR4061 International Conflict
Broad and historical. Origins and evolution of war, competing theories across levels of analysis, irregular war and terrorism, the ethics of war, the future of war. Cases: WWI, the Cold War, Iraq.	⚠ Narrow and rationalist. The bargaining model applied rigorously to interstate war, specific testable hypotheses, and war termination.
Take it for breadth and for the normative questions.	Take it for analytical rigour and for graduate preparation.

⚠ They complement each other well and the overlap is smaller than the titles suggest. INR4224 War and Peace in East Asia then applies this course's apparatus to a region, which makes a coherent three-course sequence.

⚠ Expect formal reasoning, and do not be put off by it

The bargaining literature is formal — it uses the language of expected utility, and some readings contain models. ⚠⚠ The course does not normally require you to build models, but it does require you to follow an argument built from assumptions to conclusions and to see where an assumption is doing the work.

⚠ Students with maths anxiety often assume this course is closed to them. It usually is not. The reasoning is logical rather than computational, and the payoff is high: this is the analytical style that distinguishes a serious international relations student, and it transfers to economics, law and policy analysis. If a reading defeats you, the standard advice applies — read the verbal summary, then the model, then the verbal summary again.

Offering Notes

Institution	Its title	Credits	Contact hours	Notes
University of West Florida (SUS)	International Conflict	3	not published	no prerequisite published; may not be repeated for credit; Department of Government, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Florida Gulf Coast University (SUS)	International Armed Conflicts	3	not published	⚠ catalogue not readable — see below

Both carriers award three credits and neither publishes a contact-hour figure, so the 45 hours recorded here is Florida's convention for a three-credit course with no C or L suffix. Florida's statewide record lists the prerequisite as NONE, and neither carrier adds one.

⚠ FGCU's catalogue was not reachable when this guide was written. Its course-information service returned empty responses across every prefix tested, including ones it certainly carries, so this is a service-wide condition rather than evidence about the course — but it does mean FGCU's own description could not be read and its title is the only evidence of its emphasis.

⚠⚠ Take the prerequisite question seriously even though there is none. This course assumes familiarity with basic international relations theory. INR2002 is carried by thirty Florida public institutions — more than any other number in the prefix — so it is easy to get and it will make this course substantially more rewarding.

Position in the curriculum and transfer

An upper-division course in a political science or international relations degree. It pairs with INR4060, INR4124 (statecraft, deterrence and coercive diplomacy) and INR4224.

Florida's statewide record classifies it as transferable to an institution offering the same course, with no Gordon Rule designation and no general-education category, and marks it for dual enrolment with elective high-school credit — ⚠ boilerplate across the prefix.

⚠⚠ On transfer, send the syllabus and say explicitly whether the course covered peace studies and conflict resolution. A receiving programme reading the statewide title will assume it did.

AI Integration

Conflict research is one of the most quantitative corners of political science, and computational methods are now embedded in it — machine-learning conflict forecasting, automated event extraction from news text, and satellite monitoring all feed the data this course analyses.

⚠⚠⚠ And this course, more than most, gives a student the tools to think clearly about what those systems can do — because the bargaining model is itself a theory about INFORMATION.

Follow the argument through, because it is a genuinely good one. The bargaining model says a central cause of war is private information combined with an incentive to misrepresent it: states cannot credibly communicate their true resolve, so they fight to reveal it. ⚠ A naive optimist might conclude that better intelligence and better forecasting should therefore reduce war — more information, fewer bargaining failures. ⚠⚠ The course's own framework says why that is too quick: the problem is not the absence of information but the INCENTIVE TO MISREPRESENT. A state that can better assess its adversary is also a state whose adversary has stronger reason to deceive it — and synthetic media, deepfakes and generated disinformation make deception cheaper at the same time as analysis gets better. Signalling resolve credibly may get harder, not easier.

⚠ That is the kind of argument this course exists to let you make, and it is worth making in a seminar.

Where the tools help in the coursework: unpacking a formal argument in different words until it lands; summarising a dense article; generating the strongest objection to a hypothesis; checking whether you have stated a model's assumptions correctly; and drafting and revising.

⚠⚠ Three cautions.

• Formal arguments get subtly mangled. ⚠ A model will explain the bargaining framework fluently and can misstate which assumption produces which conclusion. In a course where the assumption is the argument, that is not a small error. Check against the original article.
• Fabricated citations and wrong historical detail. Plausible articles that do not exist; plausible casualty figures, dates and treaty terms that are wrong. ⚠ In a field where an argument turns on whether a case fits a pattern, a wrong fact is a wrong conclusion.
• ⚠⚠ Live conflicts are an active information environment, and that is not incidental. Reporting on an ongoing war is contested, and both states and non-state actors work deliberately to shape it. Treat any account of a current conflict — generated or not — as a claim with a source and an interest behind it. ACLED and the International Crisis Group exist precisely because this is hard, and using them is part of the discipline.

⚠ And the standing professional note for anyone heading toward intelligence or defence work: nothing sensitive goes into a consumer chat interface, from the first internship onward.