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This module is only suitable for advanced undergraduate students and requires sound methodological knowledge, including familiarity with quantitative research. Students should also have taken POLS001 International Conflict and Cooperation and POLS0019 International Security (or equivalent) before taking this module.

The module is about the causes, dynamics, and consequences of terrorism and how we can empirically study them. As such, it places as much emphasis on the practical process of scientifically studying terrorism as on the subject itself. We will draw on insights from political science, sociology, psychology, criminology, economics, and history to shed light on the historical trends in terrorist activity, the relationship of terrorism to other forms of political violence, the use of one-sided violence in civil conflicts, 鈥渆xtremism鈥�, radicalization, and the system and individual-level roots of terrorism, the role of religion in contemporary transnational terrorism, as well as the effects and effectiveness of this strategy of political violence. We will also examine the policy responses available to political decision makers in the field of security.

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Learning goals:

• Be familiar with the key theoretical arguments on each of the module鈥檚 topics.
• Be able to critically engage with existing theoretical arguments.
• Be able to develop your own theoretical argument, including empirically testable hypotheses.
• Know how to empirically examine theoretically relevant questions on terrorism.
• Be able to develop a research design that can test the empirical expectations of a theoretical argument.
• Be familiar with the methodological challenges to empirical studies of terrorism.

Expectations:

This advanced political science module is based on the expectations that you鈥�

• have good prior knowledge of theories in conflict research;
• are familiar with empirical (including quantitative) research (= you should know how to interpret quantitative and qualitative evidence);
• show strong interest in deepening your knowledge of empirical political science and applying it to the study of terrorism;
• participate actively in the seminar exercises (computers are required!);
• and invest about two hours per week in preparation for the seminars, in addition to reading the required texts specified in the syllabus and watching the online lectures.
• Experience with statistics programmes, such as R or Stata, is advantageous, but not required.

Delivery:

Please note that this module is designed as an 鈥渁pprenticeship鈥�-style research module and does not follow the traditional lecture-seminar approach. Hence, there are no in-person lectures in this module. Instead, weekly teaching delivery will be divided into one 50-minute interactive discussion of the weekly readings (with the whole class) and one 50-minute workshop-based seminar (in the smaller seminar groups).

The lectures will be available online on Moodle and you are expected to watch them ahead of class, in addition to the two teaching contact hours. These lectures will focus on the 鈥渂igger picture鈥� of each week鈥檚 topic, summarizing the relevant theoretical debates and key empirical findings. While the interactive discussions of the weekly readings (with the whole class) aim to deepen your theoretical understanding and practice critical reasoning, the workshop-based seminars serve to illustrate how to empirically study terrorism. To this end, over the course of the term, you will work together in small peer groups to develop a research design tackling a research question of your own choice related to terrorist violence, ultimately resulting in the 30%-weighted group portfolio assessment. You will also submit a 70%-weighted individual essay after the end of the module.

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Accompanying textbook:

King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press.