Use of Force and Diplomacy

The Mershon Center's first area of focus in international security studies is the use of force and diplomacy. This covers an array of projects, including:

• A Comparative Study of Herder-Farmer Conflicts in West Africa, which looks at why some of these conflicts become violent while most do not.
• American Musicians in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy, which examines the State Department's program to send musicians around the world during the Cold War.
• Civic Order and Dispute Resolution in 14th and 15th Century London, which investigates the ways in which London promoted a civic culture of order that provided a favorable environment for dispute resolution.
• If it Bleeds, It Leads: Assessing Media Effects on Transnational Terrorism, which explores a new method of measuring the role of mass media in terrorist attacks.
• Cultivating the Masses: Soviet State Intervention in its International Context, 1914-39, argues that Soviet state intervention was one of the approaches pursued around the globe to prepare populations for mass warfare, at the end of WWI.
• Mershon Network of International Historians, an online association for scholars engaged in the study of twentieth century European international relations.
• The Ecology of Terrorist Organizations, which analyzes the birth and death of terrorist groups as part of a larger social ecology.
• Passport, the newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
• Rentier States and International Terrorism, which examines the relationship between states that export natural resources such as oil and terrorist acts.
• Ostpolitk and Israel, which looks at the tenuous relationship between West Germany and Israel between 1966 and 1974.
• Symbolic Opposition to the USA Patriot Act, which studies symbolic protest of the Patriot Act by city governments across the United States.
• Reconstructing the Cold War, a social constructivist account of the Cold War.

To learn more, please click on the links above.