Outcomes

Upon completion of the BA degree in International Security and Law, students will be able to: 1. Recognize and describe enduring security problems and new developments (e.g., military, economic, demographic, environmental, and technological change; sustainable development; forced migration, and humanitarian emergencies), and the effects of the international system on defense policies of states, particularly the tension between national demands and international interdependence; 2. Classify and appraise the policy tools available to address security challenges, and the likely costs and consequences of these tools; 3. Identify and assess the relationship between war, peacetime settlements, politics, and strategy, particularly the issues of morality in armed conflict, and implications of such ideas for international relations; 4. Explain the relationship between law and security and how law can be used to pursue international security and foreign policy; 5. Identify the links between diplomacy and foreign policy, and the role of international diplomats in forwarding their governments’ objectives; 6. Identify the organizations comprising the US national security apparatus, and this structure’s legal underpinnings derived from the US Constitution and federal law; 7. Describe the diversity of states and how governmental form conditions foreign policy, including authoritarianism and democratization; 8. Identify and synthesize the theories and debates in international politics: conflict, human rights, international organizations, trade, economics, and development; 9. Describe the fundamentals of US government and politics, essential for any security professional operating either domestically or in a multilateral setting; 10. Generate research questions and develop investigative strategies to explain political phenomena; calculate and interpret basic statistics; and understand the ethical concerns that pertain to the conduct of research on human subjects; 11. Conduct basic statistical analyses and apply statistical inference and causal reasoning to analyze social scientific and policy issues; and 12. Critically assess social scientific and policy arguments; apply the fundamentals and theories of international security to evaluate the quality, credibility, and limitations of an international security policy solution.