• Students gain insight into the interconnectedness of the main sub-disciplines of political science: Political Theory, International Relations and Conflict Studies.
• Students gain the ability to recognise, in a specific case of a scientifically relevant political question, how the various sub-disciplinary perspectives address a problem and how they differ in their approach.
• Students acquire the ability to analyse a scientifically relevant political question by using the various sub-disciplinary approaches in the field of political science.
• Students acquire the ability to reflect critically, and to develop and defend a reasoned perspective of their own, on just war theory.
• Building on the insights from previous courses in the master’s curriculum, students acquire the ability to reflect critically on the extent to which modern warfare is different from traditional warfare and what implications this has for political science theory.
• Students gain experience in transferring the insights they acquired in class to different domains beyond academia, e.g. gamification, training and civic education.
• Students acquire the ability to distinguish different scenarios in situations of moral conflict through developing a board game prototype.
• Students gain experience in project management and team coordination processes through the collaborative process of developing a board game prototype.

This course aims at the cross-fertilisation of several sub-disciplines within political science. Students explore the relationship between Political Theory, International Relations and Conflict Studies by addressing the normative debate surrounding ‘just wars’. The course also includes an applied perspective, which allows students to move beyond the academic engagement with the topic by developing gamified training materials for politicians and civil servants faced with the dilemmas surrounding the ‘just war’ debate.
    
In the first part of this course students will gain insights into the ‘just war’ debate, which traditionally focused on the right to initiating a war and on the proper conduct of actors during a war. Recently, a third element has been added: the extent to which post-conflict resolution should be subject to certain norms. All three debates reflect a fourth debate, which some have labelled a ‘non-debate’: the extent to which the domain of international relations can be the subject of moral judgment in the first place. We will address all these issues by examining the political theoretical arguments and by assessing and explaining the extent to which actors in world politics actually follow these political theoretical arguments. Special attention is paid to the exchange of views between normative models from political theory and empirical research in International Relations. In addition we will discuss to what extent the insights of just war theory are challenged by modern political and military reality.

In the second part of this course we will take an applied perspective towards the moral dilemmas of war faced by politicians and civil servants. In small groups, students will take on the role of game designers to develop training materials with the purpose of transferring the dilemmas surrounding the ‘just war’ debate into board game prototypes. The group results will be presented to experts and practitioners in the field in a final conference at the end of the course.