Paradoxes of War - Princeton University | Coursera Miguel A. Centeno Musgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs Princeton University

About this Course

The Paradoxes of War teaches us to understand that war is not only a normal part of human existence, but is arguably one of the most important factors in making us who we are. Through this course, I hope that you will come to appreciate that war is both a natural expression of common human emotions and interactions and a constitutive part of how we cohere as groups. That is, war is paradoxically an expression of our basest animal nature and the exemplar of our most vaunted and valued civilized virtues. You will learn some basic military history and sociology in this course as a lens for the more important purpose of seeing the broader social themes and issues related to war. I want you to both learn about war, but more importantly, use it as way of understanding your everyday social world. So, for example, the discussion of war and gender will serve to start you thinking about how expectations of masculinity are created and our discussion of nationalism will make clear how easy “us-them” dichotomies can be established and (ab)used. I will suggest some readings for you to complement the class and assign some activities through which you will be able to apply the theoretical insights from the course to your observations of everyday life. At the end of the course, you will start to see war everywhere and come to appreciate how much it defines our life.

Professor Centeno is the Musgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the WWS. He was the founding Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (2003-2007) and Master of Wilson College (1997-2004). In 2000, he founded the Princeton University Preparatory Program. He is interested in political sociology and social change. He is the author of Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation State in Latin America, and Global Capitalism among other works. He is also the editor of Discrimination in an Unequal World, Towards a New Cuba and The Politics of Expertise in Latin America, The Other Mirror: Comparative Theory Through A Latin American Lens (ed. with F. Lopez-Alves); and Mapping the Global Web (ed. with E. Hargittai). Forthcoming books include War and Society, 2014 and Building States in the Developing World (w. A. Kohli and D. Yashar). New projects include an analysis of “emergent risk” in global flows and a history of the concept of discipline