My End of the World Syllabus

Don't tell me you're not intrigued.

Photo by Nikoli Afina on Unsplash

Longtime readers of Drezner’s World are aware of my day job: professor of international politics at the Fletcher School. In recent years I have developed a few new courses in response to current events. Developing new courses, particularly new lecture courses, can be a heavy lift. It means preparing a lot of new lecture notes,¹ calibrating the readings to fit the student body, and trying to make sure the classroom content and assigned readings complement each other.

Last year I rolled out a course on economic statecraft, which helped pave the way for my review article on the topic. This spring I’m teaching a revised version of what I originally called my apocalypse course: “The End of the World and What Comes After.”

I first taught this course virtually in the spring of 2021 and then in person in the Spring of 2022. A lot has happened in the past two years, so the syllabus has been updated as well. Will it lead to a subsequent publication? Maybe!

Readers of Drezner’s World may be interested in the content of this course, so I’ve posted the key portions of the syllabus below for those who are interested. Bear in mind that this is a course is aimed at masters-level students in international affairs. That means the readings are more scholarly than they would ordinarily be for an undergraduate class but contain more policy pieces than a class for doctoral students.

This is also a course that contains material outside my traditional areas of expertise. In other words, I might have missed something obvious. Anyone who wants to suggest something I am missing or comment on something I am including is welcome to do so in the comments.

Enjoy!

OVERVIEW

The world has been coming to an end for some time now.  Take your pick of catastrophe:  terrorism, financial crisis, nuclear war, cyber-collapse, natural disasters, devastating pandemics, or climate change.  It seems as if the twenty-first century has been replete with world-defining catastrophes and we are not even a quarter of the way through it.

At the same time, however, it is worth remembering two important contextual notes when thinking about the end times.  The first is that the world has already ended many times before.  According to Elizabeth Kolbert, the Earth has already experienced five extinction-level events.  The history of the human race suggests several near-extinction-level events in the prehistoric era. Even short of planetary apocalypse, major civilizations have collapsed in the past, but humanity has endured.  When catastrophes strike, like the Black Death or the Great Influenza, humanity adapts and overcomes. 

The second is that the apocalypse has been overpredicted in human history.  Parson Malthus warned about a demographic time bomb in the late eighteenth century.  The Club of Rome confidently announced the inexorable depletion of key natural resources in the 1970s.  Y2K was supposed to break the Internet on January 1, 2000.  Many people embraced the misplaced eschatological beliefs surrounding the Mayan prediction of the end of civilization in December 2012.  All we got out of that last one was a mediocre Roland Emmerich film. 

This course originated from the reality of COVID-19 but focuses on the larger questions the pandemic raises about systemic collapses and the ability of the world to respond to them.  It starts with some theoretical considerations of why societies might not be prepared to cope with looming catastrophes.  These include problems of collective action, time discounting, failures to differentiate risk and uncertainty, normal accidents, bureaucratic politics, millenarian beliefs, and the anarchical structure of international politics.  It then considers which kinds of societies and structures are better placed to respond to disasters and catastrophes. 

The next section considers the myriad categories of threats – both real and imagined – that have affected and will affect the planet.  These threats range from pandemics to financial crises to nuclear catastrophes to climate change to… more exotic possibilities.  The final section considers more generic strategies to prevent the end of the world and to promote human flourishing. 

THE READINGS

Daniel W. Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, Apocalypse Edition (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2022).

Frank Snowden, Epidemics and Society:  From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2019).

COURSE OUTLINE

PART ONE: THEORIES OF SYSTEMIC COLLAPSE

I.  An introduction to the end of the world

Rebecca Solnit, “The Uses of Disaster,” Harper’s, October 2005.

Andrew Lawler, “Collapse? What Collapse? Societal Change Revisited,” Science 330 (November 12, 2010): 907-909.

Umair Haque, “If Life Feels Bleak, It’s Because Our Civilization is Beginning to Collapse,” Eudamonia, July 3, 2020.

Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the world of the polycrisis,” Financial Times, October 28, 2022.

Ana Marie Cox, “We Are Not Just Polarized. We Are Traumatized,” The New Republic, September 14, 2023.

II.  Why the world is worth preserving

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chapter one.

Shawn Dorius and Glenn Firebaugh, “Trends in Global Gender Inequality,” Social Forces 88 (July 2010):  1941-1968.

Angus Deaton, The Great Escape (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2013), chapter two.

Max Roser, “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better,” Our World in Data, July 20, 2022.

III.  Thinking about systems:  Equilibrium, disequilibrium, and catastrophe

Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), introduction and chapter one.

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York:  Random House, 2007), prologue and chapter four.

Peter Kareiva and Emma Fuller, “Beyond Resilience:  How to Better Prepare for the Profound Disruption of the Anthropocene.”  Global Policy 7 (May 2016):  107-118. 

IV.  The exogenous and endogenous sources of systemic risk

Robert Merton, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.”  American Sociological Review 1 (December 1936):  894-904.

Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents (New York:  Basic Books, 1984), introduction, chapter one and chapter three.

Dirk Helbing, “Globally networked risks and how to respond,” Nature 497 (2 May 2013):  51-59. 

V.  Apocalyptic narratives and thinking about the unthinkable

Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, 9-30.

Daniel W. Drezner, “Metaphor of the Living Dead: Or, the Effect of the Zombie Apocalypse on Public Policy Discourse.”  Social Research 81 (Winter 2014):  825-849.

Charli Carpenter and Kevin Young, “Does Science Fiction Affect Political Fact? Yes and No: A Survey Experiment on ‘Killer Robots,’” International Studies Quarterly 62 (September 2018):  562-576. 

Kevin Bankston, “How Sci-Fi Like WarGames Led to Real Policy During the Reagan Administration,” Slate, October 8, 2018.

VI.  The first image: Catastrophe and the individual

Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, 1-8, 103-110.

Shelley Taylor and David Armor, “Positive illusions and coping with adversity,” Journal of Personality 64 (December 1996): 873-898.

Philip Tetlock, “Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (July 2003):  320-324.

John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler, “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking,” Science Advances 5 (October 16, 2019): eaav5916.

VII.  Experts and masses

Snowden, Epidemics and Society, chapters 2, 10-12.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Avital Pilpel, “Epistemology and risk management,” Risk & Regulation 13 (2007): 6-7.

Mai’a Davis Cross, “Rethinking epistemic communities twenty years later,” Review of International Studies 39 (January 2013):  137-160.  

Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, D. Alex Hughes and David G. Victor, “The Cognitive Revolution and the Political Psychology of Elite Decision Making,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (June 2013):  368-386.

Jonathan Wiener, “The Tragedy of the Uncommons:  On the Politics of Apocalypse,” Global Policy 7 (May 2016):  67-80. 

Robert Huber, Esther Greussing, and Jakob-Moritz Eberl, “From populism to climate scepticism: the role of institutional trust and attitudes towards science,” Environmental Politics 31 (November 2022): 1115-1138.

VIII.  The second image: Catastrophe and the Weberian state

Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, 81-102.

Amy B. Zegart, “September 11 and the Adaptation Failure of US Intelligence Agencies,” International Security 29 (Spring 2005): 78-111.

Jack Goldstone, “Pathways to State Failure,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 25 (September 2008):  285-296

Andrew Healy and Neil Mahotra, “Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy,” American Political Science Review 103 (August 2009):  387-406.

Daniel P. Aldrich and Michelle A. Meyer, “Social Capital and Community Resilience,” American Behavioral Scientist 59 (February 2015): 254-269.

Brink Lindsey, “State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, And How to Get It Back,” Niskanen Center, November 2021.

IX. The third image: Anarchy and the dilemmas of global collective action

Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, pp. 31-80.

Elinor Ostrom, “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Summer 2000):  137–158.

Miguel Centeno et al, “The Emergence of Global Systemic Risk,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (2015):  65-85.

Todd Sandler, “Strategic Aspects of Difficult Global Challenges,” Global Policy 7 (May 2016):  45-55.

Scott Barrett, “Collective Action to Avoid Catastrophe: When Countries Succeed, When They Fail, and Why.” Global Policy 7 (May 2016):  45-55.

Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney, “Bad World:  The Negativity Bias in International Politics,” International Security 43 (Winter 2018/19):  96-140.

PART TWO:  POSSIBLE ENDS OF THE WORLD

X. Overpopulation and resource depletion

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, chapters 1, 7, 18.

Emily Meierding, “Dismantling the oil wars myth,” Security Studies 25 (Spring 2016): 258-288.

Malcolm Wiener, “The Collapse of Civilizations,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs paper, September 2018. 

Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan, “The Age of Energy Insecurity,” Foreign Affairs 102 (May/June 2023):  104-119.

XI.  Quiet risks

Joseph F. Coates, “Risks and threats to civilization, humankind, and the earth,” Futures 41 (December 2009): 694-705.

David C. Denkenberger and Robert W. Blair Jr., “Interventions that may prevent or mollify supervolcanic eruptions,” Futures 102 (October 2018): 51-62.

Hin-Yan Liu, Kristian Cedervall Lauta, and Matthijs Michiel Maas, “Governing Boring Apocalypses.”  Futures 102 (September 2018): 6-19.

XII.  Pandemics

Snowden, Epidemics and Society, chapters 4-9, 13, 19-21.

Richard Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg, The Epidemic that Never Was: Policy-Making and the Swine Flu Scare (New York: Vintage, 1983), pp. 17–22, 46, 57–59, 95–97, and 105.

Gregory Koblentz, “Biosecurity Reconsidered: Calibrating Biological Threats and Responses." International Security 34 (Spring 2010): 96-132.

Alex DeWaal, “New Pathogen, Old Politics,” Boston Review, April 3, 2020.

Michael Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, “The Pandemic That Won’t End,” Foreign Affairs, March 8, 2021.

XIII.  Great power war

James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49 (Summer 1995):  379-414.  

Andrew Krepinevich, “The Eroding Balance of Terror,” Foreign Affairs 98 (January/February 2019):  62-74. 

Roseanne McManus, “Revisiting the Madman Theory: Evaluating the Impact of Different Forms of Perceived Madness in Coercive Bargaining,” Security Studies 28 (October 2019):  976-1009.

Matthew Kroenig, “International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming,” Foreign Policy, August 27, 2022.

XIV.  Nuclear accidents

Bradley A. Thayer, “The Risk of Nuclear Inadvertence: A Review Essay,” Security Studies 3 (Spring 1994): 428-93.

Alan Robock, “Nuclear Winter,” Climate Change 1 (May 2010):  418-427.  

Erik Gartzke and Jon Lindsay, “Thermonuclear Cyberwar,” Journal of Cybersecurity 3 (March 2017): 37-48.

XV.  Cyber and AI

Mark Manion and William Evan, “The Y2K problem and professional responsibility: a retrospective analysis,” Technology and Society 22 (August 2000):  361-387.

Andy Greenberg, “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History,” Wired, August 22, 2018.

Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, and Jeremy Wallace, “Spirals of Delusion,” Foreign Affairs 101 (September/October 2022):  168-181.

Ian Hogarth, “We must slow down the race to God-like AI,” Financial Times, April 13, 2023.

David Streitfield, “Silicon Valley Confronts the Idea That the ‘Singularity’ Is Here,” New York Times, June 11, 2023.

“Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks today,” Nature, June 27, 2023.

“Does AI Pose an Existential Risk to Humanity? Two Sides Square Off,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2023.

XVI.  Environmental change

Peter Haas, “Banning Chlorofluorocarbons: Epistemic community efforts to protect stratospheric ozone,” International Organization 46 (January 1992): 187-224.

Karl Butzer, “Collapse, environment, and society,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (March 6, 2012):  3632-3639. 

Bill McKibben, “130 Degrees,” New York Review of Books, August 20, 2020.

Jeff Colgan, Jessica Green, and Thomas Hale, “Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change,” International Organization 75 (Spring 2021):  586-610.

David Victor, Marcel Lumkowsky, and Astrid Dannenberg, “Determining the credibility of commitments in international climate policy,” Nature Climate Change 12 (November 2022): 793-800.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023 Synthesis Report, Summary for Policymakers,  March 20, 2023.

XVII.  Are we in a polycrisis?

World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report 2023, pp. 6-13, 29-69.

Daniel W. Drezner, “Are we headed toward a ‘polycrisis’? The buzzword of the moment, explained,” Vox, January 28, 2023.

Michael Lawrence, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Scott Janzwood, Johan Rockström, Ortwin Renn, and Jonathan Donges, “Global Polycrisis:  The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement,” Cascade Institute technical paper, June 2023.

XVIII.  Distracting risks and distracting responses

Elizabeth Kolbert, “Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?” The New Yorker, January 18, 2021.

Garrett Graff, “The U.S. Government UFO Cover-Up Is Real – But It’s Not What You Think,” The Atlantic, November 17, 2023.

Jennifer Rubinstein, “The Lessons of Effective Altruism,” Ethics & International Affairs 30 (December 2016):  511-526.

PART THREE:  WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

XIX.  Right of boom: preparing for the end of the world (4/24)  

William McNeill, “Control and Catastrophe in Human Affairs,” Daedalus 118 (Winter 1989):  1-15.

Julian Brave NoiseCat, “How to Survive an Apocalypse and Keep Dreaming,” The Nation, June 2, 2020.

Eula Bianca Villar and Francesc Miralles. “Purpose‐driven improvisation during organisational shocks: case narrative of three critical organisations and Typhoon Haiyan.” Disasters 45 (April 2021): 477-497.

Harold James, “Productive and unproductive crises,” VoxEU, September 6, 2023.

XX.  Left of boom: preventing the end of the world

Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch, and Tim Williams, “The benefits of forced experimentation:  Striking evidence from the London underground network.” VoxEU, September 15, 2015. 

Seth Baum et al, “Long-term trajectories of human civilization,” Foresight 21 (March 2019):  53-83. 

Peter Scoblic, “Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies,” New America Foundation, December 2021.

Frances Z. Brown, “Governance for Resilience:  How Can States Prepare for the Next Crisis?”  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 2022. 

Rajiv Shah, “Big Bets,” November 23, 2023.

Rainer Sachs, “The governance of uncertainty: how to respond to non-quantifiable threats,” Environment Systems and Decisions 43 (22 July 2023):  537-543.

1. There are some professors who possess the qualities necessary to walk into a classroom without a single note and perorate for an hour plus on the subject matter at hand with barely an “um” or an “ah.” I am not one of those professors.