Hoover History Lab

POLISCI 116/316 / IntPol 222 / HIS 105F

Global Futures: History, Statecraft, Systems

Professors: Stephen Kotkin and Condoleezza Rice

TAs: Norman Joshua, Jonathan Roll, Lucian Staiano-Daniels

Winter 2025

Where does the future come from? It comes from the past, of course – but how? What are the key drivers of continuity or change, and how can we trace those drivers going forward, too? What are the roles of contingency, chance, and choice, versus long-term underlying structure? How can people, from whatever walk of life, identify and utilize levers of power to try to shift the larger system? What is a system, and how do systems behave? To answer these questions and analyze how today’s world came into being and where it might be headed, this course explores geopolitics and geoeconomics, institutions and technologies, citizenship and leadership. We examine how our world works to understand the limits but also the possibilities of individual and collective agency, the phenomenon of perverse and unintended consequences, and ultimately, the nature of power. Our goal is to investigate not just how to conceive of a smart policy, but how its implementation might unfold. In sum, this course aims to combine strategic analysis and tactical agility.

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POLISCI234R

Deadly Bands: Introduction to the Political Problem of Violent Male Groups

Instructor: Lucian Staiano-Daniels

Fall 2025-26

Thugs. Goons. Stormtroopers. Bandits. Gangsters. Rioters. King Lear's unruly knights. History is full of these men. But the same men are also police officers, militiamen, guild members, and soldiers. They can also do any of these things part-time. Why and how do men participate in violent groups? What happens when states cooperate with these groups, suppress them, or attempt to use them? And why are these groups so startlingly like one another, within many different polities and during many different times? This course will analyze political interactions in terms of contested negotiations around male interpersonal violence. It will explore these negotiations through groups of what Charles Tilly called "violence specialists:" soldiers, the police, thugs, criminals, etc. In many times and places, these men were and are a "labor pool" of violence who offer security and muscle; and who also turn to criminal activity. The relationships of violence specialists to states can be cooperative or ambivalent as well as antagonistic¿or networks of these men can make up the state itself. The political challenge of violent men who are embedded in the rest of society - at once of it and outsiders to it - will always be with us. It is important for issues like post-Soviet states, the spike in violence during the Covid plague and its equally sudden decline, the militarization of police, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's Syria. An exploration of this challenge includes an excerpt from Stanford's own history.

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