Curriculum Map

International Relations

In February 2022, deterrence failed and most expert predictions failed with it. What followed became the most openly documented war in history — a standing laboratory. Ten units that run the field's three great frameworks against the live case, teach open-source verification as a method, and treat the dollar system as strategic terrain.

10 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

Three Days That Lasted Years

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and nearly every confident prediction made about the following seventy-two hours turned out to be wrong. This unit opens the course's standing laboratory: why deterrence failed, why forecasters with excellent information got the outcome wrong, and how three competing theoretical lenses will spend the rest of the course arguing over what actually happened and why.

2-3 weeks

The Three Lenses

Realism, liberalism, and constructivism are the three major traditions through which international relations scholars explain why states do what they do. This unit builds all three properly, then tests them against a single 2,400-year-old text — Thucydides's Melian Dialogue — reading the same conversation three different ways to show what each lens sees and what each lens misses.

2-3 weeks

The End of History Hypothesis

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy represented the final form of human government — not the end of conflict, but the end of any serious ideological rival. This unit reads Fukuyama fully and fairly, tests democratic peace theory against three and a half decades of evidence, and scores the thesis honestly against its out-of-sample failures: Georgia, Crimea, and the war this course opened with.

2-3 weeks

The Unusable Weapon

Nuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons ever built and among the least usable, because using them risks destroying the user along with the target. This unit builds deterrence theory properly — Schelling's compellence/deterrence distinction, mutual assured destruction, Kahn's escalation ladder — and maps it onto the nuclear signaling that has run alongside the Ukraine war since 2022.

2-3 weeks

The Dollar Is a Battleship

Reserve currency status, SWIFT membership, and correspondent banking are not background financial plumbing — they are strategic terrain, and the frozen Russian central bank reserves are the largest financial weapon ever deployed in a single conflict. This unit treats the money architecture as a weapons system, examines why sanctions underperformed the strongest predictions, and asks which direction the arrow really runs between economics, law, and politics.

2-3 weeks

Alliances Are Promises

NATO's Article 5 does not say what most people think it says. This unit reads the actual treaty text, treats alliance credibility as reputation sustained in a repeated game, and uses Finland and Sweden's 2022-2023 accession decisions as a natural experiment in what makes states trust — or stop trusting — a promise on paper.

2-3 weeks

The Satellite in Your Pocket

A shadow's length, a street sign in the background of a shaky phone video, and a commercial satellite image can together verify a claim more rigorously than an eyewitness statement. This unit teaches open-source intelligence as a working method — geolocation, equipment-loss counting, and chain-of-custody reasoning — using Bellingcat's MH17 investigation as the founding case, and is honest about what the method cannot see.

2-3 weeks

The Information Front

A firehose is not built to persuade you of one story. It is built to make you doubt all of them. This unit teaches narrative warfare as a distinct instrument of state power, holds a genuine scholarly argument and a Kremlin talking point in the same hand without collapsing either, and asks why the war's information theater played so differently in Washington than in Lagos.

2-3 weeks

The Authoritarian International

Autocracies used to be understood as isolated regimes, each locked in its own internal struggle against its own citizens. Anne Applebaum's Autocracy, Inc. argues they now function as a networked system, bound by transactions rather than ideology. This unit traces that system through its financial plumbing, its transnational repression, and its documented procurement web — and asks what a citizen is supposed to do once the mechanics are visible.

2-3 weeks

Drones, Chips, and Attrition

A $500 drone can destroy a $3 million tank. That single fact has rewritten the economics of war, and this unit reads it the way a defense-economics briefing would: force generation, the artillery-shell production race, semiconductors as strategic terrain, and an honest reckoning with what generalizes to the next war and what does not.

2-3 weeks

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.