Week 14 — Readings & Resources · International Relations

Course: Introduction to Political Science (POLS 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Halloran
Objectives covered: Objective 8 (international relations — realism, liberalism, constructivism; the U.N. and international law; the democratic-peace finding).

How to use this page

Everything here is a link to an external resource — open it in your browser, the same way you'd open a YouTube link. Nothing needs to be downloaded, and there is nothing to buy.

This week's load is deliberately light: 2 short readings + 1 video + the primary text you'll use in the workshop, grouped by the ideas from the lecture, plus a couple of optional references. Read or watch one item per group and you're ready for the quiz; do all of them and you'll be very comfortable. Total time is roughly 40–50 minutes if you do everything, far less if you pick one per group.

Order that matches the lecture: ① anarchy, the security dilemma, and the three paradigms → ② the U.N., international law, and the democratic-peace finding → ③ the week's primary text (for the workshop).

A habit to start now: before you trust any claim about "how the world really works" internationally — in these resources or anywhere — ask the question from class: which paradigm is doing the explaining here, and what would the other two say?

① Anarchy, the Security Dilemma & the Three Paradigms

Maps to Lecture Segments 2–4. No world government above states; the security dilemma; realism, liberalism, and constructivism, each in its strongest form.

Reading — "International Relations" (OpenStax, Introduction to Political Science, Ch. 14 Introduction)
🔗 https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/14-introduction
Why it's assigned: a free, readable statement of exactly this week's ground — the actors and structure of the international system, and the principles political scientists use to explain how states interact under anarchy.
⏱ ~12 min

Video — "World History: World Order — Crash Course" or "International Relations 101" (CrashCourse-style overview, YouTube)
🔗 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=crashcourse+international+relations
Why it earns the click: a brisk on-ramp to the vocabulary of this week — sovereignty, anarchy, the balance of power — from a source the course has used before (Week 1's American-government video, Week 3's readings). Search the CrashCourse channel directly if a specific episode link has moved; the series is consistently reliable for a first pass.
⏱ ~10 min

② The U.N., International Law & the Democratic-Peace Finding

Maps to Lecture Segment 6. How the international system functions without a world sheriff — the U.N.'s structure, why states mostly comply with international law, and the debated democratic-peace finding.

Reading — "International Law" (OpenStax, Introduction to Political Science, §15.2)
🔗 https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/15-2-international-law
Why it's assigned: walks the same line the lecture walks — why international law exists and functions despite having no centralized enforcer, and how compliance actually works in practice.
⏱ ~10 min

Reference — United Nations, "UN Charter" (overview + full text, official)
🔗 https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter
Why it's assigned: the U.N.'s own overview page for its founding treaty — background before you dive into the workshop's close reading of Articles 1–2.
⏱ ~5 min

③ The Week's Primary Text (for the Workshop)

You'll analyze this in Political Analysis Workshop 14. Read it once before the workshop so you arrive ready to source it and take its argument apart.

Primary text — The United Nations Charter (signed June 26, 1945, San Francisco; came into force October 24, 1945)
🔗 https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-1 (United Nations — Chapter I: Purposes and Principles, Articles 1–2, official text)
🔗 https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text (United Nations — full Charter text)
Why it's assigned: the founding treaty of the international organization built to prevent a recurrence of the war that had just killed tens of millions — its opening articles state, in plain legal language, the two ideas this week's lecture keeps returning to: sovereign equality (Art. 2(1)) and the prohibition on the threat or use of force (Art. 2(4)). This week you'll run those two sentences through all three IR paradigms.
⏱ ~10 min

Corroborating text — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book V (the Melian Dialogue, ~416 BCE; Crawley translation)
🔗 https://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.5.fifth.html (MIT Classics — the Internet Classics Archive, Book V)
Why it's assigned: the classic ancient proof-text for realist thinking — read alongside the U.N. Charter's twentieth-century promise of sovereign equality, it puts 2,400 years of the same underlying question (what governs relations between unequal powers, absent a higher authority?) side by side.
⏱ ~8 min

Optional one-stop references (free online)

• OpenStax, Introduction to Political Science, Ch. 15 — "The Politics of Globalization" — previews next week's political-economy material.
  🔗 https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/15-introduction
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — entries touching just-war theory and the ethics of war (paraphrase only if you cite it; do not long-quote in-copyright text).
  🔗 https://plato.stanford.edu/
• The United Nations — Main Bodies overview (Security Council, General Assembly, ICJ, and more, official).
  🔗 https://www.un.org/en/about-us

Pick-one quick path (≈25 min total)

In a hurry? Do exactly these and you'll be ready for the quiz:
1. Read OpenStax Ch. 14 Introduction (group ①) — the international system and the three paradigms' vocabulary.
2. Read U.N. Charter Chapter I (Arts. 1–2) once, slowly (group ③) — for the workshop.

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell Prof. Halloran and use the OpenStax contents page or the United Nations' own UN Charter hub (un.org/en/about-us/un-charter) above in the meantime.