Hello. My name is Miguel A Centeno and I'm a professor here at Princeton University. This is my office. I teach in the Woodrow Wilson School in the department of Sociology. And now I'm teaching this course on Coursera called The Paradoxes of War. What I want to just do in a couple minutes is introduce you to what we're trying to do with the course, what the different parts of the course will look like, and then get you going on the material itself. So what's this course about? The course is really about both war and sociology. I don't expect to teach you everything there is to know about war. I don't expect to teach you everything there is to know about sociology. What I want to do is to use war as a way of showing you what a sociological perspective is. And a sociological perspective is very hard to define, but it's essentially challenging the normality or challenging the naturalness of things and trying to wonder how institutions, how behaviors are constructed. How do we come to act in a certain way and have a certain kind of institution. And we're going to use war for that. We could use the economy, we could use love, we could use sports, we could use all sorts of examples. But we're going to ask those questions. Why do we fight the way we fight? Why is it that we do the things we do? And we're going to do it about war. Now, this topic could take years upon years upon years of coverage. I've devoted the last 15 years to reading everything I can about war. And I've just explore very, very small amount. So what I'm giving you is a very selective view. It is what I have gathered from all of these materials. I have never served in a war. So all my knowledge is you basically see right behind me. I've studied it. I've explored it. I've analyzed it. I've written about it. I've spoken to a lot of people about it. And what I want to do is condense that, and to give you a bunch of items that you can think about, that you can process. And hopefully you'll have a much better understanding, not only of war, but of your everyday reality. Now, we're going to do that through four different ways. The most important part, perhaps, are these lectures. You should feel free to go through them. You should pause them. You should repeat them. You can ignore them if you want. They're my way of sort of summarizing all of this material that I present in my class and in my seminars. They are very much of a summary again, any specific things that you want to explore, I can suggest readings, I can suggest other sources. But for now, this is an introductory format, this is a way of getting you to think about the various aspects of war. So we're going to be covering the psychology of war, we're going to be covering the history of war, the sociology of war, the anthropology of war, the economics of war. And letting you in a sense have these various insights and hopefully put them back together again when we discuss what the future of war might be in the 21st century. The second part of the class is readings. Now again, we're not offering you credit. So obviously, you are free to do as much of these readings as you want. And we can think of two different reading programs. The first one is basically following the same reading list or a condensed version of the reading list that I use in my Princeton class. So, for example, in the first couple of weeks. You might read a little bit of Thucydides and a little bit of Homer. It is impossible to have a notion of war as practiced in the Western world without a familiarity with these two authors. Our images of war, our ideas about war. Our values about war are in some ways condensed in these two texts. And I won't ask you to read all of them, but just selected parts. And then, along with various weeks you'll get more and more readings, especially more contemporary ones. You don't have to worry. The whole class is not about Greek classics. A second alternative reading is this wonderful book, which just came out as we were finishing taping this class. It's by professor Ian Morris at the Stanford University. And it's called War, What is it Good For. I wish I'd had this book four or five years ago. It's an absolutely brilliant book, and beautifully written. And I, and by coincidence. Professor Morris and I coincide on several things, we disagree on others. But the structure of this book and the structure of the class are very similar. So another way you could do it is simply to follow along. It'll be very clear which classes go with which chapters. And just follow along. On this side, or you can do this supplemented with the readings or vice versa, or you can simply choose not to read any of these materials. If you're going to do that, I would urge you, however, to once a week at least, go through kind of search engine. And look under something like war, and see what kinds of contemporary events are going on. Since this is a global class, we really want to get the input of everyone around the world, as they're seeing events going on that have to do with the course right outside their window. The third part of the course is a series of exercises. Now usually tests, et cetera, are meant to give you a grade. Or meant to in a sense quantify how much of the knowledge you have absorbed. We're not interested in doing that. We want to use these tests as a third mechanism by which you can learn more about the material. So I will be talking at you quite a bit and hopefully learning from that. You'll be reading on your own and learning from that and then the exams, if you will, or exercises will allow you to put these two together in new ways. So we want you to treat these exercises as learning tools, not as duties that have to be accomplished. The fourth part of the class is unfortunately perhaps the most limited. This is communications between you and me directly. Now I wish we could have thousands of you visit Princeton. I would like to go on a world tour, meeting all of you. But those are impossible, so we're going to try to use digital technology. What that means is that once a week, I'm going to look through the various fora. The various discussion groups, et cetera. For questions that are popping up. Questions that seems to be broad enough of interest to the entire class. I will also reflect on things that I don't know about. And tell you what I'm learning from you. And we will have an unfortunately, a pretty one-way, but at least some kind of conversation. I'll do this once a week, and we'll set these up along with the lectures. So, you know, again as imperfect as it might be, there is an opportunity for us to converse on one way or the other. I am going to ask one favor, it's very easy to get my email here, at Princeton. So I would rather if you have questions about the class, or comments about the class, make it on the core site. There's lots of opportunity, lots of spaces for you to do so. That will allow me to know, in a sense, what kind of work I have to do for the class. And, it won't interrupt the other work that I'm getting, believe me, the lots and lots of other work, that I'm getting through my regular email. So that'll be great. And, that way we can get a communication going, we can get a conversation going. And, by the end of the class, we'll actually get to know each other, quite a bit. So, again, if this were a meal I want this course to be a dessert. I don't want it to be a vegetable that you have to go through. I want it to be something that you can savor, that you can enjoy, that you can use to better understand your world. And with that, let's go on to lesson one.
