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The Keller Center

The Pearson Institute is housed in the Keller Center, located at 1307 E 60th St on the University of Chicago campus.

Harris

Public

Policy

Harris Public Policy is offering the following courses as part of The Pearson Institute’s academic programming in 2024–25. These courses create an intellectual context for conflict study and introduce students to new tools and methodologies.

Students can broaden their perspectives through elective courses at Harris Public Policy and in other schools and divisions, including the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Law School, and Social Sciences Division.

Global Conflict Policy Lab

This course, led by Rebecca J. Wolfe, is held in partnership with Harris Policy Labs, a unique initiative in which teams of second-year students apply their rigorous core education to real-time public policy challenges facing client organizations. Students in this lab were split into teams to work on projects with different clients to tackle real-world conflict and development policy issues through data analysis. Past teams of students have focused on projects such as informing state-level peace policies; developing a database to track labor market access policies for refugee-hosting countries; examining the relationship between climate change and armed conflict; informing survey methodologies for global organizations; and testing assumptions of countering violent extremism interventions.

Hydropolitics: Water Policy and Conflict

Water resources are increasingly contested in nearly all parts of the world. Available freshwater supplies have declined nearly 40 percent since 1970, and the UN predicts that 1.8 billion people will not have sufficient water to meet all of their daily needs by 2025. Water conflict is essentially a political problem because it reflects normative disagreements about who has the authority to define its value and appropriate uses. This course examines conflict over water and policy efforts to deal with intersectoral competition, international allocation, and the diplomatic and economic consequences of water resource depletion. The course, taught by Michael Tiboris, begins with a discussion of water’s status as an object of policy—as property, a commodity, entitlement, and natural good. It then turns to a series of policy challenges in context, including agricultural water use, allocation treaties, development disputes, violence over resource instability, and domestic water justice conflicts.

Nuclear Policy: Dilemmas in Decisionmaking

This course, taught by Kennette Benedict, will examine national and international policies on the uses of nuclear energy—both military and civilian. Students will review current military doctrines and plans for nuclear war-fighting, particularly those of the United States and Russia, as well as the likely effects of nuclear war. The course will review the history of international proliferation of nuclear technology and material as well as contemporary efforts to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons through international treaties and negotiated agreements, such as those with Iran and with North Korea. Students will also review the development of civilian nuclear power and examine current regulatory policies intended to prevent accidents, secure nuclear materials, and dispose of radioactive waste.

Order and Violence

Most countries in the world have been independent for about 50 years. Some are peaceful and have prospered, while some remain poor, war-torn, or both. This course, taught by Chris Blattman, will explore the question: What explains why some countries have succeeded while others remain poor, violent, and unequal? There are no formal prerequisites for this class, but non-Harris students should have a background in economics, statistics, and basic game theory. 

Political Economy of Development

The course, taught by Eduardo Montero and Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra, will bring PhD students to the frontier of research topics and provide a good command of how social science methodological tools are used in the area.

Women, Development, and Politics

This course, taught by Maria Angélica Bautista, explores the dominant and emerging trends and debates in the field of women and international development. The major theoretical perspectives responding to global gender inequities will be explored alongside a wide range of themes impacting majority-world women, such as free market globalization, health and sexuality, race and representation, participatory development, human rights, the environment and participation in politics. Course lectures will integrate policy and practitioner accounts and perspectives to reflect the strong influence development practice has in shaping and informing the field. Course materials will also include anti-racist, postcolonial and post-development interruptions to dominant development discourse, specifically to challenge the underlying biases and assumptions of interventions that are predicated on transforming “them” into “us”. The material will also explore the challenges of women participating in politics and what are the consequences when they do or do not.

Managing Chaos: Competing Strategies in a Disordered World

Conflict has been a constant companion in human experience from time immemorial. Some argue that conflict is inherent in the human condition, or in human nature. Yet today something is different; something has changed. Conflict seems more omnipresent, more intractable, and more dangerous. This class, taught by Michael Miklaucic, examines the various new domains of conflict and the way they affect global power dynamics, showing that while conflict is a permanent feature of human society, it has evolved to occupy new spaces using a new toolbox.

Big Data and Development

Big Data and Development, taught by Austin Wright, is a seminar course focused on the use of innovative data capture and analysis techniques to investigate topics related to economic and political development. Microlevel data is increasingly used to target and evaluate development interventions. In this course, students will engage with cutting-edge theoretical and quantitative research, drawing on readings in economics, political science, and data science. 

Conflict and Applied Data Science

This course, taught by Oeindrila Dube, will examine why people fight, the effects of fighting, and possible solutions to prevent conflict in the future. The reasons people fight, and the ways in which they fight, depend on economics, politics and psychology; we will draw on all three disciplines throughout the course. Different forms of fighting, whether terrorism or civil wars, have typically been studied separately; we will bridge this divide and study them together, assessing common root causes and approaches for resolving these conflicts.

Conflict and Humanitarian Intervention: Blurring Humanitarian, Development, and Security Policy

Humanitarian principles were instituted to ensure aid was used for life saving purposes, and not to support governments or a country's foreign policy goals. While there was always some blurring, the lines between humanitarian, development and security policy began to blur to a greater degree during the Balkan wars; after 9/11, the lines became ever more faint, creating significant debates about civilian-military relations. Post-Syria there are questions if there are even lines anymore. In this course, we will examine this evolution, where aid, both humanitarian and development, is used to a greater and greater degree in support of a country's security policy. The course, led by Rebecca Wolfe, will examine how this has changed the nature of these programs, how it effects the ability of governments and INGOs to operate in these environments, and the moral and ethical dilemmas that arise.

How to Change the World

This is a class on the social science of policy-making---the lessons from economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology, plus the practical experiences of practitioners. The course, led by Christopher Blattman, will focus on policy-making in a global context, especially international policy and development. While we will look at international organizations, the focus is on national and local development strategies and domestic policymakers and institutions. 

Economic Development and Policy

The course, led by Alicia Menendez, will introduce students to the main concepts in development economics, such as modern growth theories and their relevance for low-income countries, and major topics in policy and research within the field.

Economics, Politics and African Societies

This course, led by James A. Robinson, has two objectives. First, we will try to convince ourselves that the lenses through which economics and political science have tried to explain “African” “development” are charged with presuppositions that have limited our ability to grasp the logic of those societies. There is nothing specific to those disciplines in that regard, they are part of a given cultural and historical context. In doing that, this course is also about the rich diversity of the societies lumped in the term Africa. Second, we will try to undo the learnings weaved through that lens, but at the same time engage with a fertile ground for research, with a focus on generating new research ideas that carry less, we hope, the heavy veil of our assumptions.

Power and Development

This course, led by Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra, is intended as an introduction to current and future research on the role of power in “development.” One ambitious aim of the course is to make sense of the world of today beyond “us” vs. “them,” and through research attitudes and relationships that do not carry the framework of pitying, saving, or fixing as the starting point. 

Translating Evidence for Behavioral Policy Design

The demand for the use of evidence in international development programs and policy continues to grow. However, policy makers’ often have questions about how to interpret and use evidence generated. How generalizable are these results? How to interpret null results? Mixed outcomes? Short and long term effects? Are these results scalable? Additionally, what are the political barriers to using evidence? In this course, led by Rebecca Wolfe, we will explore how to think about these issues and others in relation to designing policies and programs in the international development sphere.

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Pearson International Conflict Seminar | Jordan

Harris Public Policy students attend a seminar at the Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Knowledge Forum in Amman as part of The Pearson Institute's International Conflict Seminar to Jordan in 2018.

Ramin Kohanteb / The Pearson Institute