Over the years, I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses on environmental security; causes of war, revolution, and ethnic conflict; international relations; negotiation theory; and philosophy of social science. I continue to teach in these areas, but in coming years I will focus my teaching more on how societies adapt to complex environmental, technological, and social change.
Most social science theories are wedded, I believe, to out-dated mechanistic models that assume societies are made up of individual rational actors, that causal relations among social variables are deterministic and linear, and that social systems tend to migrate towards a stable equilibrium. I'm interested in introducing students to the wide range of alternative models of complex systems now being developed that allow for emergent properties, nonlinearity, and multiple equilibria.
In the spring of 2007, I will introduce a new course on
"Complex Social Systems: War and Peace." This course will review theory and research in ecology, evolutionary biology, physics, economics, and political science on complex adaptive systems, with close attention to recent applications of complexity theory to political conflict and international state behaviour.
I also believe strongly that teaching should be informed by the best scholarly research. During my years at the University of Toronto, I have sought to integrate teaching and research at every possible opportunity. In a popular course on environmental conflict, I encourage students to pursue original research, in close consultation with scholars who have been actively involved in the environment and conflict research program. I then shepherd the best student research from this and other courses through the publication process. I also bring students into the Trudeau Centre's research projects, and the results have often been published in leading journals as co-authored papers.
Finally, I am deeply committed to interdisciplinary education. All of the pressing problems that humankind faces straddle multiple disciplinary boundaries and require complex interdisciplinary solutions. Despite paying lip service to the importance of interdisciplinary education, our universities and research institutions for the most part still "silo" human knowledge and scholarship. Through teaching and example, I encourage students to exercise their interdisciplinary curiosity, bring ideas together from multiple fields, and successfully apply them to practical problems like war and peace.
