A final note about the series of Chasing Chaos simulations from last semester:
For part of the final exam, I put students back into the teams from the Rwanda simulation and had each team select an article from this list:
- Strobe Talbot, “The Making of Vladimir Putin,” Politico Magazine, 19 August 2014.
- Dexter Filkins, “The Fight of Their Lives,” The New Yorker, 29 September 2014.
- Youssef Cherif, “Tunisia’s Elections Amid a Middle East Cold War,” Atlantic Council, 24 October 2014.
- Howard W. Frenchot, “China’s Dangerous Game,” The Atlantic, 13 October 2014.
- George Soros, “Wake Up, Europe,” The New York Review of Books, 20 November 2014.
- Ali Khedery, “Iraq’s Last Chance,” The New York Times, 15 August 2014.
- Josh Kurlantzick, “Why Obama’s Courtship of Myanmar Backfired,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 6 November 2014.
Each team was tasked with designing a 10-12 minute presentation on the following question:
What international relations theory (constructivist, liberal, realist) and corresponding level of analysis (individual, domestic state, international system) best explain the subject of the article? Why?
I set up the delivery of the presentations as a competition. My usual practice for these competitions is to give each student an amount of Monopoly money for voting, and students are prohibited from voting for their own teams. In this case teams had unequal numbers of members, which would have created an advantage for the smallest teams, so instead I distributed the same amount of money to each team. A team could not vote for itself, but it was free to allocate its money to other teams in whatever way its members wanted.
When teams voted on the best presentation, each team put down all of its money on a different team to produce a tie among all of the teams. Clearly something was afoot — the class expected that a tie would force me to equally distribute the points for winning the competition across the whole class. Shared interest + communication = cooperation, a real-life demonstration of liberal theory!
I exercised the God option to frustrate their gambit. I announced another round of voting, with the provision that a tie would result in no points being awarded. And a clear winner quickly emerged.
This led to an interesting discussion about how the structure of a game affects the behavior of its players and how actors are affected by their environment. I was pleased to see that after a semester of simulations and theories, students were able to make this connection.