Concentrations
Concentrations in the Master of Arts in Security Studies degree program are guideposts for your academic career. Through your concentration, you can explore your passions and interests while preparing for a specialization after graduation.
Full-time students select their concentration in their second semester, while part-time students select their concentration by the third semester. However, you can take courses in any concentration and change your concentration as your plans and interests evolve. Course requirements include one core course in your concentration during your first, or second semester (full-time) or by the third semester (part-time students).
Available concentrations
Intelligence
Concentration chair, Professor Elizabeth Grimm
The intelligence concentration provides a focus on the practical dimensions of intelligence, including the intelligence cycle, the intelligence disciplines, problems of intelligence collection and analysis, covert action and the intelligence-policy nexus. This concentration is also centered around domestic intelligence, military intelligence and other countries’ intelligence operations. You can address intelligence issues in the military, government agencies or government-related industries.
You will be able to consider major conceptual issues such as the appropriate role of intelligence in a democracy, oversight and accountability issues, the intelligence budget as part of the overall defense budget and the complexities of secrecy.
Courses in the intelligence concentration address one or more of these topics:
- Intelligence collection (human and technical disciplines)
- Intelligence analysis
- Counterintelligence
- Covert action
- How decision-makers use intelligence
- Comparative intelligence services
- Oversight
- History of the intelligence community or a history of operations
- Tactical and strategic intelligence
- Surveillance
- Ethics of intelligence
International security
Concentration chair, Professor Kimberly Roberts
This concentration examines the broad range of issues on the international security agenda. Beyond traditional focuses on sovereignty, hegemony and great power politics, you’ll learn about:
- The range of transnational and subnational challenges on the international security agenda, including nuclear proliferation and other weapons of mass destruction
- Catastrophic threats from cyber- and biosecurity
- Enduring strategic rivalries
- Environmental security and the challenges posed by climate change
- Human security challenges, including shifting global demographics, migration and global health issues
- Global economic challenges and resource constraints
- Transnational threats from non-state actors
- An overview of the range of forms of political violence, including terrorism, revolutions, civil wars, insurgencies, subversive wars and interstate wars.
You’ll also become acquainted with the advantages and disadvantages of the possible responses to this contemporary international security agenda–including coercive and cooperative tools of statecraft–and to the range of actors involved in these responses. For instance, you will learn about the United Nations and other international organizations, alliances and coalitions, global economic institutions, multi-national corporations and public-private partnerships and other non-governmental organizations.
Courses in the international security concentration address these topics:
- The emerging structure of the international system.
- The range of transnational and subnational security challenges facing states and humans on the planet today, from climate change to infectious disease to weapons of mass destruction.
- Alliances and other forms of security cooperation.
- The range of state and non-state actors involved with aspects of the international security agenda, such as the UN, World Bank, International Criminal Court and multi-national corporations.
- Conflict resolution and peacekeeping.
- Diplomacy, international law and international governance.
Military operations
Concentration chair, Professor Rebecca Patterson
In this concentration, you’ll acquire in-depth knowledge of the U.S. military and those of other nations with a particular emphasis on applying the military instrument of power to support national security strategy. Courses include the study of conventional military operations, nuclear deterrence, the use of air and sea power, military analysis, net assessment techniques and the interaction between civilian and military officials, among other subjects.
Courses in the military operations concentration will:
- Enable you to develop in-depth knowledge of enduring concepts and principles used to plan, execute and/or evaluate military tactics, operations and/or strategy.
- Develop a detailed understanding of major, direct inputs to the development of military power in peacetime and/or wartime.
- Provide a detailed examination of some set of major military operations, battles, campaigns or wars in the past.
- Equip you to rigorously assess current/future military tactics, operations and/or strategies.
Technology and security
Concentration chair, Professor William Imbrie
This concentration examines how technological innovations and applications shape national security policy and outcomes. It spans classes that focus on the theoretical application of technology, such as nuclear deterrence or the theory of cyberwar, with emphasis on the underlying technology itself, such as hands-on cybersecurity or classes in data science.
You’ll be able to approach security issues from a technological perspective, and as a future analyst, policymaker or scholar, you’ll gain an appreciation of the wide range of technology issues affecting security.
Courses in the technology and security concentration address these topics:
- The theoretical application of technology, with theories significantly influenced by the underlying technology, such as how nuclear deterrence follows from nuclear technology or how different theories can shed light on how to use cyber capabilities.
- The use of technological tools to uncover new insights about security-related issues, such as data science software.
- The study of technology itself and its impact on security, using case studies or other methods of examining operationally what the technology offers policymakers.
- The use of technologies that are relevant for national security, such as in hands-on cybersecurity classes.
Terrorism and substate violence
Concentration chair, Professor Jennifer Jefferis
In this concentration, you’ll study the motivations and operations of terrorist and insurgent groups, the dynamics of civil wars and the policies required to effectively counter these threats effectively. Courses examine sources of terrorism, terrorist tactics, key terrorist groups like al-Qa’ida and the Lebanese Hizballah, counterinsurgency, ethnic conflict, and post-conflict stabilization missions, among other issues. You’ll learn to analyze the spectrum of conflicts short of war, their internal dynamics and the measures and practical responses required to resolve them.
Courses in the terrorism and sub-state violence concentration address these topics:
- Terrorism
- Insurgency and counterinsurgency
- Stability operations
- Sub-state violence and threats to domestic security, including drugs, human trafficking and weapons of mass destruction
U.S. national security policy
Concentration chair, Professor Heidi Urben
In this concentration you will study the institutions and processes that formulate and implement U.S. national security policy, with a particular emphasis on how domestic pressures shape security policy at home and abroad. Courses examine Congress, the National Security Council, homeland security and defense, the defense budget, the interagency and U.S. policies on a variety of security-related issues.
Courses in the U.S. national security policy concentration address these topics:
- Institutions that create U.S. national security policy and strategy
- U.S. national security policy process
- U.S. national security policies towards other regions
- Contemporary U.S. national security challenges
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