You are to write a policy brief about rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL). This assignment is intended to get you thinking scientifically about the cause of an ongoing conflict and allow you the opportunity to write a succinct and informative analysis. In this regard, you should address three subtopics in your paper: 1) why the conflict began, 2) why it continues today and 3) provide a policy prescription on how the International Community can best stop the conflict.
In addition, you should to view this assignment much like a member of the U.S. State Department, CIA, or Military Intelligence would – you are providing an analysis of the situation based upon your expertise. This means you are making an argument as to why you think the conflict began, why it continues, and how to best facilitate an ending. This is not an assignment with a necessarily correct answer. Instead you need to convince me why your analysis and policy recommendations are correct.
The assignment requires you to investigate the political, social, and economic causes of the conflict. How long a time-frame you choose to include is your choice but it must be relevant to your argu-ment. For instance, you could look at changes to the political, social or economic environment ten years prior to the conflict or just a single year prior. Just make sure that your time span is chosen thoughtfully and that it is long enough to provide a meaningful analysis. In addressing the casuses of the conflict it is important that you place them within the major topics of this class (rational choice theory, relative derivation, social mobilization theory, opportunity and willingness to fight, individual participation, etc.). In order to assess why the conflict began, you will first need to study the groups involved – who are they, where did they come from, why are they fighting. You will also need to briefly describe the main groups involved in the conflict.
To complete this assignment will need to conduct research but this not a ‘research paper.’ Instead you are writing a policy brief – which is why you must take a position and defend that position. To conduct the necessary research you should start by locating general sources (books, journal articles, reports) on the conflict you have chosen. These sources will give you important background and history on your conflict, and will help you to identify the relevant time period. The most important of these sources are the books mentioned in the syllabus. If you haven’t begun reading your chosen book, now is the time. These sources might also contain theoretical arguments, and you might find some data, information, or evidence in these sources that helps you to assess the causes of the conflict. To locate additional sources you should perform searches through the “Find Journal Articles” link on the WSU Library Home Page, as well as through journal catalogs such as EBSCO, JSTOR, Proquest, Gale, etc. In addition, Google has an academic only search engine called “Google Scholar”. Searches of newspapers and other periodicals also may be helpful. Among the many data sources that may be useful are: international organization publications or websites (UN, World Bank, etc.), national government publications, intelligence reports, research reports from various organizations, scholarly data sets, data archives, etc. Many of these types of resources can be accessed via the “Search IT” function of the WSU library website. It may also be useful to look
at the Political Science Research Guide” which can be accessed through the “Subject & Resource Guides” link on the WSU Library Home Page. There are many ways to acquire the information you need, provided that you spend some time working through credible sources and search engines. Although a Google search can link you to legitimate websites and data sources, many of the websites returned by a Google search are not credible and are not suitable for academic research (i.e. do not cite information from Wikipedia.). If you are unfamiliar with finding and using academic quality sources, set up an appointment (probably more than one) with one of the WSU librarians.
In citing your resources you should use footnotes or parenthetical citations to cite any ideas, quotations, data, or other unique information that you include in your paper. In addition, you should list in a bibliography all of the sources you consulted in researching and writing your paper (the bibliography does not count as part of the page limit). The WSU Library can link you to information on various bibliographic styles, any of which you are welcome to use: http: //libraries.wsu.edu/quickguides
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