J298 War on the Borderlands — Conflict Reporting in Today’s World

At the far borders of what was once the American Empire, fires are burning. After the fall of the Berlin Wall more than three decades ago, the American led NATO alliance began moving East, and it has at last found conflict at the very doorstep of what was once its rival superpower: Russia has gone to war rather than accept a Westernized, NATO-ized Ukraine. At the other end of the vast Eurasian supercontinent, China stands poised to invade Taiwan, its ruler for life having declared he would “unify the homeland” before his term was up. The United States is committed to use all its resources to oppose any armed attempt to seize the island. The two major challenges of Ukraine and Taiwan, of Russia and China, as well as many lesser conflicts around the war-exhausted Middle East, Africa and elsewhere, and the international migration pressures of climate change, define the current landscape of conflict reporting. In this seminar, we will learn the basics of ongoing and burgeoning conflicts, read the best that has been written covering war, and prepare ourselves to report on a new era of war.