University of Oslo

This course offers an introduction to Norwegian history, life, and society. Topics include: Norwegian history, geography, the political system, foreign politics, economics, the welfare state, religion, the judicial system, the role of the family in Norwegian society, Norwegian literature and language, Norwegian visual arts, culture, and identity. The course provides insight into Norwegian way of life and Norwegian identity seen in the light of historical, political, and cultural development.

This course is an introduction to topological spaces. It deals with constructions like subspaces, product spaces, and quotient spaces, and properties like compactness and connectedness. The course concludes with an introduction to fundamental groups and covering spaces. The course discusses topics including sets and functions, images and preimages, and finite, countable, and uncountable sets; how the topology on a space is determined by the collection of open sets, by the collection of closed sets, or by a basis of neighborhoods at each point, and what it means for a function to be continuous; the definition and basic properties of connected spaces, path connected spaces, compact spaces, and locally compact spaces; what it means for a metric space to be complete, and characterizing compact metric spaces; the Urysohn lemma and the Tietze extension theorem, and characterizing metrizable spaces; and the construction of the fundamental group of a topological space and applications to covering spaces and homotopy theory.

The course provides a survey of Norwegian visual art from the early medieval period to contemporary art. The primary focus is on painting, but developments in sculpture, architecture, folk arts, design, installations, conceptual, and performative art are also covered. Beginning with archeological findings from the Viking Age and the arts of the stave churches, the course runs more or less chronologically through the arts with regular interventions from the present. The course develops skills in describing, interpreting, and critically reflecting upon visual art and its discourse. It analyzes Norwegian art as a key to understanding Norwegian culture, and develops an understanding of the vital role that Norwegian artists have and have not played in shaping national identity.

This course introduces students to security policy and strategic thinking and to gives a thorough familiarity with the key concepts within this field. It combines theory and case studies and also covers the main actors and institutions in security governance (NATO, UN, US). The course opens with a theoretical focus on the scope of security studies and on approaches to its study. The scope then narrows to military security issues (security and defense proper), discussing the two types of conflicts, conventional and asymmetric. It seeks to streamline a theoretically focused approach to the empirical material, revisiting theory towards the end of the course. It also has a case on African conflicts and one on Norwegian security policy.

Game theory may be defined as the use of formal models in the study of strategic interaction. This course offers an introduction to game theory and its potential applications to the study of war. Game theory suggests at least three main sources of war. First, war may result from asymmetric information. Because countries may have incentives to misrepresent their military strength, they may be unable to settle a dispute peacefully. Second, commitment problems might result in war. If two countries want to settle a dispute peacefully but suspects that the other side is unlikely to abide with the terms of that settlement, they may resort to warfare. Finally, war could result when the main source of the dispute involves an indivisible good, so that a compromise is difficult or even impossible. The course places particular emphasis on explaining puzzles related to war in general and World War I in particular. Specifically, the course provides a primer in core issues concerning war, including (but not limited to): information problems; commitment problems; indivisibilities; arms races; coalition building; war termination; and differences between international and civil wars. The course recommends students have completed a course in international politics as a prerequisite.