Civics and government students can learn about political science with these printable flash cards.
There are 47 flash cards in this set (8 pages to print.)
To use:
1. Print out the cards.
2. Cut along the dashed lines.
3. Fold along the solid lines.
Sample flash cards in this set:
| Questions | Answers |
|---|---|
| REALISM (political realism) | A broad intellectual tradition that explains international relations mainly in terms of power |
| IDEALISM | an approach that emphasizes international law, morality, and international organization, rather than power alone, as key influences on international relations |
| LEAGUE OF NATIONS | organization after WWI and a forerunner of UN; was weakened by the absence of the US membership and by its own lack of effectiveness in collective security |
| MUNICH AGREEMENT | symbol of the failed policy of appeasement, this agreement, signed in 1938, allowed Nazi Germany to occupy Czechoslovakia. Cause further German expansions |
| POWER | the ability or potential to influence others; behavior, as measured by the possession of certain tangible and intangible characteristics |
| GEOPOLITICS | use of geography as an element of power, and the ideas about it held by political leaders and scholars |
| ANARCHY | the term implies not complete chaos but lack of central government |
| NORMS | the shared expectations about what behavior is considered proper |
| SOVEREIGNTY | state's right to do whatever it wants within its own territory; most important international norm |
| SECURITY DILEMMA | situation in which states' actions taken to assure their own security are perceived as threats to the security of other states |
| BALANCE OF POWER | general concept of one or more states' power being used to blance that of another state or group of states |
| GREAT POWERS | the half dozen or so most powerful states; the great-power club was exclusively European until the 20th century |
| MIDDLE POWERS | States that rank somewhat below the great powers in terms of their influence on world affairs |
| NEOREALISM | version of realist theory that emphasizes the influenceo n state behavior of the system's structure, especially the international distribution of power |
| HEGEMONY | holding by one state of a preponderance of power in the international system, single handedly dominate the rules and arrangements by which international politics and economic relations are conducted |
| HEGEMONIC STABILITY THEORY | argument that regimes are most effective when power in the international system is most concentrated |
| ALLIANCE COHESION | the ease with which the members hold together an alliance |
| BURDEN SHARING | distribution of the costs of an alliance among members; the term also refers to the conflicts that may arise over such distribution |
| NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION(NATO) | US led military alliance formed in 1949 to oppose and deter soviet power in europe |
| WARSAW PACT | soviet led eastern euopean military alliance. Opposed the NATO alliance |
| US-JAPANESE SECURITY TREATY | bilateral alliance between the US and Japan,created in 1951 against the potential Soviet threat to Japan |
| DETTERENCE | threat to punish another actor if it takes a certain negative action |
| COMPELLENCE | the use of force to make another actor take some actions |
| ARMS RACE | reciprocal process in which two or more states build up military capabilities in response to each other |
| RATIONAL ACTORS | actors conceived as single entities that "think" about their actions coherently, make choices, identify their interests, and rank the interest in terms of priority |
| NATIONAL INTEREST | the interests of a state overall |
| COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS | a calculation of the costs incurred by a possible action and the benefits it is likely to bring |
| GAME THEORY | branch of mathematics concerned with predicting bargaining outsomes. Include Prisoner's Dilemma and Chicken |
| ZERO SUM GAMS | a situation in which one actor's gain is by definition equal to the others loss |
| PRISONER'S DILEMMA | situation modeled by game theory in which rational actors pursuing their individual interests all achieve worse outcomes than they would have by working together |
| INTERDEPENDENCE | political and economic situation in which two states are simultaneously dependent on each other for their well being |
| NEOLIBERAL | approach that stresses the importance of international institutions in reducing the inherent conflict that realists assume in an international system |
| INTERNATIONAL REGIME | set of rules, norms, and procedures around which the expectations of actors converge in a certain international issue area |
| COLLECTIVE SECURITY | formation of a broad alliance of most major actors in an international system for the purpose of jointly opposing aggression by an actor |
| DEMOCRATIC PEACE | proposition, strongly supported by empirical evidence, that democracies almost never fight wars against each other |
| POSTMODERNISM | approach that denies the existence of a single fixed reality, and pays special attention to texts and to discourses- how people talk and write about a subject |
| SUBTEXT | meanings that are implicit or hidden in a text rather than explicitly addressed |
| ECONOMIC CLASSES | categorization of individuals based on economic status |
| MARXISM | branch of socialism that emphasizes exploitation and class struggle and includes both communism and other approaches |
| MEDIATION | use of a third party in conflict resolution |
| POSITIVE PEACE | peace that resolves the underlying reasons for war |
| WORLD GOVERNMENT | centralized world governing body with strong enforcement powers |
| PEACE MOVEMENTS | movements against specific wars or against war and militarism in general, usually involving large numbers of people and forms of direct action such as street protests |
| DIFFERENCE FEMINISM | strand of feminism that believes gender differences are nto just socially constructed and that views women as inherently less warlike than men |
| LIBERAL FEMINISM | strand of feminism that emphasizes gender equality and views the "essential" differences in men's and women's abilities or perspectives as trivial or nonexistent |
| POSTMODERN FEMINISM | effort to combine feminist and postmodernist persepectives with the aim of uncovering the hidden influences of gender in IR and showing how arbitrary the construction of gender roles is |
| GENDER GAP | refers to polls showing women lower than men on average In their support for military actions |
