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Education

Tracking Global Conflict Activity

Length
25-30 Minutes
Grade Level
High School, Higher Education

Learning Objectives

Students will use the CFR Global Conflict Tracker to identify active conflicts and assess their relative impacts on U.S. national security.

Instructional Plan

  1. (Intro: 5 minutes) - Explain to students that in an increasingly interconnected world, American foreign policy experts are acutely concerned about world conflicts and the threats they pose to U.S. national security. To help follow these conflicts and the unique threats they pose, CFR created the “Global Conflict Tracker” - an interactive list of active conflicts filterable by type, status, and impact on U.S. interests. The following activity explores these conflicts to help students evaluate for themselves which features make a conflict particularly significant to the United States.
  2. (Independent Global Conflict Tracker Exploration: 10-15 minutes) - Provide students a brief tour of the CFR Global Conflict Tracker and how to navigate it. Then, give students 10 minutes to click through the Global Conflict Tracker on laptops or phones, paying particular attention to conflicts whose impacts CFR has deemed “critical” to U.S. interests.
  3. (Class Discussion: 10 minutes) - Use any of the following questions to facilitate a discussion of the Global Conflict Tracker.
    • “Have you heard of these conflicts before? If you haven’t heard of them, what does that suggest about relationship between the U.S. and the countries involved?”
    • “Reflect on patterns that emerged in your exploration of the Tracker. What do the conflicts ranked ‘critical’ to U.S. interests have in common?”
    • “Do you think any of these conflicts present a higher risk to U.S. interests than the Tracker states? If so, which ones? Why?”
    • “Imagine you are in charge of updating this tracker. What new categories, filters, or conflicts would you include? Why? What would this data capture that the current Tracker does not?”

Instructor Notes

  • To extend this activity into a full class session, consider having students conduct a guided reading of CFR Education’s introductory resources on conflict and discuss how these resources connect back to the data in the Tracker.
  • To extend this activity into several class sessions, consider using it to prepare students for a CFR Education simulation involving the question of conflict, U.S. national security, and intervention.

Materials