Honors 410: Global Conflict (Phelps): Library Guides

The Council on Foreign Relations surveyed foreign policy officials and researchers to determine the top 30 most pressing possible conflicts in 2024.

Choosing a conflict from the list should make your research easier. The survey was conducted in November 2023, so there should be plentiful news coverage and research sources about them. 

Choose your topic carefully:

• Choose something you find interesting: you will spend a lot of time reading about this conflict.
• Choose a conflict that you can research objectively. We are all human, and it can be hard to stay objective when learning about tension and violence. If you have a heartfelt connection to one of the parties in a conflict, think twice about whether that is the best conflict for you to research.

CQ Researcher provides overviews of issues discussed in Congress, including international conflict. It was originally designed for journalists covering issues on Capitol Hill, but it works great for college students too. Following up with their citations can be an easy way to find more information for your project.

Books are the best place to learn about the history of international conflicts (scholarly articles cover conflicts, but they tend to be too narrow in focus for anyone but expert specialists).

Search QuickSearch for books. Use filters to

• narrow your search down to books (e-books are ok).
• narrow your search to books published in 2018 or later.

Scan the title and table of contents. Is the language objective? If the author condemns one side or the other in their titles, their research may be biased.

We have databases for both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

For each database, pay attention to the "sorted by" menu on the results page. If you only use "most recent first," you might miss some really substantive articles that are a couple of months old. I prefer to set the "Publication Date" filter to the date range that I want, then sort by "relevance."