Huma 1000 Essay Promts

Essay Prompts for HUMA 1000

All of these essays are meant to stimulate thought and generate a viewpoint – you, as the writer, should be conveying a clear thesis with supporting evidence. It is worth remembering that no answer within the constraints of the essay for this class (1000 words) is going to be exhaustive in responding to the prompt. Rather, you should only attempt to address one aspect of the question that you chose to focus on, using concrete examples and texts given in class as supporting evidence.

1. Humans are fundamentally social animals. The groups they belong to shape people’s views about the world: family, local community, region, nation. There are also other types of identities that one may feel very strongly about, such as class, religion, ethnicity, etc. Most people have more than one kind of identity, and each identity may be related to a different set of interests. What are some of the potential factors that can influence a person’s adoption of an identity? When multiple identities overlap, what determines which of these take precedence over others? Feel free to use relevant personal experiences, contemporary events, and news items to make your case in addition to the course’s readings.

1. “War is the mere continuation of politics by other means” is a famous line from Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. In this sense war is the use of violence in disagreements that cannot be resolved peacefully. Yet, when is it permissible to use violence in a breakdown of negotiation? How do societies justify these "exceptional" cases?

1. We live in the era of nation-states, where individual states are assumed to represent the interests of a single nation. However national groups other than the national majority live within each nation-state in the contemporary world. Should the interests of these minorities be protected or should they submit to the will of the majority? How should disagreements between the majority group and a minority group be resolved?