Definitions
My current college note-taking strategy for international politics is taking notes on Notability with an iPad and stylus. On weekends like today, I type up the notes, using the lecture slides and textbook to fill out the notes or take out whatever shorthand I use. It's got a couple of advantages, mainly that I get to go over my notes a second time in a few days (reinforcing the concepts) and writing notes allows me to copy diagrams, quickly draw arrows, or scribble out. In my experience, typing notes isn't yet as fast as handwriting them.
One of the things I've noticed about international politics is that we have to take specific definitions of concepts -- often using words in a slightly different context than we're used to. The democratic peace is a concept I recently came across, which is the observation that few, if any wars are fought between mature democratic states.
To me, it's a good example of words having specific meanings where we'd often use them more generally. It's a definition with caveats, certainly. In the definition above, I've italicized what I see as the problematic words. (It's important to note that the definition isn't saying that wars involving democratic states are less common -- just that inter-democracy wars are less common.)
"Few" is obviously a very general statement, [1] "war" is also a term that's used widely in the media but has a specific definition, including the criteria of sustained combat with 1,000 battle deaths per calendar year, and "mature" is also a word annoyingly open to interpretation.
If I've learned nothing in college so far, it's that words in different contexts can have very specific definitions. I've found it a good habit to try and assimilate the 'new' definitions.
[1] If I get time this weekend, I'll do some research on the percentage of wars in the last 400 years fought between two or more identified democracies, and then come back and edit this post. Off the top of my head, the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, and (depending on whether you think pre-1914 Germany was a democracy) World War I are exceptions I can think of. Right now, I should get back to work.
