Dr Katharine Millar CLM 410

This course is available on the MSc in International Relations, MSc in International Relations (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in International Relations (Research) and MSc in International Relations Theory. This course is not available as an outside option.

All students are required to obtain permission of the Teacher Responsible by completing the online application linked to LSE for You.  Admission to the course is not guaranteed.

This course foregrounds gender as an analytic lens to highlight and question received wisdom regarding the interrelations of various practices of violence and manifestations of conflict.  It moves away from the concept of 'security' to examine assemblages of threats and vulnerabilities that connect and problematise traditional international relations concepts of scale (eg local, national, international) as well as the public and private.  Taking gender seriously allows us to trace the 'systems level' war into the everyday, and to follow everyday practices of violence into the global.  The course encourages students to consider not only the ways different practices of violence are masculinised/feminising, but also how these gendering violences are implicated in social power relations, sexualised/sexual hierarchies, and the production of order/normality.  Geographically, this approach brings the Global North and South into the same analytical frame.  Particular thematic emphasis is placed on the questions of what constitutes violence, and how this key conceptualisation relates to our ways of analysing, interpreting and making sense, both academically and experientially, of the phenomenon.

20 hours of seminars in the LT.

Students will be expected to produce 2 essays in the LT.

There are two pieces of formative work, each a 1,500 words critical literature review.  The first examines academic texts examining the role gender plays, analytically and normatively, in scholastic works.  The second examines an assigned film, novel, longform journalism or podcast reflecting upon what non-academic texts can communicate about conflict and violence.  Either or both can be used to develop ideas for the summative essay.

M Zalweski, Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse (2013)

C Sylvester, War as Experience (2012)

M Erikson Baaz and M Stern, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of war? (2013)

V Hudson, Sex and World Peace (2012)

C Nordstrum, Shadows of War (2004)

M Jackman, 'Violence in Social Life', ARS (Vol.28, 2002)

T N Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Essay (100%, 5000 words) in the ST.