Dr Katharine Millar CBG.8.13

This course is available on the MSc in International Relations, MSc in International Relations (LSE and Sciences Po) and MSc in International Relations (Research). 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, race, sexuality – as embodied, as social, and as forms of intersectional hierarchy/ies – to examine the interrelation of seemingly-disparate practices of violence and manifestations of conflict. It moves away from the concept of “security” to highlight assemblages of threats and vulnerabilities that connect and challenge traditional international relations concepts of both scale (e.g. local, national, international etc.) as well as the legitimately “political”. The course encourages students to consider not only the ways different practices of violence are gendered, racialised, and sexualised, but also how these violences are implicated in social power relations, and the production of order/normality. The course examines both practices of violence and resistances violence. Particular thematic emphasis is placed on the questions of what constitute 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 AT.

Students will submit a 2-page (max) bullet-point (no prose!) outline in Week Seven Autumn term that specifies their proposed research question, evidence, and essay structure for the summative assignment.

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)

Class Presentation (15%) in the AT.

Class Participation (10%) in the AT.

Research Essay (75%, 4000 words) in the WT.