Anthropology of Violence and Security

Course goals

1. To analyze and evaluate the key anthropological approach to violence and security.
2. Apply anthropological concepts and frameworks to understand real-life case-studies.
3. Distinguish anthropological perspectives from other disciplinary approaches.
4. Design a small interdisciplinary research project and experiment with ethnographic research methods.
5. Collaborate with peers in conducting an interdisciplinary research project together as a team.
6. Reflect on the research process and develop an understanding of interdisciplinary perspectives to violence and security.
7. Develop a sound critical and intellectual argument and position.

Content

Violence and security have become prominent subjects of analysis in the anthropological discipline. This course will demonstrate how anthropologists have provided insights into the diverse ways in which violence and security are enacted, performed, experienced, and defined across historical trajectories and geographical localities. To unpack the anthropological approach, this course rests on three key pillars that surface throughout the various themes of this course, such as policing and resilience.

1. The first is the variety of ways in which violence and security are analyzed and identified. Rather than presenting a singular approach, this course emphasizes multiplicity and diversity. To do so, we will examine the physical, structural, and symbolic forms of violence to show how divergent forms of violence and (in)security shape everyday social realities. In demonstrating this multiplicity, students will engage with various conceptual tools to analyse these diverse manifestations and the prominent ethical and methodological questions.

2. The second is the simultaneous distinction and interconnection between violence and security: although they are often mutually constitutive, they also operate as distinct subjects of analysis, and touch on different (anthropological) debates.

3. The third is the politicization of both violence and security and the inherent processes of exclusion and boundary making. To define something as violence is a political act. Furthermore, security for one entails insecurity for another and is thus always a political affair. How are notions of membership defined and enacted and what type of imaginaries of security are produced?

As part of the interdisciplinary minor Re-Imagining Security, this course equips students with a critical understanding of key anthropological concepts and analytical frameworks, while enabling them to distinguish these from approaches developed in other disciplines. Students will work in teams to conduct an interdisciplinary research project on a topic related to the course theme, approaching the subject from multiple disciplinary perspectives. This collaborative research project constitutes the primary form of assessment and is developed progressively over the duration of the course. Accordingly, the course follows a slightly different structure than most others: during the first half of the course, students attend lectures twice a week, while the second half is primarily dedicated to supervised group meetings focused on advancing the research project.
This course is part of the minor ‘Reimagining Security’.

You can register for the minor here: https://students.uu.nl/onderwijs/minors/re-imagining-security/. Those who have registered for the minor also need to enroll for this course through Osiris.