The Politics of Violence

Course goals

Learning outcomes - after completing the course, you will have:

• knowledge and understanding of basic historical developments related to the course topic;
• knowledge of several analytical tools to disaggregate and analyze episodes of collective political violence;
• familiarity with the diverse ways in which historical knowledge of the course topic can be relevant to job market prospects;
• a skill set enabling thinking, writing and speaking at an academic level and in line with academic standards of conduct ('academic integrity').

Learning objectives and skills - after completing the course, you will be able to:

• explore broad historical or historiographical topics, based on literature and evidence;
• critically evaluate different interpretations and formulate their own viewpoint;
• collaborate with fellow students on a group presentation;
• connect historical, sociological and anthropological knowledge of the course topic to modern-day social and political issues­;
• work in accordance with academic standards.

This course has two graded assignments. One is a group presentation, graded pass/fail and passing that component enables the students to advance to the final essay. The final essay is graded with a numerical grade, and changes have been introduced in order to make it more resistant to LLM-enabled cheating. If there is any doubt about authorship, the student will be invited for an oral examination, to complement the written essay.  

 

Content

This is the first course of the Specialization Conflict, violence and security (Track International Relations).
The lectures are in English and the seminar groups in Dutch. 

For LAS and TCS students who want to follow this course, here is more information: https://tcs.sites.uu.nl

This course covers the history and sociology of political violence. It examines the forms and developments of political violence and provides an overview of the most important recent ideas about it. The course will provide tools for analyzing and unraveling various forms and aspects of collective political violence, such as terrorism, (civil) wars, uprisings, and revolutions.

Using various case studies, the course aims to answer the following three main questions:
(1) What is collective political violence? Violence is often described as "elastic" and "slippery." How can we better understand the concept of violence?

(2) How does collective political violence change over time? Is the world becoming safer or more dangerous? The answer to this question is hotly debated among scholars. Why is this? And why do they arrive at divergent answers?

(3) What are the sources of collective political violence? Violence is often caused by not one, but several factors. How can we create order in the different types of causes (triggers and structural causes of violence) and the different levels (micro, meso, macro)?

 

Additional information

Course 1 in the Specialization Conflict, violence and security. 
Often, the specialization students benefit from other events such as special lectures or field trips that are complementary to the teaching of this and related courses.