Contesting Security

Course goals

After this course:

• Students can analyse and critically evaluate the key international law approaches to security.

• Students can apply relevant concepts and frameworks found in international law to understand how the concept of security informs real-life scenarios relevant to security themes.

• Students can distinguish legal perspectives from other disciplinary perspectives.

• Students have developed an understanding of interdisciplinary perspectives to security.

• Students have trained key academic skills such as writing, presentation and debating skills, while demonstrating adherence to the principle of academic integrity in both the process of preparing outputs and in the outputs themselves.

Content

From mass protests against police violence to the armed conflicts currently ongoing in Ukraine and Syria, daily news feeds are filled with issues of conflict, security law, and human rights. Different weeks of this course will be devoted to examining a security-related theme that you will have seen discussed in popular discourse, such as: (i) war (ii) counter terrorism (iii) climate change (iv) protest (v) nationality (vi) disease/ pandemic and (vii) racial injustice.

The aim of this course is to introduce you to the different ways in which security is defined and invoked in international law settings/analysis. During this course, you will reflect on the advantages of invoking the term ‘security’ for different groups and the potential of the term to address different global challenges. For example, we will consider: what are the advantages/ disadvantages in framing climate change as a challenge to our security? Does poverty increase our insecurity? We will look at these questions by analysing various real life-scenarios.

If you do not have a legal background, this course will introduce you to how international law works and teach you how to find and work with legal sources and methods. You will learn how international law defines security, and by drawing on literature from other disciplines on (e.g. international relations, anthropology), you will learn to distinguish legal perspectives from other disciplinary perspectives. You will be encouraged to ask critical questions about how the concept of ‘security’ is understood in international law such as: ‘security for whom’, ‘security against what’, ‘security by whom’. You will consider how different ways of understanding security hold potential to exclude and subordinate different groups. You will also be encouraged to reflect on how the concept of ‘security’ operates as both a permissive and limiting force in the framework of international law.

This course will be taught with lectures and working groups that involve active learning activities that encourage students to develop their presentation, discussion and analytical skills, learn from each other and distinguish legal perspectives from other disciplinary approaches.