Armed conflicts and peace-making

Outline and aims of the course

Interpersonal armed violence and war, understood as collectively organized violence between groups, range among the earliest and most persistent features of human relations. While the dominant modernist narrative emphasizes the evolution of the state and state system as paramount institutions monopolizing and containing armed violence, critics from different corners have long argued that these institutions actually maintain, enable, and conceal the exercise of violence. Moreover, in recent decades the state and the state system have been increasingly regarded to be in crisis, as evidenced from supposed state failure and ‘ethnic’ conflict to the expanding role of international organizations in responding to these challenges. Especially since the end of the Cold War, the focus on interstate war as the traditional key concern of security studies has been enlarged to include civil wars and armed violence beyond the state. Meanwhile, new opportunities for concerted action by the United Nations and others vindicated and developed the agenda to “make”, “keep”, and “build” peace in war-shattered societies. This course introduces students to major themes of armed conflict, violence, and peace-making so as to enable them to critically engage with them in an independent and analytically informed way.

More specifically, it deals with the following subjects:

Key concepts: violence, war, peace

War and the state

Civil wars, state and non-state actors

Drivers of war

Micro-Macro dynamics of violence in war

Peace in IR and peace enforcement

Peacekeeping and peacebuilding

Critical perspectives on peacebuilding and liberal peace

The State/System and the Global Order of Violence