War and Empire in World Politics

3 Credits.

This course explores the intersection between war and empire in world politics, past and present. It conceives world politics as a space of co-constitution and war or violent conflict as a form of social interconnection. The premise of the course is that imperial warfare and violence have been generative forces in shaping world politics, well beyond the times and places of specific battles and killings. The course considers armed conflict in imperial context from colonial “small war” through to the War on Terror. It looks at how warfare shapes (and is shaped by) the societies, cultures and polities that populate world politics. The course considers also some of the intellectual traditions that have arisen out of the experience of, and inquiry into, colonial violence, from the thought of resistance leaders to subaltern and postcolonial studies. The course consists primarily of book length texts and the principal assignment will be a term paper which puts a set of these books in conversation with one another.