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Semester 2

Advanced Topics in Global Security (PLIT10151)

Subject

Politics

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students must have completed 4 Politics courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses, and we cannot consider interdisciplinary courses or courses without sufficient Politics/Government/International Relations focus. **Please see Additional Restrictions below**

Course Summary

This course builds on core themes and tools developed in Foundations of Global Security, introducing sophisticated frameworks for analysing security politics and addressing new and particularly vexing security issues to help -students develop an advanced understanding of the contemporary security environment. Students will rely on various theoretical approaches, many of which extend ideas and topics covered in Foundations of Global Security, to explore contemporary security challenges and security/insecurity discourses. The course will enhance their analytical skills for assessing security problems, and for building independent research strategies that allow them to develop original arguments about emerging and enduring security hotspots. Amongst PIR's Honours curriculum, it expands the range and depth of our Global Security curriculum, offers the opportunity to deliver even more research-led teaching on security, and complements L&T strengths in security and foreign policy, e.g. Russia's Foreign & Security Policy, Gender & Peacekeeping, and Human Rights in International Relations, while also meeting a general security studies demand in the curriculum, for which there has been growing student interest over the past six years.

Course Description

This course covers advanced ways of analysing new or complex security challenges, with developments in traditional and critical scholarship each playing a part. It also balances a focus on recent developments in conventional security sectors like military, war and peace, and the nation-state with emergent issues, such as global health challenges, extremism, climate change, and cybersecurity. Students will rely on deploy various frameworks to explore contemporary security challenges and dynamics. The course will enhance their analytical skills for assessing real-world problems, and for building independent research strategies that allow them to develop original arguments about emerging and enduring dilemmas. The course blends weekly lectures and tutorials with compulsory readings to help you build analytical skills and to engage the lived politics of security in a more experiential way. **The course will engage themes including, but not limited to (with variations according to contemporary developments): 1. Critical and popular geopolitics; 2. Peace studies and non-violent resistance; 3. Race, colonialism and imperialism; 4. Violent extremism; 5. The privatisation of security (private security contractors); 6. Cybersecurity and artificial intelligence; 7. Transnational crime (human trafficking, drug trafficking, financial crime); 8. Climate change, resource management, and the Anthropocene. **This course consists of one lecture plus one tutorial per week, accompanied by compulsory readings. Attendance of lectures and tutorials is compulsory and tutorials are subject to participation assessment. The tutorials are designed to give students an opportunity to engage more deeply with the topics raised in the lecture, to discuss and share your ideas with other students and to develop your communication skills.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 85%, Practical Exam 15%

Additional Restrictions

Unless you are nominated on a Politics exchange agreement, visiting students are only permitted to enrol in one Politics course each, per semester, before the start of the relevant semester’s welcome period – and spaces on each course are limited so cannot be guaranteed for any student. Enrolment in a second Politics course will depend on whether there are still spaces available in the January Welcome Period, and cannot be guaranteed. It is NOT appropriate for students to contact staff within this subject area to ask for an exception to be made; all enquiries to enrol in these courses must be made through the CAHSS Visiting Student Office. This is due to the limited number of spaces available in this very popular subject area.

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