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DV420      Half Unit
Complex Emergencies

This information is for the 2021/22 session.

Teacher responsible

Prof David Keen CON.6.06

Availability

This course is available on the MPA Dual Degree (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ and Columbia), MPA Dual Degree (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ and Hertie), MPA Dual Degree (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ and NUS), MPA Dual Degree (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ and Sciences Po), MPA Dual Degree (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ and Tokyo), MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in Anthropology and Development Management, MSc in Development Management, MSc in Development Studies, MSc in Global Politics, MSc in Health and International Development, MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics, MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies, MSc in International Migration and Public Policy (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ and Sciences Po), MSc in Political Economy of Late Development, MSc in Urban Policy (ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ and Sciences Po), MSc in Urbanisation and Development and Master of Public Administration. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Places will be allocated with priority to ID and joint-degree students. If there are more ID and joint-degree students than DV420 can accommodate, these places will be allocated randomly.  Non-ID/Joint Degree students will be allocated to spare places by random selection with the preference given first to those degrees where the regulations permit this option.

Course content

When genocides, civil wars and famines are reported on television in countries such as Syria, Sudan or Yemen, we are often left with a sense of confusion. Why is this happening? Why do these disasters keep recurring? And which actors are driving the process? This course looks behind the headlines to get a deeper understanding of the causes and functions of humanitarian disasters.

By re-thinking common conceptions of conflict (such as the idea that war is a contest between two or more sides aiming to ‘win’), the course offers new ways of thinking about war, humanitarian intervention and peacebuilding. Who benefits from conflict? Who benefits from famine? How do these benefits shape the information we receive? How is the ‘enemy’ defined, and whose interests do these changing definitions serve? And how can one make peace a peace that doesn’t propel society back into war?

The course offers an understanding of the complex fault-lines that lie behind oversimplistic news coverage. It also expands our understanding of disasters to take account of the fact that many disasters (from climate change to ‘migration crisis’, from Covid to democratic crisis) are now ‘coming home’ as far as Western democracies are concerned.

The course draws on detailed empirical case-studies — including the course-leader’s own fieldwork in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Guatemala, France and on the Syria/Turkey border. The course makes use of the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, showing how they can help us to deconstruct the interests and the language that muddle our understanding of the causes and functions of contemporary disasters — in whichever part of the world they are found.

The course is interdisciplinary and looks at the political, economic and psychological functions of violence, though it requires no specialist knowledge of any particular discipline.

Teaching

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars in the LT. Seminars will be at or upwards of 45 minutes duration and lectures will be at or above 60 minutes duration. There will be a revision lecture at the beginning of ST.

Student on this course will have a reading week in Week 6.

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