Prof Tarak Barkawi CBG.9.03

This course is available on the CEMS Exchange, MBA Exchange, MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe, MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe (LSE & Sciences Po), MSc in International Relations, MSc in International Relations (LSE and Sciences Po), MSc in International Relations (Research), MSc in International Relations Theory and MSc in Women, Peace and Security. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

All students are required to obtain permission from the Teacher Responsible by completing the Student Statement box on the online application form linked to course selection on LSE for You. Admission is not guaranteed

Many peoples and places in modern world politics have been shaped by histories of empire. This course explores the violent dimensions of the imperial past and present. It covers armed conflict in imperial context from “small war” to “counterinsurgency” and the War on Terror; it looks at the ways in which warfare shapes (and is shaped by) the societies, cultures and polities that populate world politics; and it considers some of the intellectual traditions that have arisen out of the experience of colonial violence, from the thought of resistance leaders to subaltern and postcolonial studies. The premise of the course is that warfare and violence have been generative forces in shaping world politics.

This course aims to familiarise students with scholarship on empire and conflict in International Relations and related disciplines. This involves, first, understanding the limitations of the sovereign nation-state as the basic unit of world politics. For most people in most times and places, international relations have taken imperial form of one kind or another. What would it mean to take empire seriously in international thought and inquiry? The course approaches this question by looking at the relations between empire and globalization in historical and theoretical context. Second, although much scholarship on empire concerns economy and culture, the history of empire is a history of continual warfare and armed resistance. Such “small wars” have shaped society and politics in both the core and periphery of the international system, and often continue to do so long after the guns fall silent (as for example in the case of the US and the Vietnam War). The course will cover the histories, strategies and theories associated with such wars and their effects. Third and finally, the course will explore the intersection between empire and knowledge in political theory and social inquiry. Not only did anti-colonial resistance produce its own theorists, such as Frantz Fanon and Mao Zedong, but in recent decades empire has been the site of new turns in social and political theory, as for example in subaltern studies and postcolonialism. The course will introduce students to this work and it applications to understanding world politics.

MSc Seminars

The seminars will develop students’ abilities to read, digest, and critique monograph length texts. Each will be based upon a single book. Students will be expected to read the assigned book in its entirety before each seminar. Every student will be expected to come to seminar prepared to participate. There will be no individual seminar presentations. Every student is expected to speak in every seminar. Students should be prepared to comment on the main argument of each book; to place each text in a wider intellectual context, concerning for example the debates and audiences the book is speaking to; and to offer a critical assessment of the book’s contributions.

There will be some variation in the texts assigned to MSc students each year. 

10 hours of lectures and 18 hours of seminars in the MT.

Additionally, there will be weekly film viewings starting in Week 2.

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy. 

Students will be expected to produce 2 essays in the MT.

Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Penguin Books, 2004).

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999 [1984]).

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000).

Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999).

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994 [1993]).

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967 [1961]).

Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1989).

Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Owl Books, 2007 [2006]).

Faisal Devji, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (London: Hurst, 2008).

Essay (100%, 5000 words) in the LT.

Department: International Relations

Total students 2018/19: 21

Average class size 2018/19: 21

Controlled access 2018/19: No

Value: Half Unit