DV520      Half Unit
Complex Emergencies

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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When confronted with media reports of civil wars, famines or genocides in countries such as Sudan, Syria or Yemen, we are often left with a sense of confusion. Why is this happening? Why do such disasters keep recurring? Why are they so hard to resolve? 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 straightforward contest between two or more sides aiming simply to ‘win’), the course offers distinctive ways of thinking about war, humanitarian intervention and peacebuilding. Who benefits from conflict? Who benefits from famine? How do these benefits relate to the information we receive? How is ‘the enemy’ defined, and whose interests do these changing definitions serve? Can actors such as humanitarians avoid becoming co-opted by these dynamics? How can one make a peace that doesn’t propel society straight back into war?

The course offers an understanding of the complex fault-lines that lie behind oversimplistic news and media coverage. It also expands our understanding of disasters to take account of the fact that many disasters (such as climate change, the ‘migration crisis’, or the rise of populism) now seem to be ‘coming home’ to the rich democracies of the Global North.

The course makes use of the political thought of writers such as 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 draws on detailed empirical case-studies from a diverse range of contexts.

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.

13.5 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars in the WT. 

Students will co-produce seminar presentations and will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the WT, ie, a plan for the summative research paper (1500-2000 words) on which the student will receive feedback and topic approval.

• David Keen, Complex Emergencies (Polity, 2008)
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken, 1951)
• Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Polity, 2015)
• Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (University of California Press, 2012)
• Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Polity, 3rd Ed., 2012)
• Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (Oxford University Press, 1981)
• Ruben Andersson, Illegality Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (University of California Press, 2014)

Essay (100%, 5000 words)