Suspended in 2025/26
GV307      Half Unit
Conflict and Cooperation: A Few Provocative Debates

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

(Q1) When is it permissible to kill civilians for a political cause? (Q2) Should governments be permitted to restrict civil liberties in the name of security? (Q3) Is cultural diversity more problematic than desirable in societies? (Q4) Should we preserve and promote multiculturalism? (Q5) Do grievances or ideologies matter more in explaining radicalization and terrorism? (Q6) How convincing are the arguments in favour of open borders? (Q7) What role, if any, does inequality play in the onset of political violence? (Q8) How skeptical should we be of apocalyptic claims regarding climate refugees and violent conflict? (Q9) When it is justifiable to use drones to kill? (Q10) What are the arguments for and against an international responsibility to protect civilians in cases of gross human rights violations?

This course is organized around these ten "big" empirical and normative questions which touch on issues in the public sphere relating to political and ethnic conflict and cooperation. The selection of debates and cases may vary year-to-year as the scholarly frontier of understanding and the world's catalogue of conflicts also evolve. The course is taught as a research seminar comprising ten weekly two-hour sessions. Given its research-oriented focus, the course is attentive to methodology and students will be taught to critically evaluate the more common approaches to empirical research in the field. Students will have the opportunity to undertake a single substantial research project on a course-related topic resulting in an assessed summative essay.

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

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

Students will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the AT.

The formative assessment comprises an essay plan (of 1000 words) which will be used for the summative long essay.

• A statement from Al Qaeda regarding the mandates of the heroes and the legality of the operations in New York and Washington - Al Qaeda, 2002
• The Lesser Evil - Michael Ignatieff, 2004
• E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture - Robert D. Putnam, 2007-06
• Are There Any Cultural Rights? - Kukathas, Chandran
• Dying to win: the strategic logic of suicide terrorism - Robert Anthony Pape, 2005
• Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders - Joseph Carens
• Beyond greed and grievance: feasibility and civil war - P. Collier, A. Hoeffler, D. Rohner
• Climate Change and Conflict: The Migration Link - Nils Petter Gleditsch, Ragnhild Nordås
• Killing by remote control: the ethics of an unmanned military - Jeff McMahan, 2013
• The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ and the Structural Problems of Preventive Humanitarian Intervention - Roland Paris, 2014-10-20

Course participation (20%)

Essay (80%, 3000 words)

The summative assessment will comprise two components. First, a student's overall contribution to the course (20%) will be assessed by way of oral participation in the classroom and written contribution to an online discussion forum where each of the debates examined in the course will be the subject of potential discussion. Second, students will choose one of the questions posed each week and write a long essay totalling 3000 words.