IR374      Half Unit
Conflict and Peacebuilding

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

A basic background knowledge of the subject themes or related areas would be an advantage.

This course combines theoretical, empirical, and conceptual work on conflict and peacebuilding with experiences and reflections from particular cases. The course integrates research on political violence, civil war onset, armed group mobilisation, rebel governance, and civilian agency. It further explores international responses to conflict, engaging literatures on statebuilding, transitional justicecolonisation, and liberal peace. While the course is primarily empirical in focus, it situates experiences of violence, conflict and peace within a broader historical trajectory, considering relationships between global structures of power and the microdynamics of conflict.

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of classes in the Winter Term.

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

Students will produce a summative essay proposal in Week 8 of the WT. The formative assessment provides students with an opportunity to produce an essay plan and receive feedback to support their preparation for the summative essay.

Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

Straus, Scott. 2015. Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Cohen, Dara Kay. 2016. Rape During Civil War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Autesserre, Séverine. 2014. Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention. Cambridge University Press.

Staniland, Paul. 2014. Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press),

Arjona, Ana. 2016. “Rebelocracy: A Theory of Social Order in Civil War” (Kellogg Working Paper) & Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Walter, Barbara F. “The New New Civil Wars. ”Annual Review of Political Science 20, no. 1(2017): 469–86

Weinstein, Jeremy. 2007.Inside Rebellion: The Politics of insurgent Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wood, Elisabeth. 2008. "The Social Processes of Civil War: The Wartime Transformation of Social Networks." Annual Rev. Political Science. 11:539-561.

Mamdani Mahmood. 2003. ‘Making Sense Of Political Violence in Post-Colonial Africa.’ Socialist Register (79).

Enloe, Cynthia H. 2007. Globalization and Militarism : Feminists Make the Link. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield

Peterson, Spike. 2007. ‘Thinking Through Intersectionality and War.’ Race, Gender & Class, 10-27.

Tickner, JA. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. Columbia Univ. Press 

Wimmer, Andreas. 2012. Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World. Cambridge University Press

MacGinty, Roger. 2021. Everyday Peace: How So-Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict. Oxford University Press.

Fujii, LeeAnn. 2010. “Shades of Truth and Lies: Interpreting Testimonies of War and Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 47(2):231–41.

Campbell, Susanna, David Chandler, and Meera Sabaratnam. 2011. A Liberal Peace?: The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding. Zed Books.

Course participation (20%)

Essay (80%, 2500 words)