Suspended in 2025/26
IR422      One 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 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 mobilization, rebel governance, and civilian agency. It further explores international responses to conflict, engaging literatures on statebuilding, colonization, 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.

This course is delivered through a combination of classes and lectures totalling a minimum of 20 hours  in the WinterTerm. Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Students will produce a formative essay in the WT.

• 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%)

The essay is a take-home assessment.