IR452      Half Unit
Empire and Conflict in World Politics

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This is a course about war and empire. Many peoples and places in the world have been shaped by imperialism. This course explores some of the violent dimensions of the imperial past and present. It imagines world politics as a space of co-constitution and war or violent conflict as a form of social interconnection. The course considers armed conflict in imperial context from ‘world wars’, to colonial ‘small wars’ through to the War on Terror and beyond. It looks at how warfare shapes (and is shaped by) the societies, cultures and polities that populate world politics. The course also considers some of the intellectual traditions that have arisen out of the experience of, and inquiry into, imperial/colonial violence, from the thought of resistance leaders to subaltern and postcolonial/decolonial studies. The premise of the course is that imperial warfare and violence have been generative forces in shaping world politics, well beyond the times and places of specific battles and killings.

This course familiarises students with some themes from scholarship on empire and conflict in the social sciences and humanities. 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 imperial and global socio-political and economic forces 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. Imperialism has informed both “world wars” and “small wars”, all of which have shaped society and politics in both the core and periphery of the international system, and continues to do so long after the guns fall silent (e.g. 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. The course will also 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 and inquiry, as for example in subaltern and postcolonial/decolonial studies, as well as a spike in wider critical approaches in the wake of the War on Terror. The course will introduce students to these works and their application to understanding world politics, including in relation to specific contexts and historical periods of modern empire.

15 hours of lectures, 35 hours of lectures and 15 hours of classes in the Winter Term.

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

The course features a film series focused on themes of imperial/colonial and decolonial conflict. The film series also provides an opportunity for course socialisation and the exploration of course themes through accessible popular culture and media. The course coordinator will briefly introduce each film, which is followed by small-group and open-forum discussion in order to draw out the significance of the film for course themes

Students will be expected to produce a 3-4-page summative essay proposal, stating which question/title they are responding to, followed by an outline of their working argument or explanatory framework developed through a literature review in essay-like form, engaging the essential readings and a selection of recommended readings. The proposal should put these texts into conversation with one another in order to identify the key perspectives relevant to the proposed theme, question or title, demonstrating how the proposal’s working argument is positioned in relation to these perspectives. This section will be followed by discussion of the kind of empirical evidence under consideration (e.g. case study or studies, dispersed empirical examples etc.). Finally, the formative assessment will include a bulleted essay structure outline and a bibliography. This essay proposal must be developed through an engagement of essential and recommended course literature relevant to the theme. The course coordinator will provide feedback on the proposal, highlighting both positive aspects and any potential problems with the essay project.

Roxanne Doty, Imperial Encounters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 

Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam (eds.), Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Abinbgdon: Routledge, 2015). 

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

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]).

Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015)

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

Eric R. Wolf, (1997[1982]) Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 2015 [1995])

Course participation (20%)

Essay (80%, 5000 words)

The summative assessment is to be completed on the basis of the formative essay proposal (see above) and the feedback on this provided by the Course Coordinator. The essay’s response to the question, working argument and analysis must be developed through an engagement of essential and recommended course literature relevant to the question/theme. Please note that all forms of plagiarism are prohibited, and that summative and formative assessments will be checked for plagiarism, including the use of generative AI.