Politics modules

From western antiquity until modern times, the body in the west has been aestheticised, vilified, eroticised and pathologised. It is in and through the body that both self and society have been fashioned and disciplined.

It is at the heart of the emergence of sexuality as a modern discourse, and a constituent feature of the politics of identity, formed around race, gender and sex. For all the different debates the body has generated, they have always been framed within the mind/body, and nature/culture distinctions, which have been at the core of western thinking since the eighteenth century. 

This module focuses on how societies emerging from different types of conflict (such as war, genocide, ethnic violence and grave human rights abuses) engage in the process of coming to terms with their past. It examines official mechanisms of ‘transitional justice’ such as trials and truth commissions, as well as cultural forms of remembrance and local community practices.

By exploring the complex relationship between conflict, memory and justice in various cross-cultural settings, it seeks to provide an understanding of the ways in which such processes can promote or hinder reconciliation and the rebuilding of social and inter-communal ties.

The module will also assess the role of external factors (particularly through the creation of international war crimes tribunals) in terms of how they have affected such internal processes of facing the past. Various case studies, including Germany, Japan, Serbia, South Africa, and Rwanda will inform the theoretical discussions and provide a comparative perspective. 

This module focuses on the African city as a specific site to explore politics and international relations. The module considers the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial African city as a concrete site which hosts and is shaped and reshaped by changing and contradictory power relations, ideologies, struggles, economies and cultures.

This optional module aims to build a systematic understanding of the political and social foundations of global financial markets, their operation and impact on the world economy. The module uses an empirical lens to interrogate different forms of finance. The first part introduces the politics of finance and the dynamics of financial power as ‘currency’ or money finance. The second part of the module explores finance as ‘credit’. This will involve in-depth examinations of contemporary features of the global financial system and its effects on stability in both advanced and developing countries. The final form of finance is as ‘equity’ and the inherent volatility and fragility of the current financialised era of capitalism. The module concludes with student-led workshops on financial crisis where students present group projects on different episodes and ‘types’ of financial crises.

Lecturer: Dr Johnna Montgomerie

This module explores the contemporary security agenda in world politics. It addresses both theoretical debates over the nature of security and the range of phenomena currently identified as security threats.

The module takes as its point of entry, the emergence in the post Cold War world of the idea of human security, which challenged the traditional view that the state was the primary referent of security. Today’s security landscape is complex, asymmetrical and includes heterogeneous actors. Contemporary security studies now focuses on a broad range of actors – states, individuals, substate groups, transnational NGOs and intergovernmental organisations. These actors are studied as: i) subjects exposed to a range of security threats; individuals and collectivities seek to reduce their vulnerability to risk; as sources of insecurity themselves.

The module is divided into three sections.

The first analyses different theoretical approaches to studying security within world politics. It compares and contrasts the traditional Realist Strategic Studies approach with current ‘critical’ approaches to security studies, such as the Copenhagen and governmentality schools. The second identifies some of the most pressing contemporary threats to individual, national and global security. Alongside established concerns with UN collective security and peacekeeping, the module also addresses the ‘new security’ threats deriving from resource scarcity and environmental degradation, flows of refugees and migration, disease and health, and organised crime. The final section sketches out the contours of an evolving security landscape associated with the War on Terror.

In particular, it addresses the relationship between the discourse of the War on Terror and the emergence of two new spaces of (in)security: i) states of exception such as Guantanamo Bay and ii) the surveillance territories of homeland security.

Lecturer: Dr Jeremy Larkins

The workings of power, authority and freedom have implications as much for our subjective, or psychic, organisation as they do for institutions and programmes of government. Psychoanalytic theory looks to the unconscious motivations of human behaviour and the strange, often perverse effects these can have on social relations. Ideas of leadership, cultural identity or personal choice, for example, involve identifications that often distort one’s sense of self and delimit its autonomy. Secret desires for subjugation to the powerful or the willful denial of suffering (in oneself or in others) are central themes of psychoanalysis. 

‘Psychopolitics’ thus comprises the fantasies, obsessions, obscene desires and precarious repressions that structure political reality and supply it objects for intimate investment. This module explores how we study politics from a psychoanalytical perspective. It focuses primarily on key texts by Freud and Lacan – as well as by other thinkers – to develop a vocabulary of psychopolitical analysis to apply to the study of contemporary events.