PPR425: Theorising Security and War

Objectives

• Do we still know what security and war are?
• Why are some forms of violence classified as war while others are classified as criminality or terror?
• Now that security is everybody's business, how much safer are we?
• what kind of science is the science of security?
• And who in addition to states is in the business of making us secure?

Theorizing helps us to pose and answer these questions. This module introduces students to ways of conceptualizing power, security and war. Since forms of security and war are intimately correlated with forms of cultural political and economic life, theories in this module address: geopolitics, biopolitics, techno-science, digitalization, molecularization, network war, image war and virtual war.  The teaching and learning strategy of Theorising Security and War is designed to make students theoretically and philosophically literate in conceptual and analytical schemes comprising the biopolitics as well as the geopolitics of security and war.  Students should be able to:

• demonstrate a broad theoretical competence in relation to classical and contemporary texts dealing with the analysis of power relations, problematisations of security, sources of violence, and definitions and practices of war
• work critically with theoretical accounts of: contingency, uncertainty and risk
  radical relationality (complexity and networks); and changing problematisations of security
• Specifically they should be able to distinguish the salient features of geopolitical and biopolitical problematisations of security and war and the different calculative rationalities and governmental technologies employed by them
• locate a specific theoretical tradition within its wider theoretical and philosophical assumptions and be capable also of critical comparing different traditions in relation both to these assumptions and their different logical and practical entailments

In the process students should be able to demonstrate in written work, group presentation and discussion more refined analytical skills in the interrogation and critical engagement of empirical material and case studies drawn from a wide variety of multi-media sources.

Select Bibliography

Foucault, Michel, Society Must be Defended (Allen Lane, 2003)

Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (Blackwell's, 2000)

Messner, Dirk, The Network Society (Frank Cass, 1997)

Creveld, Martin van, The Transformation of War (Free Press, 1991)

Suganami, H, On the Causes of War (Clarendon Press, 1996)

Giddens, Anthony, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Volume 2. Nation and Violence (Polity Press, 1987)

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