International relations

Activism, Development and Violence: Global Systems, Local Encounters

Module code: 001IRS
Level 6
30 credits in spring semester
Teaching method: Seminar
Assessment modes: Coursework, Essay

On this module, you’ll study global systems of violence and rethink development away from a ‘will to improvement’ within ready-made frameworks.

The module uses decolonial, Indigenous studies, feminist, critical political economy and racial capitalist perspectives, along with activist research approaches, as you encounter global systems of violence through community-based learning and investigate manifestations of these systems in Brighton in collaboration with local activists.

Local sites will vary each year and include:

  • arms factories
  • war museums
  • movements working on abolition and the decolonization of development
  • climate change.

You’ll explore global systems of violence that entangle problems of development in places ranging from Palestine to Yemen and across global issues of war, policing, and community development. You‘ll reflect on what they intuitively associate with ‘development,’ what they resist and why this might be the case, as we grapple with how to rethink development in relation to systemic violence.

Through these encounters, the module will problematise the Global South as a location of violence and encourage students to rethink the relationship between the local and the global.

Topics covered include:

  • rethinking development: between the bureaucratic and the political
  • reform versus radical transformation
  • development beyond improvement: solidarity, unsettling hegemony
  • humanitarianism/war/Yemen/Palestine
  • colonialism/reparations/WWI
  • abolition/policing/alternative development.

 

 

Module learning outcomes

  • Theoretically explore the relationship between the local and the global
  • Examine how a local site is implicated in global systems of violence
  • Reflect on the module theme of ‘development beyond improvement’
  • Demonstrate an understanding of and ability to apply theories, concepts and debates about development and global systems of violence
  • Demonstrate an understanding of praxis in relation to an empirical site
  • Reflect on the significance of global systems of violence for practice and policy of international development