War, Peace and Security

War, peace, and security sound self-evident until you actually try to define them, and that tension is the whole point here: the course treats these three concepts as contested ideas whose meanings shift across intellectual traditions, not as fixed conditions to be measured. You'll work through a heavy reading load drawn largely from critical security studies (Fierke is the anchor), write and discuss your way through competing accounts of why wars happen, what counts as peace, and whose security is being produced at whose expense. It builds naturally on intro IR theory and feeds into upper-level work on conflict, strategy, and foreign policy, giving you the conceptual vocabulary to argue about contemporary crises rather than just describe them.