Politics of Security

Security here is treated not as a fixed list of threats but as a political practice — how something gets named a "security issue" in the first place, who does the naming, and what that move legitimates. You'll work through securitization theory and its critics by reading dense IR/political theory and stress-testing it against cases ranging from migration and nuclear politics to gender and popular culture, with the workload built around weekly participation, a paper proposal, and a research essay. As a graduate-level seminar, it assumes you're comfortable with mainstream IR and pushes you toward the critical-security side that informs most current dissertation work in the department.