Cours 23/24

The significant social, political, economic, cultural, and even psychological forces that have defined the last several centuries are often collected under the term modernity. To be sure, the very expansiveness of this concept makes it difficult to grasp. At the same time, the processes bound up with modernity have colored life in societies across the globe, and the Korean peninsula is certainly no exception to this trend. This course will explore the historical interspersing of Korean society, politics, and culture with the disparate global phenomena bound up with modernity and conceptions of ‘modernization’.

By doing so we will be able to approach the complexities of modernity as a concept by grounding it in the various ways that it has been incorporated, refracted, rejected, and contested within Korean society over the last 150 years. This will involve looking at the ways in which various forces of modernity interacted with Korean society. Ultimately, we will seek to understand the ways in which the search for, and struggle over, a Korean modernity stands at the fulcrum of a series of key historical junctures across its history. Indeed, this is a struggle that persists into the present day.

Principles of International Security 

Dr. Carl Rihan

This course is expected to provide students with foundations in the field of international security and the highly-related field of foreign policy. It will seek to provide students with the “essentials toolbox” that would allow them to make analytical sense of the current and emerging international challenges and their impact on the peace, stability, and security of States, societies, and ecosystems. The course will address the theoretical underpinnings of security studies and the ensuing practice, before exploring the causes of wars, key notions such as Grand Strategy and Doctrine, classical approaches to State security such as military effectiveness, classical and post-classical deterrence, nuclear weapons, and collective security. The course will then explore a first generation of challenges that conventional approaches to security have faced, ranging from the role of decolonization and interventionism in the creation of world systems and unconventional logics of violence including proxy warfare, insurgency and counter-insurgency. Students will ultimately explore the second generation of challenges which relate to the post-1990 period including “Pax Americana”, the notion of “imperial overstretch”, terrorism and the “War on Terror”. The course will conclude with an exploration of emerging challenges including illicit financial flows (IFFs), the financing of terrorism, the changing nature of intelligence and surveillance, cybersecurity, and cryptocurrencies.

This course aims to present the main issues in contemporary world politics and how the discipline of international relations tackled them.  Of course, it is impossible in a short course as this one to discuss thoroughly all relevant contemporary issues in world politics. Hence, I have selected a handful of topics covering four regions: Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In each of them, special attention will be paid to the main issues on the regional agenda and the effects they have on the international system. In addition, I added a section on the effect of the pandemic on world politics. In this way, the course provides students with basic knowledge to understand the evolution of the main aspects of contemporary international relations in the aforementioned regions.