CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES

Catalog description

Using theoretical and case study material, students will examine elements of security studies, including ethical frameworks, development of domestic and international policy, roles of state and government agencies, enforcement of law as national and domestic security policy, creation and enforcement of national borders, nation-building, and the relationship between homeland (domestic) security and defense of the nation-state. Students will also explore how community members create narratives of human (in)security after episodes of colonization and nation-building, mass violence (including ethnic cleansing, deportation, displacement, forced migration, and genocide), advocating for justice, and targeting of social identity categories (including, but not limited to, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, sexual orientation, religion, political identity, and economic class). Finally, students will investigate the relationship between individual and collective identities, particularly when individuals hold professional identities tied to the nation-state.