King's College London

This course provides students with an understanding of the most important challenges that war poses for international order. It draws on ideas from international relations, sociology, political geography, and anthropology to equip students with conceptual and analytical insights to understand the relations between international order and war. Are wars an unavoidable threat to international order? Or are they necessary at times to preserve international order? What have the Cold War, the "war on terror," and the war on poverty in common? How can we understand the relations between war and revolution, war and security, war and human rights, war and risk? What alternatives to war are possible today? How have wars and conflicts been transformed by changes in the international order?

The field of modernist studies has undergone a radical transformation over the last decade.  This course introduces students to a range of modernist writing, as well as investigating what is at stake in such reconfigurations of modernist literature and culture.  Students approach both the primary texts and investigation of the field through the lens of space and place.  Students focus on the geographical co-ordinates of modernism, as well as the way the field has been "mapped," provides a thread through the course.  It leads students into the material spaces of urban interaction, the places (cafes, galleries) where the crucial transnational collaborations occurred that have defined the period.  Students also consider the spatial politics (urban, domestic, textual, and psychological).  The course pays careful attention to the social and politics contexts in which these writers operated, and the transatlantic and colonial networks which facilitated their writing and their aesthetic experiments.

This course is divided into two parts. In the first part, it focuses on some key policies of the EU: students look at the economic and monetary policies, justice, and home affairs, the common agricultural policy, environmental and climate policy, trade policy and EU foreign policy.  The second part looks at some current challenges and controversies that the EU is facing. Students consider whether the EU is an efficient and legitimate system, current challenges to the rule of law, Euroscepticism and the increasing domestic contestation. 

The course explores the relationships between urbanization and broader social, economic, political, and environmental transformations.  Exploration in this course is employed both as a tactic to thematically investigate contemporary cities, and as an opportunity to re-imagine what we might understand to be 'the city' and 'the urban' using recent theoretical approaches. While the course addressed a wide-range of cities across the global north and south, London is used throughout as a pivotal case through which to ground the thematic and theoretical explorations.