Leiden University College

This course starts with two fundamental questions in socio-legal studies. How do laws and legal institutions affect society and social behavior? And conversely, how does society affect the production of laws and the functioning of legal institutions? Socio-legal scholarship has used different perspectives in answering these questions, including a cultural perspective. The course focuses on that perspective, and zooms in on a quite topical issue: the increasingly multicultural or ethnically diverse nature of society. It explores how that characteristic influences the emergence and functioning of laws and legal institutions. It also examines how different ethnic or religious groups, often confronted with a situation of legal pluralism, deal with laws and legal institutions. The course considers if law should merely reflect a society, or whether it also has a function to change society in a certain direction. If law does not reflect the whole of society, what implications does this have for minority groups? These questions are relevant to societies both in the Global North and the Global South. Accordingly, the course draws on and discusses cases from both regions.

This course focuses on a range of aesthetic forms and practices, including literary texts, visual art, theatre and film, that raise questions regarding the politics of representation. How can marginalized people and subjectivities be represented without distorting their own perspectives? What are the limits of self-representation? How do colonial regimes impede one's agency, and what strategies of breaking these silences can art provide? How are aesthetic forms and genres implicated in colonial practices, and how do postcolonial representations appropriate and re-write them? The readings and discussions are organized along several key topics in postcolonial studies, including the practices of “writing back” to the colonial center, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and their limitations, questions of memory, ecocriticism, and imaginations of urban space and migration. Each week concentrates on one of these topics by close-reading a novel/short stories, films and performances as well as exploring approaches developed in postcolonial theory and applying them in the analysis of these works. In doing so, the course engages with the interfaces of textual and visual representations and the expressive possibilities of different forms. The examples include some classics such as Chinua Achebe's THINGS FALL APART as well as pieces by less renowned and more local authors.

Citizenship is a fascinating yet contested idea: on the one hand, it has developed as a mechanism of polity formation and integration, empowering and legitimizing the nation-state as privileged form of political organization. On the other hand, it has worked, and it is still working, as mechanism of exclusion and control over increasingly mobile and mixed populations. Citizenship is a formal status (derived from nationality), but also a set of in/formal practices that coordinate and accommodate our social life. What are the basis of this apparent paradoxes between inclusion and exclusion, formal status and informal practices? As members of any nation-state we expect to be recognized as citizens; yet this membership entails various collateral forms of exclusion, in a world increasingly segmented despite its obvious globalization and interdependence. This course examines the paradoxes of citizenship through various lenses, both in terms of the inclusion/exclusion dynamics it triggers, as well as the (dis)connection existing between the formal status citizenship implies and the necessary practices it requires of us to live in society.

This introductory peace and conflict course lays a theoretical foundation for analyzing violent conflict and its dynamics. Students are trained in identifying conflict contexts and actors, and in examining how and why conflicts emerge and escalate. The course introduces causes of violent conflict and how they are interlinked. It also sheds light on contemporary conflict trends as well as international responses, including attempts to keep and build peace.

This course examines the role of sovereignty and statehood in today's world order. It begins with an overview of the concept of sovereignty and continues with the history of statehood, covering colonialism, decolonization, and self-determination. Students gain a firm understanding of the historical, legal and political foundations of sovereignty, and the role of statehood in international law and international relations. The lectures introduce key concepts such as: sovereignty, the legal personality of states; the criteria, forms, and attributes of statehood; the recognition of emerging states; self-determination, etc. The lecture material is contextualized in the second part of the course through a series of case studies. These provide practical, present-day examples of the tensions between sovereignty, statehood and international intervention.

This course surveys the United States' interactions with the world in what Luce (and others) called the “American century”. Starting with the US emergence as an imperial power at the turn of the twentieth century, it traces the evolution of American foreign relations through the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War. It considers how the United States came to rise to its present position of power within the international system, and how the exercise of American power (military, political, economic, and cultural) in turn came to transform the lives of millions. Throughout the course, key themes in American international history are touched upon, such as isolationism, the “new world orders” proposed by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the emergence of the Cold War, and subsequent challenges to American hegemony, from Vietnam to Iraq. The course also considers the different ways that historians have evaluated and interpreted the history of American foreign relations. The course relies heavily on the use of primary sources, which students are asked to incorporate both in their class readings and in their written work. It also features an archive excursion.

This course covers the nature of power in contemporary world politics and considers who or what counts as powerful in global affairs. The following topics are covered: the United States as a super power and the sources of its power (military might, economic prowess or cultural attraction); actors that balance US power; the rise of BRICS and the global power shift; globalization transforming the very nature of power itself. Power is a key concept in world politics. This certainly applies to the academic study of world politics, especially the discipline of International Relations (IR) where power has always been a fundamental category. Power is conceptualized as a possession or resource that states can mobilize to advance their interests. This course introduces, surveys, and critically examines the most important philosophies, theories and conceptions of power in world politics. As mentioned, different schools of thought disagree sharply on the nature of power in world politics, including on the sources of power, its effects on inter-state and transnational relations and its consequences for peace and security. Yet all of these schools offer thought-provoking perspectives on power and its relationship to connected phenomena, such as authority, hegemony, leadership, and coercion. These perspectives can be turned into valuable tools with which are used to analyze the various facets of power in world politics. In order to do so, this course crosses disciplinary boundaries, linking political science, sociology, and political philosophy. Concrete examples are drawn from world politics past and present to illustrate the ways in which the complex phenomenon called power operates in global affairs.

This course develops Spanish language skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The course is organized around interactive and communicative activities that allows students to build all skills in the most effective way. Class proceedings focus on submerging students in real-world Spanish language. Grammatical structures and vocabulary are also integrated into the learning process in meaningful contexts. Furthermore an important aspect of the course is the cultural knowledge about Spain and Latin America, with a strong emphasis on intercultural communication. This course develops competency in spoken and written Spanish to a standard that enables the student to communicate effectively and confidently with Spanish native speakers and sustain, to some extent, a work or study placement in a Spanish-speaking country. In terms of the CEFR of the Council of Europe, the student can: understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. can deal with most situations likely to arise while traveling in an area where the language is spoken; can produce simple connected text on topics that are familiar or of personal interest; can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes and ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans. Prerequisites for this course are Beginners Spanish and/or level A2 CFER equivalency.

This course unpacks the debates on freedom of religion on the basis of actual case studies. After an in-depth look at the ways in which identity discourses in general vacillate between “biological” and “cultural” interpretations (and valuations), the course zooms in on legal and social debates on religious freedom, culminating in an exploration of violent state interference in religious communities. Students not only learn about religion, and religious identity, but also about the construction of identity discourses in general. They learn to understand how differences in world-view (normative cognition) impact understandings of reality. By taking a look at actual cases of conflict between religious communities and state actors, they learn to deal with diversity on the basis of religion. From a series of outlier cases, students acquire a more generalized view of the nature of religious identities. Recommended prerequisite is an intermediate-level anthropology course.

This research-led course enables students to answer vital questions about the role of diplomacy in inter-state conflicts, and to formulate practical policy advice by examining the diplomacy of inter-state conflict in-depth. The course studies concrete cases – comprising both historical case studies of inter-state conflict and present-day rivalries (e.g. NATO-Russia, USA-Iran, Israel-Palestine) – in order to understand (a) the geostrategic, political, economic, symbolic, and psychological dynamics that enable or constrain diplomatic solutions and (b) the scope conditions for the successful application of non-coercive diplomatic strategies. Throughout the course, students pay particular attention to the ways in which diplomacy can contribute to the management, de-escalation, and transformation of inter-state conflict. In doing so, the focus is on what is arguably the trickiest diplomatic process of them all: the diplomacy of first steps also known as “ice breaking”. After years, sometimes decades, of intense rivalry, how can enemies initiate a process of diplomatic engagement? Often, formidable obstacles exist to breaking the ice between adversaries, including the strategic risk of getting exploited by your adversary, domestic resistance (divided party politics, bureaucratic opposition, civil society resistance) and psychological pathologies (misperception, enduring enemy images). Nonetheless, spectacular successes of engagement – including the rapprochements between France and Germany after World War II, Egypt and Israel in the 1970s, and the Soviet Union and the USA at the end of the Cold War – provide a glimmer of hope. Upon successful completion of the course, students are able to: examine and critically evaluate the role that diplomacy plays in world politics; analyze key diplomatic options of conflict management, de-escalation and transformation; compare and contrast cases of diplomatic engagement past and present; formulate policy proposals for the diplomatic solution of enduring rivalries.