3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Questions of violence are as old as questions of politics itself. Are politics and violence essentially the same or is politics fundamentally non-violent? Is violence the only way to achieve political change? Has the state been a force for eliminating violence and securing freedom or has it only created more conflict? Who gets to define what counts as violent, and for what purposes? This course engages such questions through a theoretical lens, often focusing on political actors and activists responding on the ground to these pertinent questions. It asks students to reconsider what they normally think violence, non-violence, and politics are. We will particularly investigate this angle through the lens of race and colonialism—reading such figures as Michel Foucault, Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Ida B. Wells—as well as focusing on histories of state formation and state violence.