Dangerous Disorders: Race, Violence, and Global Politics

This course will explore key themes and issue areas in international relations theory and international politics through a series of critical engagements with these topics. The beginning of the course will focus on how colonialism and race-making have shaped global stratifications of power through the creation of the international system, and in the development of International Relations as a provincial discipline in the US academy. We’ll then trace the legacies of racism and anti-colonial struggles over labor, territorial dispossession, assimilation, and economic inequality in an number of historical and geographic contexts including Australia, Brazil, Palestine, and North America. We then turn to the body as central to regimes of security and international order, using feminist theories of IR and studies in visual culture to consider issues of confinement, suicide bombing, drone warfare, and counterinsurgency. In the final weeks of the course, we’ll consider the relationship between security, leisure, and terrorism, looking at how post-9/11 logics and practices of securitization are transforming the infrastructures of global travel and tourism. Finally, we’ll examine how multi-scalar regimes of computation, algorithms, robots, and cloud computing are shifting geopolitical realities and global governing architectures in profound ways.

Fall 2016 • POLS 630 • Prof. Nicole Grove

Wednesday 3:00pm to 5:30pmSaunders Hall, Room 624

Office Hours: Thursdays, 12pm to 2pm in Saunders 608

Email: nsgrove@hawaii.edu

Week 1 - August 24 W.E.B. Du Bois. “Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace.” In The World and Africa and Color and Democracy. Oxford University Press. Pp. 233-330.

Week 2 - August 31 Robert Vitalis. White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations. Cornell University Press. Introduction and Parts I and II, pp. 1-84.

Week 3 - September 7Vitalis cont. Parts III, IV and Conclusion, pp. 85-182.

Week 4 - September 14 Patrick Wolfe. Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. Verso. Introduction and Chapters 1-4.

Week 5 - September 21Wolfe, cont. Chapters 5-8 and Conclusion.

Week 6 - September 28Lauren Wilcox, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations. Oxford University Press. Introduction and Chapters 1-3, pp. 1-103.

Week 7 - October 5Wilcox cont. Chapters 4-6 and Conclusion, pp. 104-204.

Week 8 - October 12Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Stanford University Press. Introduction and Chapters 1-4, pp. 1-138.

Week 9 - October 19Khalili, cont. Introduction and Chapters 5-7 and Conclusion, pp. 139-250.

Week 10 - October 26Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory. University of Chicago Press. Introduction and Chapters 1-3 (Part 1), pp. 1-138.

Week 11 - November 2Feldman, cont. Introduction and Chapters 5-7 and Conclusion, pp. 139-250.

Week 12 - November 9 Debbie Lisle, Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism. University of Minnesota Press. Part 1.

Week 13 - November 16Lisle, cont. Part 2.

Week 14 - November 23 Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press. Introduction, Section I and Section II, ‘Earth Layer’, pp. 1-108.

Week 15 - November 30Bratton, cont. Section II, ‘Cloud Layer’ to ‘Address Layer’, pp. 109-218.

Week 16 - December 7 Bratton, cont. Section II cont. and Section III, pp. 219-366.