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Critical Security Studies

  • NINT 5142 - Critical Security Studies (Spring 2008)

Section A/CRN 6021
Everita Silina
Wednesday 8.00pm - 9.50pm

Are we secure yet? Or does our increasing investment in security discourses result from a gnawing and growing sense of insecurity? Lives and livelihoods, elections, economies, industries, institutions and international relations revolve around issues of security. The concept is dramatic enough to warrant the use of military force and declare states of emergency, and malleable enough for political rhetoric and fashion marketing. This course will critically explore the concept of security as a central organizing principle of the modern social order and its contemporary trajectory.

This course concerns critical thinking about security-the active analysis, synthesis, and application of information in ways that interrogate and elucidate established ideas. This is not a course on security policy or threats per se, but about understanding security as a dynamic organizing category with (very) real world effects. It is incumbent upon the student to actively make connections between the themes and current events. The first part of the course, Ontologies of Security, examines the fundamental interrelation between security and social order, including classic political, sociological and psychological approaches that conceive of security as the underlying logic of modern society and the contemporary international system. The second, Security Discourses, explores critical assessments of conventional security frameworks. The last section, Towards an Anatomy of Security Today, examines current trajectories of security, including technologies of control and surveillance, networked organizational forms, privatization and commodification, and the shifting nature of emergencies and intervention.

This course is the foundation class for the Conflict and Security concentration.

Concentration:Conflict and Security