Annotation
This seminar will present and define critical approaches in the field of security studies which are dealing with social justice issues and contribute to the understanding of human security and human agency within the field. Specifically, this seminar will deal with feminism (in all its forms) and postcolonialism in security studies and their relevance to issues of social justice and challenges to the west-centrism of SS and IR.
The various readings should provide students with varied feminist and postcolonial perspectives on security, war, conflict, and peace and engage students in complex debates. Special attention will be dedicated to the issues of epistemology and knowledge production and its relevance to our understanding of violence, war, and other crucial phenomena relevant to our field (both International Relations and Security Studies).
This will be done through the continuous challenge to the prevailing mainstream paradigm in the field: realism, positivism, and the prevailing notion of objective (universal) knowledge.