Date and time: Wednesday 28 September 2022; 13:15-15:00 (UTC+2)

Teacher: Bart Klem

Location: Room 302 (Annedalseminariet)

Click here for post-lecture slides

The war in Ukraine has brought the phenomenon of war closer to home for many Europeans. Such a direct territorial confrontation between two states has become rare. The vast majority of armed conflicts today are not wars fought between two or more states, but rather violent conflicts that take place within a particular state, though often with a range of regional and global involvements. Many of these “civil wars” in fact pivot on attempts to re-demarcate the state ('separatists') or redefine the nature of government ('revolutionaries').

In addition, and much line with the globalisation literature, armed violence is increasingly a networked phenomenon. Both terrorist groups and national governments project force across the globe, be it with suicide bombs or drone strikes, and this raises unsettling questions about how we delimit war in time and space.

In this lecture, we will study a selection of empirical examples to then explore their conceptual implications. We will consider different perspectives, including an anthropological perspective (as is also evident in the readings for this class).

Required reading:
Group A	Kelly, Tobias (2008) “The attractions of accountancy: Living an ordinary life during the second Palestinian intifada”, Ethnography 9: 351-376.
Group B	Thiranagama, Sharika (2011) In my mother’s house: Civil war in Sri Lanka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Introduction, pp. 1-40.
All	Gregory, Derek (2010) "War and Peace." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35: 154-186

Suggested additional reading

Goodwin, Jeff (2019) The Causes of Terrorism, In Erica Chenoweth, Richard English, Andreas Gofas, and Stathis N. Kalyvas (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press (available as ebook (Links to an external site.))

Strand, Håvard, Siri Aas Rustad, Henrik Urdal and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, 2019, Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946–2018, Conflict Trends, 3, pp. 1-4. Oslo: PRIO.