Security, Peace-building and Diplomacy

The aim of this module is to introduce students to the evolution and change in diplomatic practice in the contemporary digital age through a range of cases and issues from across world. The main objectives are:

A) To equip students with theoretical approaches, concepts and debates enabling the critical interrogation of diplomacy in the digital age; its promises and its drawbacks; and its relationship with power, knowledge production, networks, gender, voice, and communication; while also critically appraising the relationship between digital diplomacy and democracy. In so doing, it aims to uncover the role of both state and non-state actors (individuals, activists, journalists, influencers, diasporas, charities, corporations, minorities) in digital diplomacy demonstrating that widening engagement means widening the agenda.

B) To showcase skills and various ways of being a diplomat in the contemporary digital age, through introducing and unpacking the real-life applications of such skills and ways, integrating practitioner contributions where possible; as well as through examining various and often overlooked pathways of practicing diplomacy (such as public diplomacy, paradiplomacy, protodiplomacy, NGO and advocacy diplomacy).

The aims of this module are to examine international security through a variety of traditional and non-traditional approaches, and through case studies across several issue areas. The overarching aim of the module is to provide students with a wider understanding of security as it has evolved historically, and the role it plays in contemporary societies and in global politics. 

The aim of this module is to understand the main features, concepts and practices of international negotiations. It provides an overview of the most important elements of negotiation and offers an application to a number of case studies.

The aim of this module is to equip students with the knowledge, understanding and skills necessary to appraise and assess the relevance of politics for their professional futures. Building on core theoretical and conceptual foundations of the study of politics, the course will proceed by active student engagement with case studies of political developments (including crisis). Students will develop the skills required to recognise and act upon this complex operating environment.

The aims of this module are to:

• To introduce, compare and contrast traditional and critical approaches to post-conflict peace-building;
• To undertake empirical case studies ¿ in lectures and via readings and class discussion as a means of illustrating and critically interrogating competing theories, concepts and debates on intervention, success and failure of contemporary peace-building.
• Introduce and interrogate recent trends in the practice of peace-building, and assess their political and ethical implications.

The aims of this module are to:

• Provide students with an opportunity to be exposed to project-based teamwork in diverse settings (understood in this context as involving a range of multidisciplinary, multicultural and demographic elements in differing configurations), aiming to strengthen their cooperative and collaborative working skills and competence, while raising awareness and appreciation of diversity itself.
• Provide students with hands on experience of identifying, framing and resolving practice oriented and real-world based challenges and problems, using creativity, critical enquiry and appropriate tools to achieve valuable and relevant solutions.
• Support the development of students' ability to engage in critical enquiry and individual reflection, as well as to apply individual strengths and skills, building on their own educational backgrounds.
• Provide students with opportunities for networking with stakeholders, organisations and corporations, aiming to enhance the competence and skills needed to connect to relevant parties and build up future professional opportunities.

The aim of this module is to understand the role that sport plays in political and diplomatic issues at a national and international level. Using contemporary examples from developed, transitioning, developing, and fuel-based economies, the module will explore how sport can be used to positive (e.g., facilitating socio-economic plans) or negative (e.g., whitewashing human rights violations) ends. In doing so, the module aims to promote a critical, evidence-based understanding of the interplay between sport, politics, and diplomacy.

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Changing World Order aims to introduce students to the way the rise of the BRICS at the turn of the 21st century has come to challenge the Western-led order in world politics. The module will focus on each of the five BRICS countries and investigate how the evolution of their domestic and foreign policies has influenced their rise in world politics.

An emphasis will be put on foreign policy and diplomacy, together with the tools, capabilities or resources employed by the BRICS in order to project their power in world politics. Simultaneously, the module will engage with different interpretations of power in world politics, drawing on various theories of international relations. This allows the module to probe into the role of the rise of the BRICS in influencing power shifts in world politics. In broader terms the module evaluates various policy consequences of emerging power shifts and the (potential) responses of the BRICS and the West.

The aim of this module is to interrogate various permutations of violence, from physical to structural and symbolic, in several political contexts stretching a spectrum  from open war and conflict to the everyday. It aims to do so through the explicitly transdisciplinary objective of bringing scholarly and practitioner debates in security, conflict and peace-building studies to bear on debates in development and sustainability, and vice versa.

In doing so, throughout the module, students will be encouraged to think through and analyse contemporary global problematics, policy problems and cases across disciplinary divides; and through a critical re-thinking and examination of the development-security-sustainability nexus via a unique lens of political violence. The module aims to achieve the latter via explorations of several competing or complementary conceptions of violence drawn from Political Thought and Political Philosophy from both Western traditions and those in the Global South. These are then put to use to explicate contemporary problems and cases in the nexus of development-security-sustainability.

The past forty years has witnessed an unprecedented growth in cities in both the developed and developing world. This module will introduce students to the concepts and theories of global cities and the politics, governance, economics, society, security and international relations issues connected to them. The central case study will be London, but students will research other cities to examine the main debates and controversies surrounding cities and their place in the world.

The module will explore such issues as how to define 'global cities¿, the history of cities in international relations and economics, the social, infrastructure, economic and governance pressures facing cities, the role of cities in international security and in diplomacy (for example, the concept of 'paradiplomacy¿ or 'city diplomacy¿). This course will allow students to understand the role of cities in global politics. The course will also allow students to better understand London, the city they have chosen to study in, and some of the cities most of them will spend their lives living and working in.

The module introduces issues around media and social movements, by tracing the theoretical evolution of media and social movements, understanding media within broader social movements in historical processes rather than merely focusing on media technologies or impact media. The model seeks to cover topics on control of media systems on different parts of the world, alternative media practices, media ecologies, networks, and social media. Whilst focused on grassroots or community activism, it considers the relationship between media, protest and democracy. The module uses a series of case studies to understand how diverse groups harness media to articulate their political voice.

The aims of this module are to give the student the opportunity to study a subject, business problem or research question in depth and to research the issues surrounding the subject or background to the problem.
The module will equip the student with the relevant skills, knowledge and understanding to embark on their individual research project and they will be guided through the three options available to them to complete their dissertation:

• A desk based research project that could be set by an organisation or could be a subject of the student's choice
• A project that involves collection of primary data from within an organisation or based on lab and/or field experiments
• A full professional placement within an organisation during which time they will complete a project as part of their role in agreement with the organisation (subject to a suitable placement position being obtained)

Students will achieve a high level of understanding in the subject area and produce a written thesis or project report which will discuss this research in depth and with rigour.