GEOG 21 Geographies of Violence
Violence appears to be a constant problem for human society, although its forms, mechanisms and objects change over time. The last decade has seen the unprecedented increase of the use of targeted killing as the US has expanded its drone strike operations around the globe, and events such as those in Ferguson and Charlottesville have led police brutality and racialized violence to remerge as national concerns. The aim of this course is to study the problem of violence through a geographic lens. it explores a range of topics relating to violence at three scales: the global, the national, and the body. The goal is to interrogate how each scale of unit of analysis reveals different ways of understanding violence and to draw connections between them; and the course will focus particular attention on the historical and political geographies of Western violence. Topics include drone warfare, humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping, police, fascism, the ethics of killing, slavery, colonialism, and the politics of nonviolence.