GD255

Professor Chris Dolan Module Leader Dr Martin Lima Co-teacher Dr Guy Crawford Co-teacher

Option - Second and Third Year UG

Term 2

15 CATS

9 x 1 hour lectures 9 x 2 hour seminars

Available to students outside GSD by application

Module description

Have you noticed how the future focus of the Sustainable Development Goals goes hand-in-hand with a failure to look back and deal with legacies of past violence and harms, which in turn can result in failures to achieve sustainability?

Have you also noticed how developments that are now broadly perceived as positive and taken for granted (e.g. increased gender equality, or the development of anti-biotics following World War II) are often rooted in experiences of war and related research and social change?

This module is an opportunity to develop your awareness of these paradoxes and how to engage with them in the pursuit of sustainability. It aims to adopt an explicitly transdisciplinary approach to exploring complex interplays between violence, peace and sustainable development, and to highlight the imperative of paying attention to the past and its legacies - both positive and negative.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this module, students will be able to:

1. Identify, analyse and explain both negative and positive outcomes of violence and conflict on sustainable development
2. Map past histories and possible pathways to future development
3. Develop policy that does not overly discount the harms of the past, and can also build on its potential to drive change moving forward
4. Develop nuanced approaches to the three pillars of sustainable development
5. Develop capacity to assess peers’ work constructively

Indicative Syllabus

The module will be structured around three broad themes within which environmental, economic and social considerations and examples are tackled.

Theme 1 will spend two weeks looking at Forms and Measures of Violence and Peace: What constitutes ‘war’? When are we ‘at peace’? What are our motivations for violence and peace?

In Theme 2, which constitutes the heart of the module, we will consider Impacts of Violence on and in Peace from environmental, economic and social perspectives:

• Environmental – How war is often about resources, how planning for war shapes natural resources, and how it impacts on natural resources
• Economic – From swords to ploughshares? A military-industrial complex? Trade-offs between military development and social justice, The Entrepreneurial State in which state military sponsored research and development becomes the basis of new areas of economic activity (e.g. microwaves, internet, motorways etc.)
• Social - Legacies of violence from individual trauma through household and community dysfunction, to the structuring of international relations

We will close off the module in the last two weeks by considering Theme 3, namely Minimising the harms of violence, maximising the gains for sustainability. Our attention here will be on how best to respond to some of the harms discussed: Psycho-social, legal, transitional justice.

Teaching Format

• Weekly lectures with an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and content (1 hour)
• Weekly seminars (2 hours)

Assessment (indicative / subject to minor amendments)

• Systems Map (30%): Students choose a past or current conflict and identify factors (environmental, economic, social) that led to the conflict, as well as discernible or likely impacts on future development, and they present these in the form of a systems map developed by hand or digitally.
• Goal Design (60%): Students build on their analysis of a past or current conflict to either a) re-design one or more of the existing Sustainable Development Goals, or b) propose an entirely new Development Goal. This is a written exercise (2000 words) in which students will be expected to outline a particular conflict, the factors driving it, as well as the negative and positive impacts that need to be addressed through the revised or newly proposed goal.
• Participation: This will be based on general participation in class (5%) as well as feedback given in seminar to peer presentations of their systems maps (5%).

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  Please note: Module availability and staffing may change year on year depending on availability and other operational factors. The School for Cross-faculty Studies makes no guarantee that any modules will be offered in a particular year, or that they will necessarily be taught by the staff listed on this page.