CRJ 789 Violence Across the Globe

This course examines a handful of cases of large scale violence across the globe, as well as a number of social science perspectives from which to describe and analyze these tragedies. After a brief overview of global militarism, the class learns to describe the organizational components that may facilitate or prevent ethnic cleansing through a comparison of two major conflicts: the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Arab-Israeli conflict. With examples from Haiti, Russia, Cuba, and elsewhere, the class then learns to identify structural forms of violence and how they destroy environmental and communal infrastructures. Next, using a study of communal violence in the Indian Punjab, the class learns how an ethnographer describes who is terrorized, when, where, and how. Finally, the course brings these perspectives together in an examination of the social and military global processes that preceded the emergence of two current conflicts: one between the United States and rebels in Colombia, and the second between the United States and al-Qaeda.