The course examines the evolving practice structures, relations and policies of international security and strategic competition in the turbulent global order within which great powers, lower-tier states, international organisations and NGOs formulate and pursue their strategies to survive; prosper; shape their habitat; gain, defend or lose status; and enter into relations of cooperation or contestation with other actors. The course is anchored by a concern with how primarily state governments, and those forces and actors that shape them and act through them, navigate diplomatic-strategic relations in a world of renewed power competition, normative contestation, and increasing turbulence at a time when governing globalist elites face strong headwinds by right and left populist forces operating within states and across them. The empirical-analytical focus of the course is on how, and in what directions, international security structures, relations and policies are changing and on the risks, dangers and opportunities these changes open up. International security will be approached from the perspective of states’ strategic posturing, bilateral strategic relations and regional security complexes, by which the course understands disjunctive, internally related orders of security interdependence embedded in political, economic and cultural relations and practices. The course will tease out the implications for the EU of changes in international politics, but it will not foreground a Eurocentric perspective that prioritises European interests, values and knowledges over those of other global actors and world regions. The course explores to what extent the current turbulences in international strategic relations between countries and within and between regions constitute a world order transformation that sets states (and other global actors) on new security pathways.
- Instructor: Michael Merlingen