Globalization 1- Period 4

Globalization - driven by rapid economic integration, enabled by national policies and global governance as well as new communication technologies - involves the deepening interconnectedness across cultures and continents. While this interconnectedness creates new opportunities it also creates new problems and challenges, affecting our lives in all kinds of ways as social processes increasingly play out in a global space. While globalization has helped to lift some societies out of poverty and has created new opportunities for businesses, entrepreneurs and consumers, empirical research shows that globalization also goes hand in hand with deep, and often widening social inequalities between individuals as well as societies, creating new power asymmetries. At the same time that economic, social and cultural capital is concentrated into the hands of highly-educated, highly-skilled transnationally mobile elites, new forms of global competition have destroyed old economic activities and unravelled existing social fabrics. In this context new challenges have arisen to the resilience of our societies, challenges that have elicited various responses both at the societal level and in terms of (global and national) governance.

Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective throughout, the first course this two-module interdisciplinary thematic specialization will examine how these new challenges can be framed and understood in terms of human (in)security, focusing on how the global and the local interact in producing new (perceived) threats to our security and analysing both global and local societal as well as political (policy) responses to these threats. Indeed, security is one key area affected by globalization, one that has opened up a much broader concept of security than the traditional (state-centric) understanding of national and international security. The rise of non state, transnational actors such as terrorist groups has for instance also been high on the agenda since 9/11 while others have spoken of "new wars" in which the public and the private have become increasingly mixed, and conflict is both about (natural) resources as well as about identity. New security challenges also arise in the context of climate change and global migration movements in which people - often fleeing from conditions affecting their basic security such as wars, famines, and draughts are constantly uprooted and seeking refuge. These challenges from both an analytical and a normative perspective pose new challenges for national as well as transnational governance, as well as require us to go beyond traditional concepts.

This course delves into the conceptual and theoretical aspects and possible limitations in the way that the United Nations have coined 'human security' as 'freedom from fear and freedom from want'. We will provide a broader focus in which aspects of social and physical well-being are systematically connected to specific culturally informed ways of coping with risk and uncertainty and making sense of the world. A basic principle of the course is that socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions of human security are not only equally relevant, but also interconnected. Focusing on concrete problems and challenges of human security this course will teach students to draw upon theories, concepts and insights from sociology; political science; political economy; governance studies; anthropology; communication sciences, and organization sciences. Juxtaposing and combining these different yet overlapping perspectives, students will acquire new knowledge and apply these perspectives to concrete empirical cases.

Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.