Courses in English

Some of the courses are taught in English (see below). Students can register for some of these courses via Osiris/Studentportal.

Bachelor

Master

WAR AND STATEBUILDING IN AFGHANISTAN
Course: MAN-CI 43
Period: 4 September - 20 October 2023
Day/time: Monday, 3.30 - 5.15 p.m. and Thursday, 10.30 a.m. - 12.15 p.m.
Credits: 6 ECTS
Level: bachelor
After twenty years of military involvement, the world's most powerful army failed to prove that it could succeed in Afghanistan. The counterinsurgency strategy has been slow to show the expected results and the Taliban seem to grow stronger as time passes by. The growing disenchantment about this war of necessity is such that many in the United States, Europe, and Afghanistan wonder what its purpose really is. This course acquaints students with the important debates about the war in Afghanistan, focusing on issues such as the decision to engage/disengage in this war or the evolution of the military strategy. Through the study of previous international interventions in Afghanistan students will gain a better understanding of the current Afghan war. Our study of the consequences of the U.S. engagement in Iraq on the war in Afghanistan will provide us with further lessons to apply to the Afghanistan situation. The course also uses the Afghan war as a vehicle for interpreting the politics of international intervention, making sense of the complexity of the Afghan war, by explaining how things really work. The course encourages students to think of the necessary trade-offs among the different goals in Afghanistan, as they try to analyze the complexity of international intervention.

NATURAL RESOURCES, CONFLICT AND GOVERNANCE
Course: MAN-CI 45
Period: 6 November - 22 December 2023
Day/time: Tuesday, 10:30 a.m. - 12.15 p.m. and Thursday 1.30 - 3.15 p.m.
Credits: 6 ECTS
Level: bachelor

Intuitively, many of us see a strong connection between natural resources, conflict and sustainable development. Popular and academic debates both underscore the importance of those connections regarding aspects such as: the importance of greed and illegal resource exploitation as a driver of conflicts in eastern DRC or Sierra Leone; the consequences of climate change for urban dwellers in South-East Asia living on slippery slopes; how land grabbing in the South is the result of the quest for land to assure food security or to produce bio-fuels to meet CO2 reduction agreements.
This course starts from the notion that natural resources are very important in people's livelihoods and may be a bone of fierce political contention. However, we should be wary about assuming straightforward relationships between resource scarcity or abundance and political conflict, human (in)security and sustainable development. This course provides an introduction to historical and current debates on the nature of various resources, the ways in which resources are governed, and the politics through which natural resources acquire such an important role in the economy and public imagination. Moreover, the course emphasises the connections that link local challenges of natural resource access, use and competition to global economic trends, the management of global public goods, and global civic activism.