2009-10
In the academic year 2009-10 Professor David Chandler will be teaching the following postgraduate and undergraduate modules at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London. (Click on the module titles to view or download the latest module guides.)
For PhD Supervision click here.
MA Modules
Click to view the previous 12 week versions (2008-2009):
International Statebuilding: Exporting Democracy
International Relations II: Beyond International Relations?
Student comment
Undergraduate Modules
Level 5, International Relations Option. Second semester.
Charles University, Prague (December 2009)
Intensive 6 session course, 'Debating Liberal Peace(building)'
Overview: Today there appears to be a consensus that international peacebuilding missions have achieved limited success on the ground due to their liberal frameworks and practices. This critique is often posed critically in terms of liberal (or neoliberal or biopolitical) attempts to develop, democratise or secure the borderlands of the West or in more policy-related terms as a result of overambitious attempts to impose liberal models of democracy and the market upon non-liberal societies. This course will study some of these debates around the ‘liberal’ nature of peacekeeping interventions in the context of the dominant discourses of security, war and the crisis of liberal thinking in our globalized and complex, interdependent world. It will suggest that through considering these debates, liberalism emerges as a central motif for both critics and apologists and that through these debates a new framework for understanding policy interventions is emerging.
Draft session outline and readings available here.
Kobe University, Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies (GSICS) (8 weeks) and National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Tokyo (intensive) (June and July 2009)
International Statebuilding, Institutionalism and Biopolitics
15 lecture course. Overview: This course provides an insight into contemporary theorising and practice in transnational relations through focusing on international statebuilding. International statebuilding is seen to be a key way to address problems of international security, democratisation and development. International statebuilding frameworks of intervention and regulation are premised on the ideas of institutional and societal capacity-building and empowerment. We will look at leading academic works on this subject and engage with why international statebuilding focuses on institutional, administrative and technical processes, where the ‘rule of law’, anti-corruption and human rights frameworks appear external to societal political processes. Students will also be introduced to the theoretical concept of liberal institutionalism (through the work of Douglass C. North) and to the critical concept of biopolitics (as developed by the French social theorist Michel Foucault). We will consider how these conceptual frameworks may assist in understanding the policy practices and discourses of international statebuilding.
Download full syllabus
Previously, I have also taught the following MA modules at the Centre for the Study of Democracy (click to view or download the module guides from 2006-7):
