Course Objective

Students who have successfully completed the course "Globalization and
human security" will have achieved the following learning outcomes:

A. Knowledge and understanding - Students have acquired knowledge and
understanding of:
(1) how the multifaceted process of globalization affects social
inequality and power relations at different societal levels, and in
different societies;
(2) how new forms of social inequality challenge existing social,
political, cultural and organizational structures of social inequality,
and how these challenges have produced different social, political
(policy), cultural and organizational responses;
(3) how these challenges of (perceived) human insecurity are “managed”
and governed from local to global levels.

Application - Students are able to:
(4) frame the issue of global social inequality in terms of ‘human
security’, and explain global causes of locally/nationally experienced
(in)security), global consequences for security issues of local/national
behaviour, and global variation in feelings of insecurity and a
perceived need for human security.

Making judgments - Students are able to:
(5) critically reflect upon existing and possible solutions to these
(perceived) problems of human security;
(6) analyse these issues of insecurity, inequality and human security
from multiple perspectives within the social sciences and understand how
different disciplines can complement, contradict, or simply ignore each
other;

Learning skills - Students have acquired
(7) a multi-disciplinary conceptual theoretical toolbox for analysing
human security;
(8) the skills to develop a written argument about these issues of
globalization and human security;
(9) to colloborate and exchange ideas with fellow students of other
disciplines.

Course Content

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.

Teaching Methods

Lectures and tutorials.

Method of Assessment

Written examination and assignments.

Literature

To be announced in the course manual (see CANVAS).

Target Audience

Bachelor students Faculty of Social Scieces. Exchange students

Additional Information

This course is the first course of a two-module interdisciplinary
thematic specialization on globalization.

Custom Course Registration

In this course you can not enroll yourself for the tutorials, but you will be assigned by the course coordinator. Note: You do have to register for the course, with the corresponding parts! Please note: You can register for only one of the following courses: Diversity 1, Globalization 1 or Networks 1.