GOVT 6596 - [Violence, Power, and Nonviolence]

(crosslisted) AMST 6596

Spring. Not offered: 2022-2023. Next offered: 2023-2024. 4 credits. Student option grading.

A. Livingston.

This course pursues a theoretical and comparative understanding of the relationship between violence and power. Beginning with an overview of disputes over the politics of ‘naming’ violence, we will examine a series of intersecting historical disputes about the nature, justification, and functions of political violence between a series of realist, Marxist, and pacifist thinkers. Topics to be discussed will include the relationship between tactics and strategy, means and ends, the dynamics of political contention, revolution and mass politics, the relationship coercion and persuasion, and the power of nonviolence, as well as revolutionary terror, general strikes, civil disobedience, hunger strikes, and political rioting. Thinkers studied may include Clausewitz, Tolstoy, Lenin, Luxemburg, Weber, Sorel, Gandhi, Trotsky, Niebuhr, Du Bois, Fanon, King, Arendt, and Deming. (PT)