The purpose of this course is to critically examine how political science approaches various forms of political violence and to examine how violence and politics are inextricably enmeshed across regimes and regions. We will engage with literatures drawn from various regions of the world, including South Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. We will discuss different approaches adopted by social scientists to describe, analyse, understand and interpret violence, with an emphasis on approaches that focus on victims and perpetrators, as well as on consequences of conflicts.

In our contemporary global world, football (known as soccer in the United States) is the preeminent sport around the globe. Widely played by girls and boys, women and men, poor and rich— and across vast social spaces everywhere in the world — football has shaped the human experience in degrees only comparable to world religions, global political ideologies, and economic systems. With roots in a Western imperial encounter, football is ubiquitous in African local, national, and transnational experiences in our contemporary world.