Protecting the Peace: Histories of Peacekeeping

This course will examine strategies of peace-making and policing in modern history, and their role in building social order. Drawing upon western case studies from the early 19th century to the present, it will investigate some of the different contexts in which peace treaties have been made (and contested) between nation states, and how systems of policing have served national communities in both conciliatory and coercive ways. Students will be asked to analyse the historical forces that have shaped different approaches to protecting the peace, and relate these to contemporary debates about crime control, the arbitration of conflict, and the relation between state powers and civil rights. In exploring these issues, the course will also pay attention to shifting public perceptions about the appropriate scope and limits of state power. How, for instance, has the technological introduction of body cams in everyday civil policing affected public perceptions about police capacity for use of force? Topics will include: treaties as a tool both of conciliation and of extending power; evolutions in systems of policing and their role in producing law and order; the social conditions that have produced use of martial law and paramilitary policing; the cultural issues that arise in the policing of particular communities; and the line between civil liberty and state authority in social debates about protecting the peace.