HIS 389 Tyrants and Terrorists
The al-Qaeda-orchestrated attacks on the World Trade Center (9/11) precipitated significant change in the character and trajectories of international politics, resulting in state securitization policies and dissenting movements around the world. This course, though, pushes the genealogies of "terrorism" beyond the twenty-first century. It highlights the perspectives of local communities impacted by violence, and the historical, theological and political imaginations of "terrorists," whose political projects often aimed to contest ostensibly authoritative or "tyrannical" states. In doing so, it challenges conventional strategies for understanding terrorism, which have focused almost entirely on institutional and macro-level processes. Its historical case studies are expansive, from medieval assassins to the invention of modern terror in Revolutionary France; or from anti-Apartheid liberation struggle in South Africa to ISIL militarism in northern Iraq.