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Crisis Politics and Human Mobility (STG-MA-ECM-CPH)

STG-MA-ECM-CPH

Description

This course invites participants to consider some of the particular dilemmas that arise when crisis politics intersect with issues of human mobility.  Whether a crisis stems from poor economic choices, failed governments, war, famine, a localized natural disaster, a global health epidemic, or a set of slow-moving environmental calamities, it is almost always enmeshed with thorny questions related to how people are allowed to move.  Disasters, emergencies, and slow-burning crises can send people fleeing to places they would not go otherwise. In some instances, crises erect new formal barriers on people’s freedom of movement; in others instances, crises open new pathways for mobility. Crises also shift the opportunity structures involved in individual and group-level decisions about when, where and how to move. Crises change government prerogatives about acceptable and unacceptable types of human mobility, and even give rise to new markets, social movements and forms of advocacy. 

What is a crisis? What are we doing when we call something a crisis? What kind of rules around human mobility are justified when confronted with a crisis? And perhaps most importantly, what are the most salient crises that we find ourselves confronted with today and how are they shaping both patterns of human movement and the prerogatives of national and international governing bodies tasked with regulating them?

The course examines the politics of crises and disasters, and especially how crisis politics can impact the movement of people. Students will study instances of crisis and crisis management, with a focus on forced displacement, international migration, assisted relocation and resettlement, and various other mechanisms used to limit and control human mobility. The cases will be global in scope, covering a selection of both manmade and natural disasters, including war, pandemic and adverse climate incidents. Special attention will be given to how crisis politics and crisis management intersect with matters of identity, inequality and dignity. Students will be asked to consider how the politics of crisis—as well as counter-crisis measures—shape subsequent frameworks for governance and for assessing vulnerability, culpability, and recovery.   

Given the complexity of both crisis dynamics and the determinants of human mobility, the course is interdisciplinary, drawing most heavily from the fields of political science, sociology, migration studies, public administration, and political anthropology. The core issues introduced in the course will be discussed through a combination of lectures, seminar style discussion, and case studies. 

The course has three overarching objectives. First, students will be asked to reflect critically on some of drivers of contemporary crises and crisis politics, and to consider their implications for affected populations, government systems and global patterns of social order and human mobility. Second, students will be challenged to identify the ways in which research can be used to produce sound strategies for mitigating the negative impacts of crises and effectively managing human mobility. Third, students will be asked to think concretely about the concept of “resilience” and its institutional, societal and individual meanings in the field of public policy. 
 

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