Terrorism and Political Violence (MLitt) 2025 entry

For more details, including weekly contact hours, teaching methods and assessment, please see the module catalogue. The modules are examples from previous academic years and may be subject to change before you start your course.

• Compulsory

  • Research Methods: presents appropriate research methods to enable students to critically understand the literature on terrorism and political violence, and to lay the foundations to enable students to engage in further independent research.
  • Fundamental Issues and Structures of Terrorism: introduces the core conceptual issues of terrorism and political violence.
  • Terrorism after 1945: provides an overview of the evolution, characteristics, and decline of terrorist movements and campaigns since 1945.

• Optional

  • Counter-Extremism: Ethics, Policy and Practice: explores the most appropriate response to extremism through collaborative enquiry and direct engagement with policymakers and practitioners. The roles of education, civil society efforts to counter extremist speech, deradicalisation initiatives, victims, communities, and companies are explored. 
  • Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: familiarises students with different approaches that seek to explain how ethnicity and nationhood are created and maintained, how different forms of ethnic conflict and ethnic violence come about, and the possible mechanisms to contain nationalism and ethnic conflict.
  • State Responses to Terrorism: takes a holistic look at state responses to terrorism and political violence; students study the work of scholars from right across the social sciences and humanities who have sought to understand and explain aspects of state responses to terrorism. 
  • Terrorism and Liberal Democracy: addresses conceptual and definitional issues concerning terrorism; the relationship of terrorism to other forms of political violence; the origins, dynamics, and development of contemporary terrorism; the efficacy of terrorism as a political weapon; the dilemmas and challenges of liberal democratic state responses to terrorism; and case studies in terrorism and counter-terrorism.