Politics, Violence and Crime MSc

UCL (University College London)

The programme offers an intensive training in the anthropology of politics, violence and crime. It provides a solid grounding in anthropological theory, analysis and ethnographic methods. It does so by uniquely enabling you to explore the central role of anthropology as a tool to engage with other people’s politics, ‘the state’, ‘democracy’, ‘the rule of law’. Students develop knowledge and understanding of major theoretical, ethnographic and methodological debates in anthropology of politics, violence and crime and enhance their independent research skills through practical training in research methods. This is the first programme to embed these themes deeply within anthropology. This anthropological grounding and bottom up ethnographic approach uniquely distinguishes the degree from existing programmes rooted in International Relations, Security and Peace Studies and/or Development Studies.

This programme is likely to include an orientation towards further engagement and work in the NGO and intergovernmental sector and careers focused on applied work in the international arena on a range of issues from legal aid, human trafficking and migration, law and governance, il/licit economies, money laundering, counterfeiting, electoral monitoring, gender violence, drugs and development, organized crime and political risk analysis for impact investing and social enterprises.

The Politics, Violence and Crime MSc Programme is designed to provide students with methodological skills that enable them to collect and analyse cross-culturally and comparatively data on violence, crime and their entanglement with politics and the state, and to test theoretically hypotheses about criminal political and economic governance in the Global South and beyond.