Human Rights|International Relations and Politics|Security

International Relations|peace and conflict studies|human rights|intervention|humanitarianism

This module surveys the field of humanitarian protection, in three parts. The first part discusses the origins of the humanitarian protection regime, including...

This module surveys the field of humanitarian protection, in three parts. The first part discusses the origins of the humanitarian protection regime, including the development of international institutions and their growing role in the management of conflict and complex humanitarian emergencies. You will study the key pillars of international law providing protections for vulnerable populations, and the context out of which these provisions emerged. The second part of the module discusses the actors associated with the protection regime, including international organisations, regional organisations, and civil society organisations. The final part of the module, part three, discusses the responsibilities of international actors with regard to conflict management, civilian protection, and humanitarian assistance, including peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and international criminal justice. 

Different theories of human communication and utterance comprehension are discussed, including Gricean, neo-Gricean and relevance-theoretic approaches. The...

Different theories of human communication and utterance comprehension are discussed, including Gricean, neo-Gricean and relevance-theoretic approaches. The specific topics and data discussed vary from year to year but are taken from the following list: referring expressions and speaker’s reference, conversational implicatures, pragmatic enrichments of explicit content, word meaning modulation, unarticulated constituents, indexical saturation, non-literal uses of language (metaphor, hyperbole, metonymy, irony). The module is taught by ten weekly lectures and backup classes, with discussion continuing on moodle during the week. By the end of the module, students should have achieved the following:

 • An in-depth appreciation of the many ways in which what speakers communicate (and what hearers grasp) transcends linguistically-encoded meaning

 • An understanding of the different kinds of pragmatic processes required for full utterance comprehension

 • An understanding of the nature of different kinds of non-literal meaning and of different theoretical accounts of them

 • An ability to analyse the semantic and pragmatic components of utterances • An ability to critically assess pragmatic theories, claims and arguments