 Hi everyone, my name is Hassan Al-Mukhtar and I'm the co-convener of the Conflict on International Development Summer School. My research in SOAS in the Development Studies Department focuses on EU external border policy, particularly in Mauritania and its social and political effects in the country. And more broadly, my research interests in borders, migration and development, with a focus on West Africa and the Sahara and the Sahel region. So it would be these geographic and thematic foci that I hope to bring to the course. Hello everyone, I'm Karen Scoe-Iverson and I'm the other co-convener of the summer school. And I'm also based in the Development Studies Department here at SOAS and my research focuses on the geographical region of Colombia, looking particularly at forced displacement in Colombia and people who have been kind of forcibly displaced due to conflict in the country and how these people have been engaged in forms of activism in order to kind of claim rights from the Colombian state and to resist these forms of violence. And more broadly, I'm interested in migration and particularly how migrants resist various forms of violence. So that's what I bring to the summer school. And right now we just wanted to give you sort of like a brief little overview of the summer school, thinking through what to expect from it in terms of what we'll cover. So let's do that. So in this summer school, we are going to look at the relationship between conflict and national development. And during the course, we will cover a number of different questions, such as firstly, how can we explain violence, why are people or states violent? And then secondly, we'll look at the question of what does violence actually achieve and what are the costs of violence? And how does conflict affect development and how does development affect conflict and what exactly is the relationship between these two phenomena? And throughout the course, we are going to look at a number of theories and case studies in order to kind of examine the linkages between conflict on the one hand and development on the other hand. I will also look at the linkages that exist between things like inequality and violence, and also between the structures and interests, which contribute to the continuation of violence within and between countries. And overall, the summer school aims to equip you with an analytical understanding of the processes of violent conflict, as well as with a critical perspective on the policy implications for intervention. And it provides you as students with an understanding of the causes and effects of violence and of the interactions between different types of violence and the forms of security and insecurity that these promote. Okay, so to go into the structure of the summer school in a bit more detail, we'll firstly explore the core concepts of the course, namely conflict, development and violence, and we'll kind of critically unpack and investigate the different ways that these concepts can be defined and measured. In particular, we'll look at different theories of violence, looking at both direct violence and more structural and symbolic forms of violence. And the latter I think are particularly relevant to contemporary discussions around institutional and racialized violence. We'll then explore and critically probe a range of explanations for the causes and consequences of violent conflict, thinking through such questions as, why are people violent? Is it something inherent to human nature? Or is it more a reflection of social relations? What kinds of subtle backgrounds and immediate causes are there when violence erupts? And how do these underlying contexts shape the form that violence takes? We'll also look at the relationship between ethnicity, nationalism and conflict, and we'll be considering whether or not group identities such as ethnicity and nationality can be used to explain why violence and conflict occur or whether there are other social forces that might mean that violence is expressed in the language of national and ethnic identity. We'll also be looking at the relationship between borders, migration and violence, considering how increasingly restrictive border controls can be seen as a form of structural and increasingly as a form of direct violence. And then we'll look at how various forms of violence are resisted on the ground, exploring the various ways in which communities who've been directly affected by violence have actually resisted this. What room is there for resistance when groups, individuals or communities face different forms of violence? And what is the kind of potential of such a resistance? And what kind of constraints does it face? In particular, we'll look at resistance in the context of migration, but we'll also discuss civilian resistance against violence in places like Colombia where I did my home research. Then we'll go on to think through questions related to security, and we'll think through what security means and to whom, and the kind of various mechanisms through which we give up certain freedoms in returns for forms of protection. And we'll contrast understandings of security focused on military means and on national security with these kind of broader understandings of human security and engage critically with both of these. And then we'll end the course with a discussion of terrorism and counterinsurgency, and we are going to approach terrorism as an essentially kind of contested concept. And we'll explore the consequences of labeling certain forms of political violence as terrorism. And we'll look at the kinds of actions that this legitimizes through a focus on counterinsurgency and counterinsurgency terrorism policies. So that's all for now from us, and we think it's going to be a very exciting course, and we hope to see many of you there.