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Cursus: GE3V17024
GE3V17024
Collapse or survival. What History Can Teach us About the Resilience of Societies
Cursus informatie
CursuscodeGE3V17024
Studiepunten (EC)7,5
Cursusdoelen

Inhoud
This is the fourth course of Specialisation 4: The Great Challenges: Crises, Inequality and Sustainability (English track History).

LAS and TCS students who follow this course as part of the core curriculum of their major need to complete a compulsory preparation https://tcs.sites.uu.nl/


In 2010 Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake from which it has yet to recover. Admittedly, Haiti was and still is a very poor country, but that poverty is not the sole explanation for the slow process of rebuilding is demonstrated by the impact of the Japanese tsunami of 2011 : here, despite Japan’s wealth, recovery was also slow and in some respects incomplete. These instances give rise to a question that becomes ever more important in our increasingly complex world, facing growing ecological challenges: why are some societies more vulnerable to shocks and hazards (floods, famines, earthquakes, wars or otherwise) than others? Wealth is only part of the answer; the way in which society is organized is at least as important. But what features of societal organisation determine whether communities collapse under the strain of natural disasters or, for that matter, financial crises or religious conflicts, or whether they manage to survive, recover and possibly flourish?

A historical perspective can help us to answer such questions. Societies in the past also had to cope with shocks. Some of them were natural, such as floods or epidemics, and others man-made: war for instance, or soil erosion caused by over-cultivation. Just as in the present, some past societies proved much more resilient to these shocks and were able to recover quickly, while others turned out to be very vulnerable. The potato blight of the 1840s, for instance, gave rise to a truly disastrous famine in Ireland, while in Flanders and the Netherlands, where the potato crop failed just as badly, the consequences were not nearly as dramatic. Understanding what caused the difference may shed light on the causes of present-day vulnerability.

​In the first three weeks of this course you become acquainted with the long-term history of shocks and hazards and with theoretical concepts to analyse the ability of societies to bounce back – the resilience of societies. Subsequently, you select a historical case-study. You are free to choose: a natural or a man-made shock, a twentieth-century crisis or one in the more distant past, a focus on prevention, recovery, or collapse. Exactly how you approach the issue will depend on the details of your case and on your own research question. You analyse your case individually, using primary and secondary sources that you have found yourself, assisted by the lecturers. You report the results of your analysis in a research paper of 6,000 words which will be presented as a poster at the final conference of the thematic package.
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