The study of genocide is by now widespread and sophisticated. Over the last decades, the field evolved from a principled focus on the historical and legal dimensions of the Holocaust to a much broader subject area. Today, this includes the study of a wide array of cases and periods; analytic angles from political science, to anthropology and neuroscience; as well as different types of re-search methodologies. Yet, genocide remains a phenomenon that everybody seems to intuitively understand, but that has proven to be notoriously hard to disentangle in all its empirical manifesta-tions.
Particularly the relationship between International Relations scholarship and genocide is charac-terised by such an unease, with many approaches focussing entirely on international law to under-stand genocide or on explanations favouring national interests as the main variables to explain interventions. In contrast to these approaches, there are cases in which interventions took place in spite of international law outlawing them (e.g. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo) and cases in which non-governmental actors drove governments to divert attention and resources to areas in which national interests were not immanently threatened (e.g. the US involvement in Darfur).  
This course aims at disentangling some of the diverse political issues surrounding genocide and humanitarian intervention. Intended as an introduction for students with basic knowledge of Inter-national Relations, but without prior knowledge of the politics of genocide, the course will teach students the basic legal and political ramifications of genocide (e.g. what is its position in interna-tional law? Which obligations does that entail for a state actors?). More importantly, the course will treat international practices in relation to genocide as a case study to understand and theorize humanitarian intervention as a key issue for International Relations (What do International Rela-tions theories say about humanitarian intervention? What distinguishes their explanations? How do they measure against the existing practice of humanitarian intervention?). 
For this purpose, the course will begin with an introduction to the concept and history of genocide, introduce students to the history of humanitarian intervention and introduce the main theoretical takes on the practice. In a second part, this knowledge will be critically applied to cases (First in class together and later in students’ presentations). The class will focus on the role of the United Nations in cases of genocide and humanitarian intervention and take an in-depth look at the NATO intervention in Kosovo as a case study.
Given the potentially diverse motivations of students to take up the course and the wide possibilities to approach the courses subject manner, I propose to partly apply a problem-oriented learning and allow students to find their own case studies and research questions for the second part of class. This would preferably happen in small group settings. I am aware that the format of the block seminar might make this difficult and it is of course possible to teach the course in a more tradi-tional seminar format.