Many legal and public policy questions including around citizenship, statelessness and minority rights, political violence and armed conflict, and uneven development and marginalization; continue to be shaped by the debates, theoretical underpinnings and processes of nation state formation and political violence that this course explores. The course is invested in a deeply humanistic and interdisciplinary understanding of the law, which views law not just as an instrumentality of governance, but as a distinctive way of imagining and making sense of our world. Such a re- orientation, to law’s cultural, political, spatial and memorializing dimensions, equips legal researchers and practitioners with ethical, scholarly and creative resources to recognize the complex social trajectories of historical events, and to respond to and redress the forms of continuing injustice, suffering and violence they have engendered.