Courses
AS.190
This course examines the ideals and operation of the American political system. It seeks to understand how our institutions and politics work, why they work as they do, and what the consequences are for representative government in the United States. Emphasis is placed on the federal government and its electoral, legislative, and executive structures and processes. As useful and appropriate, attention is also given to the federal courts and to the role of the states. The purpose of the course is to understand and confront the character and problems of modern government in the United States in a highly polarized and plebiscitary era.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
To understand politics, the sound bites of the modern media take us only so far. In this course, we will take a step back and implement an intellectually rigorous method. Scholars of comparative politics use the method of comparison in order to illuminate important political phenomena of our times. Following this method, we will embark on a scholarly tour of the world and compare the politics of various countries. We will also trace these politics back to their historical sources. We will work from the assumption that there is something to be gained from such comparisons across space and time.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introduction to international politics. Emphasis will be on continuity and change in international politics and the causes of war and peace. The first half of the course will focus on events prior to the end of the Cold War, including the Peloponnesian War, the European balance of power, imperialism, the origins and consequences of WWI and WWII, and the Cold War. The second half will focus on international politics since 1990, including globalization, whether democracies produce peace, the impact of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the prospects for peace in the 21st century. Theories of realism and liberalism will also be considered. This course was previously AS.190.209.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines some of the central ideas and institutions that have transformed politics in the contemporary world through the lens of East Asia, focusing on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. We analyze two enduring themes of classic and contemporary scholarship in comparative politics: development and democracy. The purpose is to introduce students to the various schools of thought within comparative politics as well as to the central debates concerning East Asian politics.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course surveys scholarly approaches to processes, relations, institutions, and social structures that cross, subvert, or transcend national borders. The course will also introduce students to research tools for global studies. Students who have taken Contemporary International Politics 190.209 or International Politics 190.104 may not register.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introductory overview of Western Political Theory, starting with Plato and the Greeks, moving through Machiavelli and the moderns, and ending up with a brief look at current political theory. We will analyze a range of theoretical styles and political approaches from a handful of thinkers, and develop our skills as close readers, efficient writers, and persuasive speakers.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course investigates core questions of what constitutes political freedom, what limits on freedom (if any) should be imposed by authority, adn the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and political judgement. Spanning texts ancient, modern, and contemporary, we shall investigate how power inhabits and invigorates practices of freedom and consent. Among the questions we will consider: Can we always tell the difference between consent and coercion? Are morality and freedom incompatible? Is freedom from the past impossible? By wrestling with slavery (freedom's opposite) we will confront the terrifying possibility that slavery can be both embodied and psychic. If our minds can be held captive by power, can we ever be certain that we are truly free? The political stakes of these problems will be brought to light through a consideration of issues of religion, gender, sexuality, civil liberties, class and race.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course provides an introduction to Western political theory, focusing on theories and practices of power and authority. We will examine the extent to which it is possible to describe, theorize, and make visible how political power operates, and power's relationship to authority, knowledge, truth, and political freedom. A strong tradition of political thought argues that people's consent is what makes political power legitimate. But what if one of the most insidious workings of power is its ability to prevent us from telling the difference between consent and coercion? Can power allow certain authorities to effectively brainwash people? If so, does that mean that those who obey authority should no longer be held politically responsible for their actions? Does the coercive power of norms and conformity prevent any robust practice of freedom? What role (if any) should state power play in negotiating questions of morality, religion and sexuality? Lastly, we will be haunted by a related question: can political theories of power make people free, or are those theories implicated in the very coercion they profess to oppose? Classes will be a combination of lectures, critical discussions/debates, film screenings and presentations. Throughout the term, you will sharpen your ability to formulate coherent written and spoken arguments by organizing and supporting your thoughts in a persuasive manner. An important part of this skill will include the ability to wrestle with complex and controversial political problems that lack any single answer. The stakes of these problems will be brought to life by the political examples we will study, and made legible by looking through the theoretical lenses of diverse thinkers.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The premise of this course is that a political perspective is tied up with a (meta)physical one, that is to say, with ideas about the nature of Nature and of the status of the human and nonhuman elements within it. How is the universe ordered? Who or what is responsible for it? What place do or should humans occupy within it? How ought we to relate to nonhuman beings and forces? We will read three different responses to such questions and show how they are linked to a particular vision of political life. In the first, the world into which human are born is ordered by gods whose actions often appear inexplicable: Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, and Hippolytus by Euripedes will represent this tragic vision of the cosmos. In the second, Plato , in Republic and in Phaedrus, the forces of reason and eros play central and powerful roles. In the third, Augustine of Hippo presents a world designed by a benevolent, omnipotent God who nevertheless has allowed humans a share in their own fate. We end the course with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy , which offers a perspective on these three visions of the world -- the tragic, the rational, and the faithful -- which will help us evaluate them in the light of contemporary political and ecological concerns.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Contemporary and emerging technologies of nuclear (weapons, terrorism, energy) outer space (missiles, missile defense, asteroids), biosecurity (bioweapons, pandemics, terrorism) and cyber (war, spying, surveillance) and implications for security, international politics, arms control, and political freedom.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines the politics and policies that shape the production and consumption of food. Topics include food security, obesity, crop and animal production, and the impacts of agriculture on climate change. We will also consider the vulnerabilities of our food system to challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as efforts to transform food and agriculture through new food technologies and grass-roots movements to create a more democratic food system.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have completed AS.190.405 may not enroll in this class.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course provides an analysis of US foreign policy with a focus on the interests, institutions, and ideas underpinning its development. It offers a broad historical survey that starts with US involvement in the First World War, covers major developments of the twentieth century, and concludes with contemporary issues. Important themes include the developments underpinning the emergence of the liberal world order, strategies of containment during the Cold War, nuclear deterrence and antiproliferation efforts, the politics of international trade, alliance politics, technological and security policy, and the re-emergence of great power competition.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over the past several decades, the power and importance of America’s presidency have greatly expanded . Of course, presidential history includes both ups and downs, some coinciding with the rise and fall of national party systems and others linked to specific problems, issues, and personalities. We should train our analytic eyes, however, to see beneath the surface of day-to-day and even decade-to-decade political turbulence. We should focus, instead, on the pronounced secular trend of more than two and a quarter centuries of American history. Two hundred years ago, presidents were weak and often bullied by Congress. Today, presidents are powerful and often thumb their noses at Congress and the courts. For better or worse, we have entered a presidentialist era.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Introduces fundamental patterns, puzzles, and theories on the politics of income inequality.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines the impact of weapons of mass destruction on global politics and American interests. The first half of the course focuses on nuclear weapons, examining their development and targeting throughout the Cold War. The second half of the course examines contemporary issues involving nuclear weapons (including arms control, nuclear zero, terrorism, proliferation and defense). It also considers other weapons of mass destruction (or disruption) including chemical, biological, radiological and cyber weapons. The growing concerns about Artificial Intelligence will also be addressed. Requirements include a midterm and a final exam.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Development is often assumed to be an economic issue. In this course we examine the politics of development on a global scale. We begin by looking at the colonial and Cold War histories of development. We then use these histories to contextualise contemporary development issues that directly affect international relations such as aid and debt, humanitarianism, food security, land “grabs”, migration and indigenous rights. The course also seeks to understand the ways in which the issues underlying global development have always connected and continue to connect the peoples and polities of the Global North and Global South.
This course provides an introduction to climate solutions by reviewing the politics and technologies in all major sectors: electricity, transportation, biofuels, hydrogen, buildings, heavy industry, and agriculture. In each area, we will first understand the existing technologies and potential solutions. But to understand decarbonization, we also have to study the political economy of these technologies. What role do the technologies play in the broader economy? Who will win or lose from the transition? What firms and countries dominate and control current and emerging supply chains? What makes a climate solutions project bankable? How can states design policies, regulations, and programs to successfully manage the politics of technology change?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The plots and settings of fictitious works provide “cases” for the exploration of international relations theories. Incorporates literature, film, and works of IR scholarship.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will plumb the theoretical depths of democracy and its manifold forms, ideas, and arguments. After sampling a handful of the many democratic traditions in the field, we will attempt to ‘apply’ these theories to two issues that have proven particularly sticky for democratic thinkers: the global nuclear arrangement, and global climate change. The course will require significant reading and writing and will be driven by in-class discussion.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students to the foundational importance of race and racism to the construction of our contemporary global order. Topics include the Crusades, European imperialism, eugenics, Apartheid, freedom struggles, decolonization, and global development.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
What you need to know about Chinese politics covers the major scandals, political events, and policy debates that every China watcher needs to know. This first module of a two-semester experience brings together two professors, Prof. Andrew Mertha (SAIS) and Prof. John Yasuda (KSAS), with very different perspectives on China's past achievements, its political and economic futures, and the global implications of China's rise. The course seeks to give ample coverage to every major political question about China that is often missed in a semester long class. In addition to lively debates between the instructors, students can also expect guest speakers from the policy world, business, and the academy for a fresh take on what's going on in China today.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introduction to the fundamental questions and concepts of political economy: money, commodities, profit, and capital. The course will study the nature of economic forces and relations as elements larger social and political orders.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This serves as a two-semester survey of Chinese politics from 1911-Present. This second module explores the politics of the reform and post-reform eras.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
While traditional studies on security have focused largely on border protection, sovereign authority of the state, and interstate alliances, the threats posed to everyday people were not a central focus of security analyses until the end of the Cold War. The human security approach has evolved as a challenge to conventional thinking on security. This course will introduce the notion of human security, trace its emergence and evolution in the global political discourse, explore the theoretical scholarship from which it developed, and evaluate its effectiveness as a framework for addressing the most egregious threats human beings face today. From refugee flows, gender inequality, ethnic conflict, mass atrocities, poverty, to climate change, human security scholarship and policy has sought to examine the various threats to the lives of people that transcend national borders and allow us to break out of narrow thinking to develop innovative and globally-minded solutions.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
While policies were passed to ensure equal opportunity for racially subjugated Americans, the United States witnessed increasing stratification of wealth and income and deepening concentration of poverty, stagnation in closing racial gaps, and new forms of inequality posed by the striking upsurge in contact with the criminal justice system at the bottom of the skills ladder and concentration of wealth at the top. At the same time, the welfare state came under attack and faced challenges posed by an aging population, women entering the labor force, deindustrialization, and international pressures of globalization. Social spending withered in some areas while spending on citizens was increasingly likely to happen through tax expenditures and private means. This course investigates the politics around these developments and competing perspectives in debates over redistributive policies in the United States and their impact on inequality, particularly race and gender inequality. We will examine the contours of inequality and explanations for why it has expanded over the past several decades. We explore why the US is exceptional in both the level of inequality it tolerates and the generosity and types of remedies to alleviate poverty in comparison to its European counterparts and debate the role of race, unions, electoral politics and institutions. We investigate several specific cases of persistent racial inequality – concentrated poverty, segregation, and incarceration. We investigate both how policies have reinforced racial and gender divisions from a top-down perspective as well as examining under what conditions the disadvantaged contest inequality, exploring how political struggle shapes policy from the bottom-up. The last part of the course examines the consequences of inequality and social policy for representation and citizenship and how economic inequality affects political representation and responsiveness of elites to masses.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The seminar will introduce students to the political and economic trajectories of Latin America as a whole and of individual countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Special attention will be paid to the long-term trajectory of the political regime (democracy versus dictatorship) and of economic development (variations in GDP per capita). Competing theories, from economic dependence to historical institutionalism, will be examined for their contribution to our understanding of Latin America’s relative economic backwardness and low quality democracies.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The course will cover three topics: 1) The conceptualization of political regime, democracy and authoritarianism. We will also consider neighboring concepts of other macro-political structures—government, state, and administration—in order to be able to demarcate what is distinctive about the study of political regimes.2) The characterization of political regimes in most Western and some non-Western countries, in history and today. We will centrally focus on the so called “Waves of Democratization,” but we will also consider stories with less happy outcomes, that is, processes that led to the breakdown of democracies and the installation of repressive dictatorships.3) The explanation(s) of the stability and change of political regimes around the world. Theoretical accounts of regime change come in many flavors—emphasis on economic versus political causes, focus on agents and choices versus structures and constraints, international versus domestic factors, among others. We will consider most of them.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
At the end of the 19th century racial segregation was imagined as a more than a part of Jim Crow in the U.S. South: it was imagined as a model for global order. Theorists of imperial rule crisscrossed the Atlantic to study “race relations” in the United States to bolster projects of colonial rule in Africa and the Pacific. This course will unpack the theories of spatial, racial, and urban control that underwrote these visions of global order as well as the long-lasting material impact of these ideas on cities across the globe. Together, we will also uncover the role of Baltimore, as the first city in the United States to try and implement a law upholding residential segregation, in these international relations. Other case studies include Charleston, Chicago, and Johannesburg and topics include the politics of rioting, racial capitalism, race war, gender and sexuality, and public health.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will explore theories and practices of race and immigration in order to illuminate the proliferation of populations regarded as disposable in contemporary politics. We will pay special attention to the contestable criteria used to determine eligibility for membership in the human race. We shall also examine how political power influences the relays between citizenship status and those whose lives are worthy of protection, and those who should be allowed to die.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines issues of political identity, political incorporation, and political participation of Asian Americans. Themes include Asian American panethnicity, the struggle for immigration and citizenship, Asian American electoral politics, political activism and resistance since the 1960s, and the impact of Asian Americans on the politics of race and ethnicity in the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course takes a “war and society” approach to the Korean War. It explores the ways in which the war entangled the United States and Korea, shaping society and politics in the US and on the Korean peninsula. The course looks at the Korean War “in the round,” as involving culture, gender, and economy as well as military operations, diplomacy and strategy. We will consider the causes, course and consequences of the war locally and globally and we will look at literature and film as well as history and social science. Properly understanding a war requires an interdisciplinary approach. Students will come away from the course not only knowing about the Korean War but also how to approach understanding any war in all its dimensions.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The study of public policy is the study of power—who has it, how it is acquired, and how policies themselves grant or diminish the power of individuals and groups. It is also the study of choice—how political actors make consequential decisions to deploy their resources in different ways, some of which enhance magnify their power while others diminish it. This class will examine the scholarly literature on how public policy is made and how it can be changed. We will also engage directly with actors seeking to change public policy, in order to integrate our academic knowledge with their practical experience.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
For the most part, observers of American politics have not considered the possibility that the American democratic regime might be at risk. But the unexpected election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the subsequent course of his presidency have occasioned a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety about whether democracy in the United States is at risk and whether American political institutions can withstand the stresses of contemporary politics. This course will use the Trump era to explore the conditions that seem to threaten the stability of the American regime. We will begin by exploring the political circumstances that led to Trump’s rise. We will then examine what we can learn from the experience of other countries about the conditions that make democracy either robust or fragile. Finally, we will consider how a set of contemporary political conditions in the United States — extreme partisan polarization, intense racial antagonism, growing economic inequality, and expanded executive power — contribute to the challenges facing American democracy today and in the future.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Law of Democracy refers to the statutes, court decisions, and other practices that govern the electoral processes. Although the United States and Canada have a great deal in common, they have approached many of the problems involved in institutionalizing democracy quite differently. Recognizing these differences should contribute to understanding both the strengths, and the problems, of the two approaches. Specific topic will include the right to vote, political finance, delineation of district boundaries, electoral dispute resolution, and the role of electoral management bodies and elections administrators.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this class, we will ask questions about the relationship between equality, law, and society. We will investigate how people have used law in their movements for greater equality, and ask whether law has served these movements well and how it has worked. We will pay particular attention to movements based on race, gender, and economic class.
An examination of most aspects of democratic elections with the exception of th e behavior of voters. Topics include the impact of various electoral systems and administrative reforms on the outcome of elections, standards for evaluations of electoral systems, and the impact of the Arrow problem on normative theories of democratic elections.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Considers global and comparative politics of information, information technologies, and the Internet. Examines governance of information (ownership of information, rights to information, privacy) and governance of information technologies (domain names, social media websites, etc.).
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Reflection on political ideas and institutions in the United States is often oriented by the notion that the US is in some sense exceptional. For some commentators, the US is exceptionally democratic, exceptionally stable, exceptionally productive, and exceptionally innovative. For others, the US is exceptionally racist, exceptionally unequal, exceptionally violent, and exceptionally unhealthy. What both sides share is a common point of comparative reference in Europe. For all these commentators, Europe is the norm against which all of the exceptional qualities of the US stand out. In this course, we will ask how well notions of US exceptionalism stand up against the different comparative references found in the Americas, focusing in particular on the history of political thought in the Americas. We’ll begin by studying texts from the pre-colonial and colonial periods, noting similarities and differences between the political institutions, economies, and social and racial hierarchies of in the regions that comprised British, Spanish, Portuguese, and French America. Next, we’ll consider the US, Latin American, and Caribbean independence movements, early constitutionalism, and debates on women’s role in society, slavery, and the rights of Indigenous Americans, asking what, if anything, distinguished the US from its neighbors in its early years. Finally, we’ll examine theories of imperialism, racism, patriarchy, exploitation, and environmental destruction that have emerged from the Americas in the course of the 20th century, to see how both shared and divergent historical experiences have shaped perspectives relevant to contemporary political issues.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines the impact of weapons of mass destruction on international politics with an emphasis on security issues. The first half of the course focuses on the history of nuclear weapons development during the Cold War and theories of deterrence. The second half of the class considers contemporary issues including terrorism, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missile defense and proliferation. Requirements include a midterm, final and a ten page paper.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the major debates and issues of postwar Japanese politics. Topics include nationalism, electoral politics, civil society, and immigration.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is a survey of the unique position of the United States in world politics. We will cover the broader international relations literature on the dynamics of hegemony and empire, from work in the realist tradition to more critical approaches. The course will encompass security politics as well as the economic and monetary dimensions of American influence. Interested students must have at least completed one 100 or 200 level introductory course in international relations.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
From the founding of the United States to the COVID-19 pandemic, modern universities have evolved into expansive, complex institutions that play a variety of indispensable roles in the support of democratic societies. They educate citizens as well as specialists; produce new knowledge that shapes discourse and public policy; foster reasoned debate; and act as engines of social mobility. They also incite a great deal of controversy, criticism, and distrust, including for how they have performed these roles. In this course, we will study the centuries-long relationship between universities and democracy, and assess how successfully these institutions (including Johns Hopkins) are fulfilling their most profound functions today.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course covers enduring debates about the way the Constitution has structured the U.S. government and about which powers the Constitution assigns to the federal government and to the states. We will examine these debates in the context of American political history and thought by studying the writings of prominent participants, and landmark Supreme Court cases.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Topics include executive and emergency power, racial and gender equality, and selected free speech and religious freedom issues.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
What is a border and why do borders matter in global politics. What do borders mean under conditions of globalization? An examination of the politics of borders, transborder flows, and networks within and across borders. The readings, which come from political science and other social science disciplines, will include theoretical and case-specific works. Goals for this writing intensive course also include learning to identify researchable questions, to engage with the scholarly literature, and to understand appropriate standards of evidence for making claims.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introduction to the study of political behavior, emphasizing electoral behavior in democratic countries.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is a survey of the bases and substance of politics among black Americans and the relation of black politics to the American political system up to the end of Jim Crow. The intention is both to provide a general sense of pertinent issues and relations over this period as a way of helping to make sense of the present and to develop criteria for evaluating political scientists' and others' claims regarding the status and characteristics of black American political activity.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the historical and institutional foundations of modern South Korean politics. Topics include nationalism, political economic development, civil society, globalization, and ROK-DPRK relations.Recommended students should take Intro to Comparative Politics or a course related to East Asia first.(CP)
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Recommended Course Background: AS.190.340.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Jews exercise a good deal of power in contemporary America.. They are prominent in a number of key industries, play important roles in the political process, and hold many major national offices. For example, though Jews constitute barely two percent of America’s citizens, about one-third of the nation’s wealthiest 400 individuals are Jewish and more than ten percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress are held by Jews. One recent book declared that, “From the Vatican to the Kremlin, from the White House to Capitol Hill, the world’s movers and shakers view American Jewry as a force to be reckoned with.” Of course, Jews have risen to power in many times and places ranging from the medieval Muslim world and early modern Spain through Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. In nearly every prior instance, though, Jewish power proved to be evanescent. No sooner had the Jews become “a force to be reckoned with” than they found themselves banished to the political ma rgins, forced into exile or worse. Though it may rise to a great height, the power of the Jews seems ultimately to rest on a rather insecure foundation. Cross-listed with Jewish Studies. Course is open to juniors and seniors.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course is a broad conceptual introduction to international relations theory in a format that stresses close reading and critical discussion. We will explore mainstream theoretical perspectives and critiques of those perspectives, as well as more recent developments in the field. By the end of the course, students will have a firm grasp of the core issues and debates in the field. The course is conceptually demanding; interested students should have at least completed an introductory course in political science.
“Can the United States and China avoid a new Cold War? One might think not given disputes over the South China Sea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, human rights, trade, ideology and so much more. Moreover, competition for influence in the developing world and American concerns as to whether China will replace it as the preeminent world power suggest a new Cold War is in the offing. Nevertheless, their extensive economic ties and need to work together to solve common problems such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and pandemics argues against a continuing confrontation. This course will examine whether cooperation or conflict will define Sino-American relations, and whether a new Cold War—or even a shooting war—lies in the future.”
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Business, Finance, and Government in East Asia explores the dynamics of East Asia's economic growth (and crises) over the last fifty years. We will examine Japan's post-war development strategy, the Asian tiger economies, and China's dramatic rise. Centered on case studies of major corporations, this course examines the interplay between politics and economics in East Asia, and considers the following questions: How have businesses navigated East Asia’s complex market environment? In what ways can the state foster economic development? How has the financial system been organized to facilitate investment? What are the long-term prospects for growth in the region?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An examination of the ways in which violence has been used to secure political ends. Topics include civil wars, targeted killings, terrorism, ethnic conflict and war itself. Students examine what makes types of political violence unique and what unites them.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This introductory course explores China's expanding global presence and influence in the context of rising US-China tensions. We will begin with an overview of China's rise since market opening in the 1980s, leading up to its ascendence as a global power in recent times. In addition to learning about the historical and political-economic dimensions of China's engagement with the world, the course aims to impart you with some basic skills in evaluating the quality of evidence and expertise, so that you can form your own informed assessment of contentious issues.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course surveys the major trends and approaches to the comparative study of race in political science and critically examines the link between race and politics. Topics include race and state formation, citizenship and national membership, immigration, racial regimes, and the political economy of race. Recommended Course Background: Courses in comparative politics, immigration, and racial politics.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course focuses on one of the most powerful stories told in the tradition of western political theory: the story of the social contract. This story is about the constitution of legitimate political authority. It is told in many ways and each version makes different assumptions, in particular about human nature, the power of reason, the value of order, and the character of justice. We examine this often-conflicting assumptions and explore how they continue to inform the way we think about the possibilities and problems of politics. Readings include texts by Arendt, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Freud, Pateman, the Federalists, Derrida, and Douglass. Final grades are based on class participation, two exams and two papers.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Though it is possible to imagine ways of addressing the multiple crises the world will face as the atmosphere warms, seas rise, and pollutants seep into the surface of the planet, any serious proposal will require a degree of coordination amongst nation-states that has proven impossible to achieve in the past. In this course, we will consider this difficult situation by treating it as an instance of an old problem in political theory: how to escape the infamous “state of nature,” where individuals struggle to obtain the resources they need to survive at others’ expense, rather than cooperating to satisfy their needs and address the threats they face in common. First, we will study some influential reflections on the state of nature by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Freud, and Pateman, as well as efforts to apply the logic of the state of nature to problems in international politics by Kant, Wendt, Waltz, Enloe, and others. Then we will read contemporary work on the international politics of climate change and ask what it would take to start building the better world that is possible today.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do we assess research in the social sciences? What makes one study more persuasive than another? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the main methods used in research in the social sciences? What are the elements that go into designing a research project? This course considers these questions, introducing students to the basic principles of research design.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This class explores the ideas and legal doctrines that define the freedom of speech. We will examine the free speech jurisprudence of the U.S. in comparison to that of other systems, particularly the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court of Canada.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is designed to help students better understand the politics of China. Lectures will focus on the tools of governance that China has employed to navigate its transition from plan to market, provide public goods and services to its citizens, and to maintain social control over a rapidly changing society. The course will draw heavily from texts covering a range of subjects including China's political economy, social and cultural developments, regime dynamics, and historical legacies. Students interested in authoritarian resilience, governance, post-communist transition, and domestic will find this course particularly instructive.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the colonial logics that underpin key categories and concepts in Political Science. Working through four sub-fields – political theory, political behavior, comparative politics and international relations, the course also introduces students to alternative knowledge traditions, emanating from minority communities and colonized peoples, which seek to explain the stuff of Political Science via anti-colonial logics.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This undergraduate seminar is designed to introduce students to the comparative study of political violence and intra-state conflict. We will examine social science theories and empirical studies on a wide range of forms of political violence, including civil war, coups, state repression, communal violence, riots, terrorism, genocide, and criminal-political violence. We will study these phenomena at the micro, meso and macro levels, and focus on understanding their causes, dynamics, outcomes, and aftermath. The class will also equip students with an ability to analyze political violence by using social scientific tools.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Nationalism ties powerful organizations to political mobilization, territory, and individual loyalty. Yet nationalism is typically studied in isolation from other social formations that depend upon organizational – individual linkages. Alternative types of identity category sometimes depend similarly upon organizations that collect and deploy resources, mobilize individuals, erect boundaries, and promote strong emotional connections among individuals as well as between individuals and institutions. In this class, we study classic and contemporary works on nationalism, drawn from multiple disciplinary and analytic traditions, in the comparative context of alternative forms of identity. The focus of the class will be primarily theoretical, with no regional or temporal limitations.
This course analyzes the distinctive US welfare state in historical and comparative perspective. We begin with a survey of the policy context, an historical overview from the poorhouses through the Great Society, and a tour of welfare states across the rich democracies. We then survey developments – and explain the actual workings of policy – across jobs, education, welfare, pensions, and health care. We explore the institutional and political factors behind their divergent trajectories through conservative revival and the age of Trump. Students will write a seminar paper exploring policy development over time in a program or area of their choosing. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Prerequisite(s): Students may take AS.190.380 or AS.360.380, but not both.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Most wealthy countries are democracies. But not all democracies are wealthy—India, Costa Rica, and Mongolia are prominent examples of poor countries with democratic regimes. The course will examine the relation between economic development and political democratization under three big questions. (a) Under what conditions, and through which mechanisms, does economic development promote democracy? (b) If economic development is not possible in the foreseeable future, how do countries achieve stable democratization? (c) Under what conditions, and through which mechanisms, does democracy foster economic development?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross-listed with Africana Studies
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross listed with Africana Studies.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over the past several years the city has been the center of almost every significant political struggle we've had over the past several years, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. Theorists, activists, and scholars have argued for a specific "right to the city". What does that right look like? What might it look like? How has it informed political struggle over space and time? This course will seek to answer this question.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Considers how parties and elections structure political conflict, and facilitate (or not) democratic control of government. Topics include campaigns, voting behavior, election administration, money in politics, presidential nomination, and party coalitions.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar. The course will examine the politics of memory: how power shapes what is available to be remembered, the timing and occasions of memory, who is allowed to remember, and the spaces inside of which remembrance takes place. Specifically, the seminar will explore how segregated memory enables racial segregation and racial inequality. Toward that end, we shall investigate political and theoretical interventions potentially equipped to contest contemporary forms of racial amnesia haunting what some have labeled a “post-truth” world.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines the most important debates about China’s political economic development. After exploring Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic policies, we will consider the politics of reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping, and finally conclude with China’s state capitalist policies across a variety of issue areas. The course will cover literatures on financial reform, public goods provision, foreign trade and investment, agriculture, corruption, business groups, and regulatory development. Where possible we will draw comparisons with the economic experiences of other East Asian nations as well as other post-communist states.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
While the United States has long been a democracy for white men, it has mostly been anything but democratic when seen through the eyes of Black Americans. But progress toward the expansion of democracy has occurred at a few times in American history. What made American democratization possible, and how might the United States again move toward more complete and inclusive democracy?
Since antiquity, global politics have been defined by the struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism. This course examines the arguments that have accompanied this struggle, considering influential texts written to defend or to denounce empires, as well as contemporary scholarship on imperial and anti-imperial ideologies. We will focus in particular on how imperial conflicts shaped natural law, international law, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, as well as the connections between imperialism and contemporary capitalism, development assistance, and humanitarian intervention. The fundamental questions for the course are: What is an empire? and What would it mean to decolonize our world, our international institutions, and our minds?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this seminar we examine the origins, dynamics, and consequences of nonviolent struggles around the world. How do ordinary people organize for social change? What are the differences in people power campaigns in authoritarian and democratic contexts? When does nonviolent resistance succeed or fail, and what are the political consequences of these outcomes? In answering these questions, we will study the central ideas behind nonviolent action, learn about the most important scholarly discoveries in this field and analyze paradigmatic cases. Students will choose a historical or contemporary nonviolent movement to interrogate throughout the semester, as we learn new concepts, theories, and empirical patterns to make sense of them.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines the domestic, regional, and transnational politics of the Middle East and North Africa. The class is organized into three units. The first examines major armed conflicts—anti-colonial, intra-state, and inter-state—from 1948 through the 1990s. It uses these historical moments as windows onto key issues in Middle Eastern and North African political issues such as external intervention/occupation, human rights, sectarianism, social movements, and memory politics. Unit Two focuses on policy relevant issues such as democratization, minority populations, religion and politics, and gender. In Unit Three, students will explore the politics of the Arab Uprisings through critical reading and discussion of new (post-2011) scholarship on MENA states, organizations, and populations. Enrollment limited to Political Science and International Studies majors.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Capitalism and Ecology focuses on the relations between capitalism and climate during the era of the Anthropocene. How do capitalist processes of fossil extraction, consumption, production and governance contribute to the pace of climate warming, glacier flows, the ocean conveyor system, species loss and other phenomena? What are the effects and the possible modes of political response? How do the nonhuman, self-organizing processes such as glaciers, oceans and climate change on their own as they also amplify the effects of capitalist emissions? The course combines texts on capitalism and activism with those by geoscientists on how the nonhuman systems work. Books by authors in the fields of political theory, geology, anthropology, economics, philosophy and ethology will be drawn upon. Authors such as Michael Benton, Brian Fagan, Hayek, Naomi Klein, Fred Hirsch, Fred Pearce, van Dooren and Connolly are apt to be read to engage these issues. A previous course in political theory is recommended. The class is organized around student presentations on assigned readings. Two papers, 10-12 pages in length. Extensive class discussion.
Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students of politics to international law. We will explore historical roots and current problems, recognizing along the way persistent contestation over the participants, sources, purposes, and interests associated with international law. The course situates formal aspects of law—centered on international treaties, international organizations, the World Court (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC)—within a broader field of global governance consisting of treaty-based and customary law, states and transnational actors, centralized and decentralized forms of legal authority. We will place special emphasis on the significance of international law to colonialism, decolonization, and contemporary forms of imperialism, keeping in mind that the law has been experienced differently in the Global South and by actors not recognized as sovereign by states in positions of power. Students will be exposed to a range of approaches, including rational choice, various species of legalism, process-oriented theories, critical legal studies, and postcolonial critiques.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The Politics of Good and Evil examines comparatively a series of classical myths and modern philosophies concerning the sources of evil, the nature of goodness and nobility, the relations of culture to politics, nature and the gods, the degree to which any metaphysic or theological faith is certain, and so on. It is a course in “elemental theory” in the sense that each text pursued challenges and disrupts others we read. Often the reader is disrupted existentially too, in ways that may spur new thought. A previous course in political theory or a theoretical course in the humanities is advised. A high tolerance for theory is essential. Texts on or by Sophocles, Job, Genesis ("J" version), Augustine, Voltaire, Nietzsche, James Baldwin, W. Connolly and Elizabeth Kolbert form the core of the class. Assignments: 1) One 12 page paper and a second 5-7 page paper, both anchored in the readings; 2) a class presentation on one text; 3) regular attendance and quality participation in class discussions.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Exploring the history of imbrications between capitalism and Christianity up to the contemporary era. Texts include the gospels, Calvin, Weber, Deleuze, George Gilder and Linda Kintz. Recommended Course Background: One course in theory or permission required.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is an advanced undergraduate political theory seminar that examines the disproportionate impact of environmental destruction on racially stigmatized populations. Environmental racism has largely been understood in terms of environmental policy-making that discriminates against people of color, particularly with respect to the state-sanctioned siting of toxic waste facilities, the distribution of pollutants, food-deserts, and the exclusion of non-white peoples from leading positions in the environmental movement. In this seminar, we will explore environmental racism more broadly, pushing beyond its conventional, place-based understandings and approaching the corresponding logics that produce human disposability and environmental waste from the standpoint of both space and time. Examining colonial legacies of coding racial others in terms natural disasters, epidemics, infestations, non-human animals, and dirt, we shall investigate how the natural world is subjected to exploitation and domination in tandem with the subordination of racial subjects historically identified with nature and rendered expendable. In other words, we shall illuminate the logics of power through which race-making coincides with waste-making. Accordingly, we will explore political and theoretical challenges to environmental racism in multiple registers, such as those posed by Indigenous communities, decolonial thinkers and Afro-diasporic theories contesting the intersection of racial biopolitics and ecological crises.
Writing Intensive
This upper-level undergraduate writing intensive course brings together the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault to focus on their critiques of modernity and their discussions of political change/revolution. Although Arendt and Foucault are often understood as coming from and supporting different political theoretical traditions, the course will also explore ways in which their shared debt to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche illuminates sometimes surprising commonalities and complementary positions. There is no final exam in this course but in addition to reading assignments, students will be required to write three papers.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This is an advanced undergraduate seminar that explores how racial stigma functions as a marker of being always already in debt. In view of the legacies of settler-colonialism, imperialism and chattel slavery, how is it that those from whom so much has been taken are nevertheless regarded as perpetually in debt? We shall examine the moral, economic and racialized logics of power through which a range of political subjects come to be regarded as ungrateful “takers” as opposed to “makers,” and owing a debt to society. In so doing, we will investigate how temporality functions as a tool of power by considering how the indebted are made vulnerable to precarity, discipline, and disposability—in effect, forced to live life on borrowed time.
Writing Intensive
This course examines the politics of food at the local, national, and global level. Topics include the politics of agricultural subsidies, struggles over genetically modified foods, government efforts at improving food safety, and issues surrounding obesity and nutrition policy. Juniors, seniors, and graduate students only. Cross-listed with Public Health Studies. A student who takes AS.190.223 (Understanding the Food System) in Summer 2021 cannot also enroll in this course.
Prerequisite(s): A student who takes AS.190.223 (Understanding the Food System) cannot also enroll in this course.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In the 19th Century America was noted for its courts, political parties and representative institutions. Today, America’s political parties and representative institutions have declined in importance while the institutions of the executive branch have increased in importance. This seminar will examine the nation’s key executive institutions and aspects of executive governance in the U.S. Students will alternate primary responsibility for week’s readings. Every student will prepare a 10-15 page review and critique of the books for which they are responsible in class.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar provides an in-depth exploration of the concept of sovereignty as the central organizing concept of international relations. Rather than taking it for granted as a framework that simply individuates state actors in international politics, we will explore the history of its emergence in colonial and imperial relations and trace its interactions with phenomena such as nationalism, globalization, territoriality, and intervention. The course is open to undergraduates with previous coursework in political science.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course uses a community based learning approach to inquire into the presence of the Rastafari community in the Baltimore area. Most people will have heard of Rastafari through the music of Bob Marley. People might not know, however, that Rastafari emerges out of and has been part of a global history of liberation struggles. This course is co-taught with a local Rastafari organization. You will be intellectually and practically equipped to take part in a project of original research on the Rastafari presence in the Baltimore region, starting with the demonization of the movement in the 1980s “war on drugs” and including the movement’s response.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An examination of the ways in which violence has been used to secure political ends. Topics include terrorism, assassination, genocide, coups, rebellions and war itself. Students examine what makes types of political violence unique and what unites them. (Formerly AS.190.372)
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Despite growing awareness in other subfields of political science of the importance of Asian Americans as a political constituency, Asian American political theory and thought has yet to be recognized. This course provides an opportunity to investigate and interrogate the possibility of a textual “tradition” of Asian American political thought, including writings by thinkers before the invention of “Asian American” as an analytic, political, and identity category. How do Asian American writers, thinkers, and activists conceive of core political concepts such as freedom, citizenship, inclusion, and justice in the face of longstanding historical injustices–ranging from legal and social exclusion to internment? How do Asian Americans understand, portray, and attempt to alter their social position and relation to state power? What tools of resistance were available to them, and how did they use those tools to negotiate and reconfigure central conceptual categories of political thought and politics? We will engage a wide-ranging group of Asian and Asian American writers as well as contemporary theorists, as well as a variety of genres.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
In the years between World Wars I and II, a fascinating group of artists, manifesto-writers, performers, intellectuals, and poets, in Europe and the Caribbean, who were put off by conventional politics of the time, decided to pursue other means of societal transformation. This seminar explores the aims and tactics, and strengths and liabilities, of Dada and Surrealism, as it operated in Europe and the Americas in the years between the World Wars. We will also read texts and images from writers and artists influenced by Dada and Surrealism but applied to different historical and political contexts.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.193 OR AS.190.613 are not eligible to take AS.190.415.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar on racial formation. Specifically, the course explores the end of whiteness in multiple senses of the phrase. First, to what extent do the ends served by whiteness change, or remain continuous, over time? What power hierarchies and political goals has white identity been engineered to advance historically? We shall then examine the contemporary phenomenon whereby the end of white supremacy is conceived by some as the end of the world. This, in turn, will lead us to investigate how we should best understand white disavowal of threats of climate change and pandemics/health-care crises currently coursing through white identity politics. The last part of the course will be dedicated to exploring the end of whiteness in terms of the theories and practices potentially required to dismantle whiteness as white supremacy. Readings include Du Bois, Fanon, Painter, Baldwin, Moreton-Robinson, Hartmann, Olson
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will examine violence that occurs mainly within the territory of nominally sovereign states. We will focus on violence as an object of study in its own right. For the most part, we will look at violence as a dependent variable, though in some instances it will function as an independent variable, a mechanism, or an equilibrium. We will ask why violence starts, how it “works” or fails to work, why it takes place in some locations and not others, why violence take specific forms (e.g., insurgency, terrorism, civilian victimization, etc.), what explains its magnitude (the number of victims), and what explains targeting (the type or identity of victims).
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
With the tools of geopolitics, course explores political debates over globalization of machine civilization and changes in scope and pace, space and place, and role of nature in human affairs.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Investigates the causes of large-scale policy disasters, examining the role of ideology, psychology, organization design and political incentives. Examples may be drawn from the Iraq War, Bay of Pigs, Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Financial crisis, Shuttle Challenger disaster. economic development policy, privatization, and the Great Society. Limited to seniors or with permission of instructor. (CP / AP)
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This class is designed to introduce students to qualitative methodology. Practically, students will gain first-hand experience with qualitative research methods via research design, ethics review, in-depth interviewing, participant observation, and archival/primary source research. They will learn to deploy analytical techniques such as discourse analysis and process tracing. Students will also be asked to consider the merits of qualitative approaches more generally, and discuss the relative advantages of qualitative, experimental, and quantitative approaches. Questions that we will discuss include: What place should qualitative research have in a research design? Can qualitative research test hypotheses, or only generate them? Can qualitative research explain social phenomena, or only interpret them? What are the disadvantages and advantages of qualitative approaches compared to quantitative approaches? For what kinds of research questions are ethnographic techniques best suited? Is replicability possible for ethnographic field research? What criteria of evidence and analytical rigor apply on this terrain?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Although “the market” is conventionally understood as separate from “politics”, the modern market economy did not arise in a political vacuum. In fact, the very separation between the economy and politics is itself the product of a politically potent set of ideas. This course is an upper-division reading seminar on the origins and evolution of the modern market economy. Readings will include Smith, Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Becker, and Foucault. Recommended course background: Introduction to comparative politics OR any college-level course in social or political theory.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Afropessimism represents a critical body of thought that takes as its fundamental premises two ideas, the Black is the Slave, and in order to end that ontological condition the world must end. In this course, we will interrogate the key readings associated with this body of thought as well as responses.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Contact with criminal justice has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities. Yet, our field has been slow to appreciate the development of the carceral state or to consider its manifold for citizenship. In this advanced undergraduate seminar, we will survey key debates around punishment, state violence, and surveillance, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history and racial orders seriously. Why did the carceral state expand in "fits and starts" and with what consequence for state-building? We explore its (racialized and gendered) relationship to other key systems: foster care, social provision, labor relations and the labor market, and immigration enforcement. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which the criminal justice system "makes race" and how debates about crime and punishment were often debates about black inclusion and equality. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, democratic habits, and racial lifeworlds? In addition to policy, political discourse, and racial politics, we will employ works from a range of fields - history, sociology, law and criminology - and a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative). Required books include: Khalil Muhammad's Condemnation of Blackness: race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, David Oshinsky's Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America, and Michael Fortner's Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.
Writing Intensive
Israel is one of the only countries whose existence is openly challenged. This class will examine the future of Israel focusing on international and domestic threats to its continued existence as a Jewish democracy. Outside threats to be considered include nuclear attack and the growing international movement to delegitimize Israel. domestic challenges include demographic changes, the role of religion in governance, and doubts as to whether one can be a Jewish state and still be a democracy. Lessons from the destruction of the ancient Israelite kingdoms and from contemporary state deaths will be included. The course will conclude by considering efforts that Israel can undertake to meet the threats it faces.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Race has been and continues to be centrally important to American political life and development. In this course, we will engage with the major debates around racial politics in the United States, with a substantial focus on how policies and practices of citizenship, immigration law, social provision, and criminal justice policy shaped and continue to shape racial formation, group-based identities, and group position; debates around the content and meaning of political representation and the responsiveness of the political system to American minority groups; debates about how racial prejudice has shifted and its importance in understanding American political behavior; the prospects for contestation or coalitions among groups; the “struggle with difference” within groups as they deal with the interplay of race and class, citizenship status, and issues that disproportionately affect a subset of their members; and debates about how new groups and issues are reshaping the meaning and practice of race in the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar will address the role of violence–both domestic and international–in political life. Though most claim to abhor violence, since the advent of recorded history, violence and politics have been intimately related. States practice violence against internal and external foes. Political dissidents engage in violence against states. Competing political forces inflict violence upon one another. Writing in 1924, Winston Churchill declared–and not without reason–that, "The story of the human race is war." Indeed, violence and the threat of violence are the most potent forces in political life. It is, to be sure, often averred that problems can never truly be solved by the use of force. Violence, the saying goes, is not the answer. This adage certainly appeals to our moral sensibilities. But whether or not violence is the answer presumably depends upon the question being asked. For better or worse, it is violence that usually provides the most definitive answers to three of the major questions of political life--statehood, territoriality and power. Violent struggle, in the form of war, revolution, civil war, terrorism and the like, more than any other immediate factor, determines what states will exist and their relative power, what territories they will occupy, and which groups will and will not exercise power within them. Course is open to juniors and seniors.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Europe has been in a sense the first testing ground for theories of comparative politics, but many outsiders now see Europe as a pacified and somewhat boring place. This course will question conventional wisdom through an examination of European politics in historical and cross-national perspective. We will apply the comparative method to the study of European politics today, and conversely we will ask what Europe tells us more generally about politics. We will see that Europe is still a locus of intense conflict as well as remarkably diverse experimentation. Topics will include: political, legal, and economic governance; the evolution of democracy and fundamental rights, the welfare state, class stratification, immigration and race, the role of religion; European integration and globalization. Recommended background: Introduction to Comparative Politics.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Intensive examination of the political aspects of human activities in outer space, past, present and future, with focus on militarization, earth-remote sensing, surveillance, navigation, resource exploitation, the Outer Space Treaty, and colonization.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course is an advanced introduction to war in the modern world, encompassing its political, social, cultural and ecological dimensions. It adopts a “war and society” approach in that it covers the ways in which society shapes war and, in turn, how war shapes society. It situates “war and society” in an historically evolving global context, attending to the nature of war in both the core and the periphery of world politics. Topics include the totalization and industrialization of war; civil-military relations; modernity, reason and war; “small war”; and race, culture and war.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Power is a -- if not the -- key concept of international relations, yet there is no single definition of power that is accepted by all scholars in the field. In this course we will critically examine definitions of power from classic and contemporary works of international relations, political science, and related areas of study.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Intensive exploration of theories of how geography, ecology, and technology shape political orders. Case studies of ancient, early modern, global, and contemporary topics, including European ascent, industrial revolution, tropics and North South divide, climate change, geo-engineering and global commons (oceans, atmosphere and orbital space
Writing Intensive
Though the torchlight parade has long since passed, American parties still stand in the shadow of the nineteenth-century Party Period. This course seeks to untangle the ideologies and practices of party politics from the Founding to the Progressive Era. Topics include the rise of mass parties, political violence, the coming of the Republican Party, the party politics of Reconstruction and westward expansion, corruption and the political machine, Populism, and movements for reform. We pay particular attention to comparisons between past and present, and to opportunities taken and foregone.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
An intensive examination of competing theories of the role of nuclear weapons in world politics and alternative global security orders. Focus on nuclear weapons and the interstate system, deterrence, war fighting, arms control, proliferation and terrorism, with select historical and contemporary case studies.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will survey the history of industrial policies for clean technologies from China’s wind and solar push in the 1990s to the Inflation Reduction Act. We will seek to understand the determinants of industrial policy, best practices for industrial policy, and the effects of industrial policy on climate politics. The lens of industrial policy provides a unique avenue to understand world order. Through this lens, we will see how nature, knowledge, and geopolitics come together in various formations throughout world history.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar on racial formation. Specifically, the course examines white supremacy in politics and theory. We shall take a critical-historical approach to theorize the continuities and changes in whiteness over time. For instance, what power hierarchies and political goals has white identity been fashioned to advance historically? By studying whiteness as race---and not the absence thereof--we will take up questions of how to best understand and contest contemporary manifestations of white supremacy in environmental racism, imperialism, discourses of race war and replacement theory, and ongoing neo-colonial, biopolitical and death-dealing necropolitical projects. Building on this work, we will investigate the white disavowal of existential crises of climate change and pandemic threats within apocalyptic modes of whiteness---ways of thinking and acting where the end of white supremacy is imagined and lived as the real end of the world.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In the 20th century, American universities became the envy of the world, leading in most categories of scholarly productivity and attracting students from every nation. In recent years, though, American higher education has come to face a number of challenges including rapidly rising costs, administrative bloat, corporatization and moocification. We will examine the problems and promises of American higher education, the political struggles within the university and the place of the university in the larger society. Upper classes and Grad Students only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The American constitutional order, which was designed to operate without political parties, now has parties as divided as any in the democratic world. This course will examine explanations of how this happened, the consequences of party polarization for public policy and governance, and what if anything should be done about it.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The philosophy of law or jurisprudence investigates the nature of law and what makes law, as it were, law. Thus, this course will examine various ways in which law has been defined and understood. It will also consider how law is distinguished from other systems of norms and values, such as morality, and how law is distinguished from other aspects of government, such as politics. In addition, the course will introduce students to discussions of legal reasoning and interpretation. Students will be required to participate in class discussion, take three exams, and write one paper.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
“The abnormal is he who demands, appeals, and begs” – Frantz Fanon. This course explores the writings and politics of Frantz Fanon, the radical anti-colonial author, psychiatrist, diplomat, and revolutionary who inspired decolonial and anti-racist struggles across the globe. We will situate Fanon’s writings in the global historical context of decolonization, and ask how they can illuminate contemporary questions of madness, racism, fascism, and empire. In addition to reading Fanon’s work, we will trace his influence on radical social movements, political thought, and global politics, and explore the limits and promises of culture, art, and film for social transformation.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Open to and required for Political Science majors writing a thesis. International Studies majors writing a senior thesis under the supervision of a Political Science Department faculty member may also enroll. Topics include: research design, literature review, evidence collection and approaches to analysis of evidence, and the writing process. The course lays the groundwork for completing the thesis in the second semester under the direction of the faculty thesis supervisor. Students are expected to have decided on a research topic and arranged for a faculty thesis supervisor prior to the start of the semester. Seniors. Under special circumstances, juniors will be allowed to enroll. Enrollment limit: 15.
Writing Intensive
Seniors also have the opportunity to write a senior research thesis. To be eligible to write this thesis, students must identify a faculty sponsor who will supervise the project.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Permission required.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
This class is designed to introduce students to qualitative methodology. Practically, students will gain first hand experience with qualitative research methods via research design, ethics review, in-depth interviewing, participant observation, and archival/primary source research. They will learn to deploy analytical techniques such as discourse analysis and process tracing. Students will also be asked to consider the merits of qualitative approaches more generally, and discuss the relative advantages of qualitative, experimental, and quantitative approaches. Questions that we will discuss include: What place should qualitative research have in a research design? Can qualitative research test hypotheses, or only generate them? Can qualitative research explain social phenomena, or only interpret them? What are the disadvantages and advantages of qualitative approaches compared to quantitative approaches? For what kinds of research questions are ethnographic techniques best suited? Is replicability possible for ethnographic field research? What criteria of evidence and analytical rigor apply on this terrain?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introduction to measurement and data analysis in contemporary American political science. Measurement topics will include the formation of indices and cumulative scales. Analytic topics will topics include sampling variations, statistical association and causation, as manifested in contingency tables and correlation and regression. Emphasis will be on fundamental concepts and assumptions, and on comprehension and evaluation of the scholarly literature. Advanced undergraduates by permission only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is a directed readings graduate course that takes the form of a reading seminar. Our aim is to read carefully and understand deeply what Michael Heinrich calls Marx’s “second project of critique”; begun in 1863–64 and often referred to by the name “Capital,” this project remains entangled with but must be understood as separate from the “critique of political economy.” It also remains deeply misunderstood, and particularly hard to grasp if one approaches it by starting with chapter one, volume 1, of Capital (especially as interpreted through traditional Marxism). Hence our distinct and distinctive tack.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Environmental racism has largely been understood in terms of environmental policy-making that discriminates against people of color, particularly with respect to the state-sanctioned siting of toxic waste facilities, the distribution of pollutants, food-deserts, and the exclusion of non-white peoples from leading positions in the environmental movement. This graduate seminar explores environmental racism more broadly, pushing beyond its conventional, place-based understandings and approaching the corresponding logics that produce human disposability and environmental waste from the standpoint of both space and time. Examining colonial legacies of coding racial others in terms natural disasters, epidemics, infestations, non-human animals and dirt, we shall investigate how the natural world is subjected to exploitation and domination in tandem with the subordination of racial subjects historically identified with nature and rendered expendable. In other words, we shall illuminate the logics of power through which race-making coincides with waste-making. Accordingly, we will explore political and theoretical challenges to environmental racism in multiple registers; such as those posed by indigenous studies, decolonial thinkers and Afro-diasporic theories contesting the intersection of racial biopolitics, ecological crises and racial capitalism in an era of proliferating human disposability. Authors considered may include; Mbembe, Du Bois, Hage, Glissant, Césaire, Wynter & Chakrabarty.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is an advanced introduction to war in the modern world, encompassing its political, social, cultural and ecological dimensions. It adopts a “war and society” approach in that it covers the ways in which society shapes war and, in turn, how war shapes society. It situates “war and society” in an historically evolving global context, attending to the nature of war in both the core and the periphery of world politics. Topics include the totalization and industrialization of war; civil-military relations; modernity, reason and war; “small war”; and race, culture and war.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An examination of state-building and nation-building throughout American political history. (AP)
This graduate seminar considers the relationship between finance and state building in both the developing and developed world. Topics will explore the role of central banking, the development of equity and debt markets, bubble economy politics, the effects of financialization, and financial regulatory politics.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar explores the philosophies of Stengers, Nietzsche and Whitehead comparatively, focusing on their philosophies of agency, multitemporality, affect in ethics and politics, flirtations with panexperientialism, and accounts of planetary/culture imbrications. We will also read contemporary engagements with all three on subjectivity, biology and politics, the Anthropocene, democracy, the shapes of logic, and the visiccitudes of time. Primary texts by Stengers may be Another Science is Possible and Thinking with Whitehead, by Nietzsche Daybreak, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the Late Notebooks. For Whitehead, Process and Reality and Modes of Thought. Presentation, class discussions, and a seminar paper.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Close reading of major texts in western political thought on violence, security and politics developed by republicans, realists and liberals
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course focuses on the affective dimensions of law, a power that both creates and preserves the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties. Two related questions will guide our examination of the affection dimensions of law: What are the grounds of law? Why do we obey law? Students will turn in response papers every week on the reading. In addition, there will be a 20-30 page paper due at the end of the semester.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar is intended for graduate students planning to take the comprehensive exam in comparative politics, either as a major or as a minor. In addition to exploring central methodological debates and analytic approaches, the seminar reviews the literature on state-society relations, political and economic development, social movements, nationalism, revolutions, formal and informal political institutions, and regime durability vs. transition. Graduate students only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is intended as Ph.D.-level introduction to applied statistics, with a focus on the identification of causal effects in the tradition of the Neyman/Rubin potential outcomes framework. Prior coursework in applied statistics or quantitative methods will be useful but is not required. Upon completion of the course, students will be in a position to understand and critically assess scholarship that uses instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, and other quasi- and natural-experimental research designs. Formal mathematical proof will be kept to a minimum. Students will be asked to adapt existing code and write some of their own code in R.
What can Deleuze teach classical Eurocentric theories? And what can representatives of those traditions teach him? We will read Deleuze in relation to theorists he has examined, such as Plato, Lucretius, Spinoza, Kant, Kafka, Nietzsche and Hegel, as we seek to hear the history of political theory in a new key. Concepts and issues such as politics, history, time, culture/nature divisions, capitalism, the source of ethics, the shape of political ideals, and the nature of explanation will come up for review. The course will typically read a text from a classical thinker and then consult Deleuze’s engagements with them.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
A close reading of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Ethics by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), with consideration of important commentaries on these works. What conceptions of the human being, nature, reason, God, and freedom are defended and affirmed by Hobbes and Spinoza? What rhetorical strategies accompany their theories of self, ethics, social life?
Race is not a biological fact but rather a social construction. However, it is a social construction with very real consequences. Definitions of citizenship, allocation of state resources, attitudes about government and government policy, the creation of government policy, all shape and are shaped by race and racial classifications. Serving as a critical corrective to American politics treatments that ignore race, this class will examine how race functions politically in the United States. While not required, some knowledge of statistics is helpful.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is a graduate seminar on the interpretive and critical problems that arise when political theorists read and write about texts from long, long ago or far, far away. The first part of the course will consider approaches to the history of European political thought influenced by Marx, Foucault, Strauss, Skinner, and Arendt, amongst others. Readings will include both major methodological statements and examples of interpretive and critical scholarship undertaken by proponents of these different schools of thought. In the second part of the course, we will ask whether and how methods developed to analyze and learn from the history of political thought can be applied to the study of political thinkers who lived and wrote outside western Europe and North America. Major questions for consideration in both parts of the course include: Can old ideas help us solve problems arising in contemporary politics and political theory? What can we learn from intellectual traditions unconnected to our own? What do we have to do in order to understand the ideas contained within a given text? Do we have to understand a text for it to be useful to us?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines American social policy in comparative perspective. Special attention to issues of poverty and inequality, and their relation to the political system.
This course explores institutional development in American national politics, from the Founding until the present. It traces parties, Congress, the presidency, bureaucracy, and courts, and also examines how those institutions have interacted with one another across American history. Throughout the course, we will consider how ideas, interests, procedures, and sequence together shape institutions as they collide and abrade over time. Finally, although it hardly covers the entire corpus across the subfield, the course is also designed to prepare students to sit for comprehensive examinations in American politics.
Explores how information and knowledge flow through political/social/economic configurations, forming and reforming the politics of everyday engagements at different scales. Topics such as mis/disinformation, commodification of information, embodied information, surveillance, and cyber-mediated information provide the context for analyzing practices, power, agency, and ethics. Critical security studies scholarship provides an overarching template, and we will also draw theoretical insights from multiple disciplines. The format will combine elements of seminar and workshop, and the emphasis will be on collaborative participation in the research process.
This course inquires into the colonial constitution of the "human" across philosophical, legal, political, social and economic dimensions. Special attention is paid to the ways in which sexuality, gender, race, class and faith are complicit in this constitution. The course finishes by critically considering theories of the "post-human" from the perspective of both a colonial genealogy of the "human" and anti-colonial claims upon humanism.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Race has been and continues to be centrally important to American political life and development. In this course, we will engage with the major debates around racial politics in the United States, with a substantial focus on how policies and practices of citizenship, immigration law, social provision, and criminal justice policy shaped and continue to shape racial formation, group-based identities, and group position; debates around the content and meaning of political representation and the responsiveness of the political system to American minority groups; debates about how racial prejudice has shifted and its importance in understanding American political behavior; the prospects for contestation or coalitions among groups; the “struggle with difference” within groups as they deal with the interplay of race and class, citizenship status, and issues that disproportionately affect a subset of their members; and debates about how new groups and issues are reshaping the meaning and practice of race in the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Comparative politics scholars have long identified institutions as a crucial source of cross-national variation in political life. Yet institutions are not static. We know from everyday experience that institutions change over time, sometimes quite fast. Scholars have attempted to address the problem of institutional change in various ways. Some institutionalist scholars underscore the endogenous logic of institutional evolution, whereas others resort to exogenous factors such as power. Constructivist and pragmatist scholars foreground ideas and practices as sources of institutional change. This course will explore these different strands of scholarship and attempt to reconstruct a fruitful dialogue between them."
How did colonial rule and post-colonial foreign intervention shape the history and politics of states in the Middle East and Africa? The first part of this course focuses on the colonial period, examining the era of conquest, considering how and whether colonial rule differed from other types of ruling arrangements, and studying how people in colonized territories reacted to conquest and foreign rule. Part Two focuses on post-colonial foreign military interventions. Part Three considers the potential long-term consequences of colonialism and foreign intervention. The course focuses on British, French, and American imperialism.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Grad Students Only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course uses the life and writings of famous Trinidadian Marxist CLR James to explore a set of analytical issues of importance to understanding Pan-Africanism and international relations, including: political economy and slavery, culture and freedom, and the fraught relationship between black intellectuals and black masses.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s claim that the calamity of stateless people is “not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but that “they no longer belong to any community whatsoever.” Rather than attempt to verify or disprove this claim, the course will use this claim as a provocation. How do we understand, experience, and imagine “community”? What does it mean to “belong” to a community? Is it possible not to belong to any community? Why is the language of community so ubiquitous? To help us consider these questions, we will read among others, Anderson, Freud, Harney and Moten, Joseph, LeGuin, McMillan, and Rousseau. A final paper of 20-30 pages is required.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is designed to help graduate students in political science craft an original piece of high-quality writing. This class is open to students in their first, second, or third years of the graduate program. We will work on developing the skill of academic writing step by step, focusing first on the question of how to identify and articulate a good question, second on the skill of literature review, third on the art of theoretical engagement, and fourth on the presentation of evidence. During the semester, students may choose to turn a set of interests and questions into a prospectus draft. Alternatively, they may decide to use the class to turn a seminar paper into a dissertation chapter, or a revise a dissertation chapter into an article manuscript. Special sessions will bring other faculty to the class to talk about writing a dissertation and the peer-review process.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The neoclassical paradigm of economics utterly excludes politics, yet a large swath of the subfield of “political economy” presupposes or is predicated upon that very paradigm. Neither approach can account for the distinct force of “the economic” as it continually interacts with “the political” (and the social, the cultural, etc.) This graduate seminar will be an experimental effort in exploring a whole new terrain of the economic — not another critique of the neoclassical paradigm, but the initial (re)formulation of a new approach to the economic and the political.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Policy dynamics is the study of changes of the political system in its entirety, from the point of view of the system's outputs--what government actually does, or fails to do. It is dynamic in that it seeks to explain changes in what matters governments feel can or must be addressed, the tools that are available to deal with problems, and the interactions of government and non-government actors that generate change. Particular emphasis will be placed on studying policy dynamics over long periods of time, including such post-enactment issues as implementation, policy feedback on political identities and group formation, and policy durability.
Graduate students only. "Organizations are the fundamental building blocks of economic, social and political life. This course will examine how different disciplines (sociology, economics, political science) approach the problem of explaining how organizations operate, as well as exploring the structure and development of a very wide range of organizations (firms, interest groups, charitable foundations, universities, militaries, bureaucracies, international organizations, and professions)."
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The last twenty years has seen a flourishing of literature on conservatism across multiple disciplines. This course will survey that literature, placing it in a developmental context. Particular focus will be placed on the relationship between elite and mass conservatism, especially in the light of the rise of populism in the US, UK and elsewhere.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This graduate seminar is a critical encounter with the colonial imprint on the politics of memory, temporality and race. We shall investigate the recent turn to “decolonize” virtually everything and ask what such efforts might entail given that the hallmarks of colonialism include a disavowal of the past, the capacity to set the clock to zero and begin the world anew, a linear conception of time and an abiding desire for temporal sovereignty. While investigating the possibility of decolonizing futurity, we will pay particular attention to the Promethean construction of the human race (and its constitutive others) across history. We shall confront the role of segregated temporality and mnemonic politics in modern race-making projects and their impact on the contemporary political imagination. Authors may include Nietzsche, Wynter, Fanon, Foucault, Deleuze, Anzaldúa, Baldwin, & Du Bois.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
What gives democratic regimes the ability to withstand challenges such as extreme polarization, racial and ethnic conflict, rising economic inequality, and institutional sclerosis and avoid the prospect of backsliding toward authoritarianism? This course will examine the problem of democratic resilience by locating the contemporary crisis of American democracy in comparative and historical perspective, bringing together literatures in comparative democratization and American politics.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
TBA
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This graduate course explores the colonial contexts out of which key sub-fields of political science arose. The course then examines the colonial logics that underpin the conceptual formation of each sub-field. Finally, the course considers alternative knowledge traditions, emanating from minority communities and colonized peoples, which seek to alternatively explain the phenomena engaged with by each sub-field.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Graduate students only.
The history of Euro-American Political Thought has been criticized for its orientations to race, gender, class, Christianity, the subject, capitalism, colonialism, sociocentrism, and humanist exceptionalism. How deeply are those themes ensconced in early Christian traditions, secular orientations to the earth, practices of capitalism, and contemporary images of “the political”? What openings are discernible? The seminar starts with Hesiod’s Theogony and a chapter from Tim Whitmarsh on atheism in ancient Greece. It then explores how Augustine consolidates sharp shifts in orientations to faith, divinity, nature, discipline, time and the earth. An agent of the first conquest of paganism. Readings in The City of God: Against the Pagans and The Confessions in relation to Foucault’s newly translated book, Confessions of The Flesh. Then we turn to what might be called the second Christian/imperial conquest of paganism, launched during the 15th century Spanish invasion of the Americas. How did that conquest re-enact and differ from the first? Texts by Todorov, The Conquest of America, alongside essays by C.L.R. James and perhaps de Castro. Followed by essays from Kant, Marx, Arendt, or Deleuze/Guattari, to see how each consolidates or turns earlier western theories. The seminar then engages Dipesh Chakrabarty in The climate of history in a planetary age as he criticizes Euro-centered thought (“the political”, the earth as background to politics, racism, exceptionalism, etc) and some currents in post-colonial thought. Critiques and augmentations will be explored, too.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This graduate seminar will explore works from this extraordinary period in contemporary political theory.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
What is money? And given its absolute centrality to economics and politics, shouldn’t political economy and political theory hold answers to this question? Instead, the history of both neoclassical economics and modern political thought is marked by eschewals or refusals of it or its importance. This graduate seminar will explore the theory and politics of money, through critical readings of orthodox theories, engagements with heterodox political economy, and encounters with contemporary political theory.
This course provides an analysis of US foreign policy with a focus on the interests, institutions, and ideas underpinning its development. It offers a broad historical survey that starts with US involvement in the First World War, covers major developments of the twentieth century, and concludes with contemporary issues. Important themes include the developments underpinning the emergence of the liberal world order, strategies of containment during the Cold War, nuclear deterrence and antiproliferation efforts, the politics of international trade, alliance politics, technological and security policy, and the re-emergence of great power competition.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course provides a scaffold for the study of international relations theory, organized historically and by major approaches. The focus is on close reading and discussion of exemplars of important bodies of theory. Intended for doctoral students with IR as their major or minor field. Graduate students only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
As a field, Law and Politics has evolved from the study of constitutional law and judicial politics to the political behavior of judges and their associates to the study of law and society, the operation of law and courts “on the ground” in the international arena as well as in the United States, historical institutionalism, and the carceral state. In this graduate course, we will review some of the classic texts in the field, with a focus on the tension between legal institutions and democratic politics. In particular, we will examine how that tension is manifest in the foundations of the American political system and in critical reflection on contemporary practices of American democracy. Students will turn in response papers every week on the reading. In addition, there will be two 10-20 page papers due during the semester. Graduate Students Only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
A study of the works of Thoreau and Whitman, with an eye toward how they explore the process of outside influences upon subjectivity-formation. What are the powers and limits of Whitman’s and Thoreau’s experiments with language and writing (rhetoric, syntax, imagery, myth) as they seek to induce, cultivate, and transform influences? What role is played by physical encounters with the nonhuman agencies (of plants, animals, objects, divinities)?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Contact with criminal justice has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities. Yet, our field has been slow to appreciate the development of the carceral state or to consider its manifold impacts for citizenship. In this graduate seminar, we will survey key debates around punishment, state violence, and surveillance, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history, and racial orders seriously. Why did the carceral state expand in “fits and starts” and with what consequence for state-building? We explore its (racialized and gendered) relationship to other key systems: foster care, social provision, labor relations and the labor market, and immigration enforcement. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which the criminal justice system “makes race” and how debates about crime and punishment were often debates about black inclusion and equality. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, democratic habits, and racial lifeworlds? In addition to policy, political discourse, and racial politics, we will employ works from a range of fields – history, sociology, law, and criminology – and a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative). Required books include: Khalil Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, David Oshinsky’s Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America, and Michael Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This graduate seminar considers regulatory politics in both the developing and developed world. Topics will explore the role of independent agencies, soft paternalism, co-regulation, regulatory failure, and other topics, across a host of sectors.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The university both provides a platform for critical intellectual life and, particularly during its neoliberalization, sets severe barriers to it. The latter involve increasing administrative entanglement with corporate and state forces of authoritarian control, disciplinary drives to narrow professionalism and reductive epistemologies, attacks on tenure and university governance, and cutbacks in university budgets. How can those with intellectual aspirations negotiate such departmental, professional, trustee and state pressures? What preparations and role models are conducive to help carve out such space in the academy? What critical role can intellectuals play today in and beyond the academy? What intellectual personae from the recent past are helpful here? The seminar will be divided into two parts. Part I will explore a group of academics who created intellectual space in the United States during a period resistant to it in the 1960s. Texts by Charles Taylor, Sheldon Wolin, Donna Haraway, Herbert Marcuse, Cornel West, Althusser, and me may be consulted. Part II moves into the contemporary era. Texts by Foucault, Theweleit, Latour, Haraway (again), and Moten may be reviewed, along with new explorations of relations between adjunct faculty and intellectual life. Readings for Part II thus remain in flux. But intersections between new fascist drives, climate change, racism, professional retreatism, and pandemics may be explored. Seminar assignments include a class presentation, two short papers, and regular participation in discussion.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Critical theories are often taught by focusing on their various philosophical and ethical claims. But how do you “apply” critical theories in the study of International Relations? Is “method” only a “mainstream” concern? This course seeks to relate philosophy and ethics to method with a (future) eye to dissertation writing. We will consider e.g. Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural lines of inquiry, as well as, at the same time, a range of conceptual areas of inquiry – e.g., the affective, the normative, the poetic, the phenomenological, and the material.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over the past decade, political, economic, and cultural struggles in and over the city have become more important than ever before. Protests against the growing carceral state, against increasing wealth inequality, as well as revanchist attempts to rollback multicultural societal shifts all have the city as its core. While some Marxist thinkers suggest these struggles represent larger struggles over use- versus exchange-value, Black Radical thinkers connect these struggles to anti-black racism. In the wake of one world challenging movement – Black Lives Matter – and one world altering crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic - this course will reflect critically on these two traditions of thinking about the city and to rethink the Marxist tradition through the Black Radical tradition. We will anchor these conversations in an exploratory dialogue between two exemplars of each tradition - the French geographer Henri Lefebvre, and Detroit movement intellectuals James and Grace Lee Boggs. This class will be a vital component of the 2022-23 Sawyer Seminar.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do philosophers such as Heidegger, Whitehead, Deleuze and Braidotti help us to think about the dynamics of the Anthropocene? What do anthropologists and geoscientists such as Anna Tsing, Bruno Latour, Jason Moore, Michael Benton, Jan Zalasiewics and Wally Broecker--teach those philosophies and us about the contemporary condition? Class presentations on assigned readings, seminar paper, and class discussions.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This undergraduate seminar is designed to introduce students to the comparative study of political violence and intra-state conflict. We will examine social science theories and empirical studies on a wide range of forms of political violence, including civil war, coups, state repression, communal violence, riots, terrorism, genocide, and criminal-political violence. We will study these phenomena at the micro, meso and macro levels, and focus on understanding their causes, dynamics, outcomes, and aftermath. The class will also equip students with an ability to analyze political violence by using social scientific tools.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will examine Hannah Arendt’s claim that the most “symptomatic group” of contemporary politics is “the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons.” We will consider what, if anything, this group may be a symptom of and its consequences for theories of law and politics. Among other authors we will read Arendt, Agamben, Brown, Foucault, Moten, Said, and Somers. A final paper of 20-30 pages is required.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Race and racism are political productions and—as such—have significantly shaped the study of political science, whose origins in the race science and eugenics milieu of the late nineteenth century (largely at Johns Hopkins) led to a discipline that evolved to systematically exclude and distorts serious consideration of race and racism as constitutive of politics. This exclusion and distortion has resulted in a social science that fails to effectively predict, explain, and diagnose political phenomenon. In this seminar, we will explore both the formative effect of racism in political science and its implications for how political science subfields study race as a political concept and practice, and the tradition of racial capitalism, “written out” of political science until very recently. Students will emerge from this seminar with a solid account of the racial foundations of political science, a critical view on existing approaches to the study of politics, and a grasp of a sidelined tradition of the joint study of race and capitalism.
Focusing on directed readings, this PhD seminar will first explore the logic of research design in the social sciences, before applying these techniques to China. Then we will survey the history of Chinese studies in the United States, the evolution of data sources, research methods, and compare perspectives in the study of Chinese politics and political economy. Taught in conjunction with speaker events at 555 Penn, the first half of the course will be taught at Homewood and the other half at 555.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.191
We live in a world in motion. There are over 272 million migrants in the world today and these numbers are expected to increase in the next decades. Simultaneously, migration is one of the most contested contemporary issues and dominates politics and the media. This course provides students with a thorough understanding of key themes, policies, dilemmas and debates in migration. The first part will focus on theories of migration where students can learn about the history of migration, how and why migrants move today and what categories of migrants exist. The second part will focus on debates around migration and discursive strategies used to 'other' migrants. Part three will focus on core issues in migration studies such as racism, integration, border controls and the link between migration and the economy.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In this course, students will gain a foundational understanding of critical race theory, including its genesis in legal theory. The course will examine its relationship and importance to social movements, including through key concepts like intersectionality. The course will also use critical race theory to grapple with law, racial segregation, and the criminal justice system in the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
We live in an age of crisis. Social, political, and environmental disruptions both in the United States and around the world are the new normal. How do we – as individuals, citizens, and scholars – come to understand these issues? And how should we write about them? This course is designed to help students improve as writers, readers, and editors for a world where powerful young voices are more necessary than ever. The substantive focus of the course will be on the dynamics of interlinked contemporary political crises and on the responses available to individuals to address them. We will read a variety of scholarly, journalistic, and literary sources to inform our discussion and inspire our writing. However, this course is designed not as a standard seminar, but as a writing workshop. Students will write and critique a variety of pieces of different lengths and styles – including a political memoir, an op-ed, a long-form critical essay, and a piece of speculative fiction - spending the majority of in-class time on peer review, presentations, and writing exercises, which they will compile into a writing portfolio. Reading will include works by Alexander Chee, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mary Annaise Heglar, Hunter S. Thompson, James Baldwin, Dave Zirin, Elizbeth Rush, Charlotte Shane, and Teju Cole, among many others.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course focuses on the literature of the Beat Generation writers (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Snyder, Kaufman) of the late 1940s through the 1950s and 1960s. The Beats were a group of nomadic writers traveling the North American continent between San Francisco and New York with memorable stops in Denver and St. Louis, Missouri. Beat literature revolted against the constraining normalizing values of post war USA and celebrated freedom of expression, wanderlust, and the search for euphoria of body and mind in stream-of-consciousness narration. The course examines the relationship between society’s dominant mores and beliefs (both contemporary and those of the 50’s and 60’s) and the counterculture, non-conformist philosophy as espoused by The Beats. The course focuses on Beat depictions of sexuality, gender and race in order to understand if these identity markers are but symptoms of social structures of oppression (racism, patriarchy, heterosexism) or if, alternatively, they can also signal, express and enact a new and different understanding of politics. Can the Beats help us envision new forms of (non-toxic) masculinity? Can they help us think of race in non-racist ways?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is the relationship between capitalism and empire in modern times? The history of capitalism and the history of imperialism are often treated as separate subjects. By contrast, this course begins with the hypothesis that modern empires were the progenitors of capitalist globalization, and that capitalism has been an international or geopolitical system from its earliest inceptions. The purpose of the course, then, is to engage students in a dual exploration of the political economy of modern empires and the geopolitical dimensions of modern capitalism, with a focus on Britain and the United States. We will draw our course readings from a diverse array of theoretical and historical sources on capitalism, empire and global political economy. The overarching aim of the course is to excavate how imperial histories can illuminate the nature of contemporary globalization.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course pairs readings of critical texts addressing environmental crises with literary fiction broadly dealing with the relationship between the human and the environment. We discuss the ways narratives affect our understanding of complex global phenomena, and how the tools of literary analysis can help us unpack the rhetorics and values of both fictional and nonfictional texts.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The course will focus on the origin and development of the Arab-Israeli conflict from its beginnings when Palestine was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, through World War I, The British Mandate over Palestine, and the first Arab-Israeli war (1947-1949). It will then examine the period of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, the Palestinian Intifadas (1987-1993 and 2000-2005); and the development of the Arab-Israeli peace process from its beginnings with the Egyptian-Israeli treaty of 1979, the Oslo I and Oslo II agreements of 1993 and 1995, Israel's peace treaty with Jordan of 1994, the Road Map of 2003; and the periodic peace talks between Israel and Syria. The conflict will be analyzed against the background of great power intervention in the Middle East, the rise of political Islam and the dynamics of Intra-Arab politics, and will consider the impact of the Arab Spring.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The ecological crisis currently underway calls into question political theories that emphasize concern with the ‘human’ above all else. Yet this is the hallmark of humanist political thought, encompassing notions of freedom, equality, property, knowledge, agency, time, and so on. This course rethinks ‘politics’ (theory and modes of action) from the more-than-human perspective of political ecology in conjunction with Black, Indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial thought. We will challenge political concepts that justify the domination of nature for human flourishing, and consequently question prevalent notions of what counts as ‘human’ and what as ‘nature’. We will situate anthropocentric politics within histories of capitalism and colonialism and explore the interconnections between human and non-human domination through such processes as ecological imperialism, racial capitalism, and environmental racism. Toward the end of the course, we will explore recent scholarship on modes of political action suitable for building alternate, just futures for all forms of life in a more-than-human world.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will explore the evolution of Russian Foreign Policy from Czarist times to the present. The main theme will be the question of continuity and change, as the course will seek to determine to what degree current Russian Foreign Policy is rooted in the Czarist(1613-1917) and Soviet(1917-1991) periods, and to what degree it has operated since 1991 on a new basis. The main emphasis of the course will be on Russia's relations with the United States and Europe, China, the Middle East and the countries of the former Soviet Union--especially Ukraine, the Baltic States, Transcaucasia and Central Asia. The course will conclude with an analysis of the Russian reaction to the Arab Spring and its impact both on Russian domestic politics and on Russian foreign policy.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Through an intensive and in-depth reading of theorists, thinkers, historians, and political scientists, this course will take students through the deeply interconnected story of American race relations and labor politics. We will examine primary source material, such as the essays of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the speeches of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the memoirs of Charles Denby and Angelo Herndon, and the pamphlets of Claudia Jones; we will read historical accounts which situate these figures in their context; and we will engage critically with the fundamental topic: in the United States, what is the relationship between race and class; racism and exploitation; civil rights and labor activism? Toward the end of the course, we will examine recent scholarship that has returned to these themes to show how deeply imbricated America—its people, its institutions, its political economy—remains to this history.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course is an introduction to the Congressional role in foreign policy. The Constitution grants the President the authority to conduct foreign policy. Yet it also gives Congress a substantial role in the shaping of foreign policy. The roles are not always clear, creating an inherent tension between these two branches of government and efforts on each side to increase their power. This class will address the “rules of the road” in conducting American foreign policy and how they change. The class will go beyond theory to include case studies that show the tension between Congress and the Administration – including the Iran Agreement, Climate Change, the use of sanctions and American policy towards Cuba. The course will include guest lecturers who work in Congress on the various aspects of foreign policy – including appropriations, intelligence, oversight and investigations. We will address the Congressional role in ratification of treaties and in declaring war. The class will consider the different ways that each branch of government approaches human rights and sanctions. The class will also address the domestic political aspects of foreign policy – including the role of advocacy groups and special interests and the political use of Congressional investigations. One class might be held in Washington D.C. at the U.S. Senate, so would require additional time for travel.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines the growth and development of the American state’s coercive institutions, namely, the military and police. We will explore the ways in which the American state makes war, fights crime, and polices the boundaries of citizenship. While we tend to approach these topics from the perspective of international relations, law, or political philosophy, this course focuses on American politics and institutions. How did the United States secure control over a transcontinental territory in the absence of a large standing army? Why did the federal government try to criminalize vices, and how were these statutes enforced? How did violence influence the development of the American state, and to what extent do these historical processes explain warfare and law enforcement today?
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is revolution and how is it done? Who is up to the task of revolution: the nation, working class, the colonized? How do radicals learn from the mistakes of past revolutions and evaluate the possibility of revolution in their own time? In this course, we will follow a series of debates in political theory in France from forerunners to the French Revolution (Rousseau, Sieyes) through to the aftermath of May 1968 revolts (Kristeva, Badiou, Foucault). The goal of the course is to map these theoretical debates alongside historical events in French history to which these theories are in some way responses and interventions. Besides the two major historical events bookending the course, we will also chart a course through 19th Century and 20th Century developments in the theories of popular sovereignty, violence, decolonization, and revolution (looking to theorists like Blanqui, Sorel, Fanon, Beauvoir, Sartre, and Althusser among others). Beyond the particular French examples discussed in the course, we will also focus on broader questions about the relationship between political theory and history, and we will discuss a variety of approaches to making sense of theory and history alongside one another. No previous familiarity with political theory or French history is expected for this course. Readings in French history will be assigned alongside works of political theory to help contextualize the material.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course investigates the roots of the American police, and its impact on people and place. Political theorist Markus Dubber calls police the “most expansive, most amorphous of governmental powers.” Policing is a key component of state power, but the current web of police institutions was never inevitable. In studying the deliberate creation of the police, we will pay particular attention to race-class hierarchies in the historical and contemporary carceral state. We will struggle through questions on safety, freedom, repression, and political power, such as: How did a country founded on principles of radical republicanism develop vast institutions of patrol and surveillance? Under what conditions do police powers expand or contract? And what contributes to safety in America? This course will first, look at the historic roots of American police. The next section of the course attempts to analyze how or when these institutions intervene in the lives of Americans. Next, we will study police from the perspective of policed populations and think about what impact these interactions have on American democracy and belonging. Through studying police and prisons, students will learn about an important face of the American state and how certain state functions are differentially distributed along lines of race and class.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Aitchison Students Only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The fundamental units of all political life are organizations. Interest groups, social movements, political parties, militaries, legislatures, police forces, and schools all have to solve the fundamental problems faced by all organizations—how to acquire resources, generate support from external constituencies, develop coherent strategies and coordinate joint action. These fundamental challenges will be the subject of this course, which is designed to equip students with the skills of organizational analysis, drawing on insights from political science, sociology, history and economics.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Aitchison Students Only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Aitchison Students Only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Aitchison Students only
Aitchison Students Only.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences
The United States is a capitalist economy and we live in a capitalist world. This a fact we take for granted and therefore spend little time examining. Capitalism’ proponents attribute our society’s unprecedented wealth and technological advances to this economic system. Some go so far as to claim that modern democracy and social progress are impossible without a capitalist economy. Critics point to growing social inequality and a slew of environmental ills as proof of capitalism’s unsustainability. Some suggest that capitalism is antithetical to true democracy and human flourishing. But what exactly is capitalism? How did it evolve in the USA and how does the form capitalism takes in the United States differ from the forms it takes elsewhere? And, crucially, how is capitalism shaped by – and how does it shape – contemporary politics? And how exactly is this all related to liberalism, conservatism, neoliberalism, libertarianism, socialism, and democratic socialism? This seminar is designed to help students critically approach these questions.Rather than taking simplistic pro-contra approach, this seminar will examine capitalism along four axes: as a political-economic system, a corollary set of structures and institutions, the force behind a specific form of state organization, and the determinant of how society and individuals act and see themselves. To explore these issues, we will focus on a number of contemporary political issues, with a primary geographic focus on the United States, including the following: the debates over the welfare state and socialized healthcare; unions, lobbies, and special interests; the connection between capitalism, culture, and ideology; the effects of a capitalist organization of labor of questions of race, gender, and citizenship; the commodification of the environment and other species; and the process of critique, resistance, and social change in a capitalist system. Throughout, we will discuss the theoretical and empirical arguments put forward by a historically and disciplinarily broad range of thinkers including Karl Marx, Simone Weil, John Locke, Adam Smith, Robert Nozick, Thomas Sewell, Nancy Fraser, David Graeber, Melinda Cooper, Andreas Malm, and Guy Debord, through to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elon Musk.
Writing Intensive