84.09 Political Responses to Capitalism
Is "globalization" good for democracy, as its advocates claim, or bad, as its critics assert? Are the arguments made by the two sides new or old? This seminar will try to gain perspective on these questions by considering the political reception of capitalism over time in Europe and North America. As capitalism has evolved, how has it been defined and described in public discourse? What arguments have been made about the relationship between capitalism and democracy? How has capitalism influenced the development of democracy? How has democracy shaped capitalism? Dist: SOC or INT.
84.10 The 1989 Revolutions
1989 was a year of ferment in all socialist countries. However, some socialist regimes crumbled, while others managed to stay in power. In this course we will analyze the experience of China (where protests were violently suppressed and failed to bring about political change), of the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria (where protests were relatively peaceful yet successful), and of Romania (where a bloody revolution was necessary to topple the regime). At the end of the course students will take part in a simulation where they will give advice to North Korean dissidents on how to topple the Communist regime.
84.11 Democracy and Accountability in Latin America (Identical to LACS 77)
The course surveys a range of topics relevant to modern Latin American democracy. The central theme is to examine what factors affect the development of democratic institutions and their effectiveness in providing accountable government. We consider the legacy of authoritarian regimes on contemporary politics, the importance of political culture, the role of elections, and a number of alternative frameworks for organizing representation and bargaining among political actors. Dist: SOC.
84.15 State-Building, Oil, and Islam in the Arab Gulf States
The most traditional of the middle eastern countries, the Arab Gulf States (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and Oman) have witnessed a series of profound economic and political upheavals since their independence that have kept ruling families in power and local societies largely powerless. In this course we investigate how the influx of oil revenues has shaped the institutions and power of the state in each country, how these state institutions in turn determined the range and shape of political interaction between rulers and local societies, and how Islam became a dividing mechanism to obtain legitimacy, used by local rulers and their opponents alike in pursuing alternative versions of how the state should be constructed.
84.17 The Rule of Law
The rule of law exists when laws are enforced with predictability, transparency, and fairness. We will begin the course by analyzing the conditions under which autocracies can develop a limited form of the rule of law, thus questioning the assumption that the rule of law can only arise in democracies. We will also focus on the special challenges facing federal states that attempt to develop the rule of law. We will then turn our attention to the institutions that ensure the operation of the rule of law –namely courts and bureaucracies –and analyze when and how they can become guarantors of the rule of law. Throughout the course, we will read about the rise of corruption in the absence of the rule of law. This course will be broadly comparative, with historical and contemporary examples drawn from East Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, from Latin America and Africa. Dist: SOC
84.18 Understanding the Social World: Paradigm, Method and Theory in Social and Political Science
Politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens all have theories about how the political world works. These theories are rarely articulated. Social scientists, in contrast, articulate their theories—but defend different theories and therefore adopt different approaches and methods as they identify puzzles and elaborate arguments. This seminar will compare different social science paradigms, beginning with their assumptions about (i) the nature of the social world as distinct from the physical world, (ii) the nature and limitations of human action, and (iii) the nature of causality in social phenomena. The goal is to enable students better to assess, use, and critique social science wherever they encounter it.
84.19 Islam and Politics: Local and Global Perspectives
Post-9/11 common sense conceptions of Islam tend to overemphasize its political role and to underestimate its internal political diversity. The seminar assesses these conceptions through a critical survey of the political role of Islam in the contemporary world both on the local level within states and on the global scale. Its central focus is the phenomenon of Islamist political activism with its distinguishable moderate and radical trends. The course examines the contextual causes and effects of this phenomenon, as well as its various antagonisms or alliances with regimes, secularist activists, and foreign powers in phenomena ranging from regime transitions, civil wars, revolution, and terrorism, to liberal reforms and pro-democracy movements. Cases covered include Muslim-majority countries as well as Muslim minorities in Western and non-Western countries.
84.20 Middle Eastern Democratic Transitions: Problems and Prospects
This course examines democratic reform movements and their authoritarian challengers in the Middle East. We will consider case studies of different types of authoritarian regimes along with characteristically different experiences with democratization efforts and their outcomes: Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Turkey, and Iran. The course also assesses externally-sponsored democracy promotion in the region and its often-paradoxical effects. The focus is on the relative effects of key factors on democratization: regime type, religion & culture, civil society, socio-economic development, oil wealth, terrorism, and regional & international politics.
84.21 Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Former Soviet Union (Identical to COCO 3)
This course will address a key unresolved puzzle in post-soviet studies: why have some of the 15 Soviet successor states became democratic, while others remain authoritarian? Several ex-Soviet states have evolved into full-fledged democracies (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), but others are best described as hard-core authoritarian regimes (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Belarus). A third group of countries falls in between –although they have moved closer to democracy, yet it is by no means certain that they will not revert back to some form of authoritarianism in the coming years (Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan). Russia’s example is instructive about the difficulties of casting away the legacies of authoritarianism: while during Yeltsin’s tenure most analysts believed that the country was bound to become a democracy, under Putin Russia reverted to authoritarianism. In this course we will look for explanations why those countries with shared history and institutions have ended up with such different political arrangements.
84.22 The World According to "Europe"
The discipline of ‘International Relations’ was long dominated by American scholars and debates among them. Over the past decade, however, voices have increased which claim that there is a ‘European’ approach to both the practice and the study of world politics. This course will explore the content and validity of this claim. Going beyond the sterile division of labor between analysing ‘European integration’ and ‘international politics’, the course will engage the question of what it means to take a ‘European’ perspective on the world. We will do so on a variety of levels, including whether European scholars have developed distinct ways of ‘theorizing’ IR, how they think about core concepts such as ‘the state’, ‘sovereignty’, or ‘security’, which issues matter to them and why, that is, how these directions/priorities are influenced by geography, history, or the process of European integration. Hence, we will also look at the practice of politics in and out of ‘Europe’ today. Underlying is also the question to what extent a ‘European’ perspective is (or may be) different from an ‘American’ one. Dist: SOC; WCult: NA/EU/W.
84.23 Politics of Peace in the Middle East
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