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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This class is about the means, methods, and motives for violence in international politics. We will study the causes of war; the effectiveness of forces on the battlefield; and the implications of both for contemporary problems in American foreign policy. In so doing, we will analyze some of the major theories of international relations, review the historical events that gave birth to the modern world, and gain a basic understanding of the nuts and bolts of military forces. The course has very little international economics in it and even less about international organizations. It focuses on states and therefore mostly ignores non-state and transnational actors, neither terrorists nor Doctors without Borders make an appearance. Sunshine, roses, and happy thoughts are not present in great abundance. This is the seedier side of international politics: the behavior of Great Powers, yesterday and today. Why take such a course? The impulse to drawback from the brutality of war is humane, and in the present era of relative peace and prosperity, natural. But the subject matter could not be more important, despite its dark nature. Discovering the causes of past wars, the present peace, and the dynamics of state behavior throughout history will provide vital clues to navigating the problems of today and tomorrow. After a similar period of peace during the nineteenth century, people could and did write that the problem of war was behind us. Things worked out rather differently. It will pay massive dividends to get our predictions right for the coming century, and this class will help you think about how to make them.
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3.00 Credits
Tens of thousands of international organizations populate our world. IGOs, whose members are governments of sovereigns, range from the Nordic Association for Reindeer Research to the UN and NATO; NGOs, whose members are private groups and individuals, include the International Seaweed Association as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross. We will examine where they come from, what they do, and to whom they matter, and will examine their agency, efficiency, and accountability. We cover the history, structures and functions of international organizations using case studies.
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students
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3.00 Credits
This course offers a broad overview of global political economy, the study of how international economic relations are influenced by politics and, in turn, how economics influences politics. Students will learn frameworks for analyzing the global politics of economic resource allocation, consumption, and distribution. Focus will be placed on the interconnectivity between states and markets, power and wealth, and how these affect policy decisions. Topics covered include the WTO, money, financial crisis and innovation, debt, energy, foreign aid, and other forms of globalization. Throughout the course we will examine contemporary problems that threaten the viability of the liberal international economic order and, in conclusion, assess its future in light of rising powers and emerging economies.
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3.00 Credits
The core activity of this seminar is the careful reading and sustained discussion of selected works by Plato and Aristotle, but we will also engage such other thinkers as Epictetus and Augustine, and, from a political and theoretical point of view, selections from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Among the questions that we will address: What is justice? How can it be known and pursued? How is political power generated and exercised? What are the social and ethical prerequisites--and consequences--of democracy? Must the freedom or fulfillment of some people require the subordination of others? Does freedom require leading (or avoiding) a political life? What distinguishes that kind of life from others? What does it mean to be "philosophical" or to think "theoretically" about politics? Although we will attempt to engage the readings on their own terms, we will also ask how the vast differences between the ancient world and our own undercut or enhance the texts' ability to illuminate the dilemmas of political life for us.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers an overview of major works of modern political theory by considering the central importance in these texts of a characteristic figure of the modern era: homo faber, or man as maker. We will explore various efforts to critique earlier doctrines of the naturalness or givenness of power, authority, law, justice, or virtue and to rethink politics as--for better or worse--a thoroughly artificial, contingent creation of human individuals and groups. What understandings of politics were opened (and foreclosed) by this concern with man as a maker of the very grounds of politics? We will begin with Machiavelli?s displacement of the traditional political virtues with virtu--the genius for creating new political foundations. We will engage with the social contract tradition's varied accounts of human nature and political artifice, as well as the attitudes towards homo faber, held by important critics of social contract theory. Finally, we will consider several ambivalent appraisals of homo faber, by modern and late-modern thinkers who took seriously the extent to which man is himself a product, made by his own political and technological inventions. The thinkers we will read could include Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Giambattista Vico, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Mary Shelley, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
What is generally known as Just War Theory (JWT), first clearly formulated by Augustine and then developing both theistic and non-theistic variants, is currently challenged by terrorism, torture, and weapons of mass destruction. Participants in this tutorial will review prominent current forms of JWT, examing how each deals--or can be adapted to deal--with these challenges. Participants will aim to discover, or perhaps in part to develop, the currently best available theory concerning the political ethics of torture, terrorism, counterterrorism, and the production and uses of weapons of mass destruction.
Prerequisite:
Any Philosophy course, Political Science 203, or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
Economic liberalism holds that, society is better off if people enjoy economic freedom. Its critics point to what they believe this position ignores or what it wrongly assumes, and hence, how it would make bad policy. This course explores the relationship between politics and economics by surveying influential works of political economy. Its first part examines major thinkers in relation to the historical development of capitalism in Western Europe and the United States: the classical liberalism of Adam Smith, Karl Marx's revolutionary socialism, and the reformist ideas of John Stuart Mill, and John Maynard Keynes. The second part considers more recent writings that revise and critique liberalism from a variety of perspectives, and then illustrates the contending perspectives with reference to important policy areas. The historical focus of the course permits you to appreciate the ongoing dialogue between classical and contemporary views of political economy, while classroom discussion involves frequent reference to current public policy issues.
Prerequisite:
Economics 110 and 120 or equivalent; Political Science 201 or 203 (may be taken concurrently with POEC 250) or AP credit in American Politics (or permission of instructor); open to non-majors
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3.00 Credits
This course examines debates in feminist theory about the relationship between science, gender and power in politics. On the one hand, shifting conceptions of gender have strongly influenced the development of the sciences in modernity: for example, feminists have argued that attempts to authorize science above other modes of knowing often implicitly or explicitly cast women as objects, not subjects, of knowledge. On the other hand, shifting conceptions of science have strongly influenced the development of feminist theory and practice: for example, debates about reproductive rights are often couched in terms of a conflict between reliable scientific knowledge of embryos, STDs, etc. and an unscientific, patriarchal worldview. Under what conditions can science and technology serve to transform, and under what conditions to reinforce, power imbalances based on gender, race, and sexuality? Should feminist theory embrace objectivity and model itself upon scientific procedures of knowledge production, or should feminists eschew objectivity as a myth told by the powerful about their own knowledge-claims and develop an alternative approach to knowledge? What is "objectivity" anyway, and how has this norm changed through history? Rather than treating science as a monolith, we will endeavor to understand the implications of various sciences--as enacted and imagined in various historically specific situations--for gender and politics. Readings may include texts by Rene Descartes, Andreas Vesalius, Londa Schiebinger, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Helen Longino, Nancy Harstock, Sandra Harding, bell hooks, Donna Haraway, Mary Hawkesworth, Octavia Butler, and more.
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3.00 Credits
This course provides a broad introduction to the politics of contemporary Africa, emphasizing along the way the diversity of African politics. It seeks to challenge the widespread image of African politics as universally and inexplicably lawless, violent, and anarchic. This course begins by examining the nature and legacies of colonial rule and nationalist movements. From there, we consider the African state, highlighting the factors that have made some states weak and others strong. The course then turns to how ethnicity, class and civil society operate as bases of political mobilization. Finally, the course analyzes the causes, consequences and limitations of the recent waves of political and economic liberalization across Africa.
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3.00 Credits
The People's Republic of China presents us with two grand political narratives: socialism and democracy. In the Maoist era, a distinctive understanding of socialism, which claimed to be a more genuine democracy, brought hope and, ultimately, tragedy to hundreds of millions of people. In the post-Mao era, Chinese politics has been driven by the need to redefine socialism in the wake of the world-historic calamities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution and, more recently, the end of the Cold War. The state cannot simply give up the socialist myth because without it the rationale for Communist Party hegemony evaporates. But China's rulers cannot avoid political reform, both ideological and institutional, because to do so heightens the legitimacy crisis born of Maoist failures. Within this context has emerged the contemporary Chinese democracy movement which, in all of its complexity, looks to both socialist discourse and Western practice to create a new politics that checks tyrannical abuses of state power and engenders a civil society. What is Chinese democracy now? What are its prospects and what is its relationship to the ideas of socialism?
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