Political Science

The course analyzes contemporary Chinese politics and international relations, focusing on historical background, economic and socio-cultural dynamics.  

China's return to regional and global prominence has profound implications for understanding the future evolution of the international system but also how states engage with a non-Western superpower. This course examines the international relations of China from 1949 to present. It highlights the changing and enduring characteristics of China's foreign policy through investigating the role the Party (CCP), the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the Red aristocrats have on foreign policy in the region and globally. This course also looks at China's newer initiatives such as the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) to glean a better understanding of China's vision of itself on the world stage. 

The course explores the work of key thinkers who focus on the politics of modernity, with a three part division based on society, the state and the economy. It looks at writers such as Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Spencer, Keynes, Polanyi and Hayek, and their influence on issues that continue to dominate political debate in the current era, including class, the state, social and political movements, and national identity.

Social justice has long been at the heart of 'development' – alongside economic growth, environmental sustainability and accountable governance. Further, these other goals are often regarded as instrumental to justice: growth enables surplus for redistribution; sustainability ensures fairness to future generations; and accountability promotes more equitable shares. Rather than debate ‘social justice’ in abstract terms, this course engages with embedded, ethnographic perspectives: why does injustice prevail; why do inequalities persist; why are states violent; how do people come to resist and mobilize for change; engage with the state; or turn to violent opposition? In listening to people’s perspectives, understanding their beliefs and desires, the course also introduces the anthropological approach to development at large. 

On this course students learn some of the basic and most important questions that political thinkers have struggled with over the ages, including: What does it mean to come together in a political community? What is a politics of fear?  And what might be a politics of hope? What is the relationship between politics and violence and war? Between politics and morality? How does politics balance the claims of order with the claims of liberty? And how can we use politics to change the world? Through close engagement with core texts that include Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, Arendt, Havel and Foucault, this course helps students come to understand the key coordinates of political experience and political activity.

Subsequent to the introductory lecture, this course is divided into three sections. The first main section provides an historical and political overview of the "war on terror" in relation to thinking about other types of wars. It considers how the prosecution of the war on terror has come to shape not only military, but also legal and governmental discourse and practice in the post 9/11 era. The second section invites students to consider ideas and practices of security as a central feature of this. It considers the rise of private military contracting, immigration, humanitarianism, urban geopolitics, and the overlap between health and security concerns. The third section focuses on the political-economic underpinnings of many of these developments and challenges students to think of conflict as an embedded social phenomenon: as much a part of contemporary discourses on the economy as it is something with merely economic implications.