Do ethical considerations matter in international relations? Should they? These questions are examined from the perspective of Western writers on these specific issues: just war, intervention, human rights, weapons of mass destruction, and distributive justice. The course also considers challenges to the international system posed by the critiques and responses of non-Western states and peoples.

This course examines Islamic political thought from the origins of Islam to the present. It considers how Muslim thinkers over the past 14 centuries have understood such fundamental political concepts as the state, leadership, and law. The seminar also includes modern Muslim reflections on political concepts of Western origin, such as democracy, nationalism, and civil society.

The silk roads were ancient transportation and trade links that wound their way across the Eurasian continent, or by sea through the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, to Europe. They carried silk, glass, jade, and moved religions and literatures across continents. Today, the new silk roads carry oil, gas, drugs, capitalism, and immigrants seeking better lives.

Elections are at the core of both the vitality and fragility of American democracy. Free and responsive government is hard to imagine without elections, yet U.S. elections suffer from relatively low turnout, increasing polarization, invisible money, racial and gender inequality, partisan gerrymandering, and new forms of voter disenfranchisement. This course offers students an overview of American elections by placing the November elections in historical and comparative perspective and following their development in real time.

In this examination of American foreign policy since 1898, topics include the emergence of the United States as a global power, its role in World War I and II, its conduct and interests in the cold war, and its possible objectives in a post-cold war world. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between domestic interests and foreign policy, the role of nuclear weapons in determining policy, and the special difficulties in implementing a democratic foreign policy.

Why do people mobilize? When do they do so? Why and how do they create movements? Are social movements successful paths towards social change? If so, under which conditions? This course will review the main theories of social movements and use them to analyze cases from around the world. Some of the cases we will take upon are the Arab Spring, the American civil rights movement, women and indigenous movements in Latin America, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and the environmental movement in Europe.

Since its creation at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union dominated the minds of Western foreign policymakers. None of the West's policies in the Middle East, the Third World, Europe, or China after World War II can be understood without the study of Soviet foreign policy. We will examine the development of Soviet foreign policy since 1917 and, following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the role played by Russia and Russia and the former Soviet republics in the far more complex and multipolar "New World Order." What should U.S.

This course presents international norms and institutions for regulating conflict, including promoting economic well-being, protecting human rights, exploring and using outer space, and controlling exploitation and pollution of the oceans. The course considers international agreements, problems of lawmaking, interpretation, and compliance; nationality and the status of foreigners and their investments; the principle of self-determination; and interests of postcolonial states as they impinge on the international legal order.

"Black Metropolis" refers to the more than half a million black people jammed into a South Side ghetto in Chicago at mid-twentieth century that featured an entrenched black political machine, a prosperous black middle class, and a thriving black cultural scene in the midst of massive poverty and systemic inequality. This course will follow the political, economic, and cultural developments of what scholars considered to be the typical urban community in postwar United States.

This course explores the overlapping dualities of the feminine and the masculine, the private and the public, the home and the world. We examine different forms of power over the body; the ways gender and sexual identities reinforce or challenge the established order; and the cultural determinants of 'women's emancipation.' We emphasize the politics of feminism, dealing with themes that include culture, democracy, and the particularly political role of theory and on theoretical attempts to grasp the complex ties and tensions between sex, gender, and power.