Examination of the factors leading to the war in Asia, the nature of the conflict, and the legacy of the war for all those involved. Topics include Japan's seizure of Korea, the invasion of China, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the war in the Pacific, the racial dimensions of the Japanese empire, the comfort women, biological warfare, the dropping of the atomic bombs, and the complicated relationship between history and memory.

Topics course. Development of discourses on gender as well as lived experiences of women from the rise of Islam to the present. Topics include the politics of marriage, divorce, and reproduction; women?s political and economic participation; masculinity; sexuality; impact of Islamist movements. Provides introduction to main themes, and nuanced historical understanding of approaches to the study of gender in the region.

Between 1914 and 1945, the world was stricken with economic crisis, ideological conflict, and world war. These crises led many to despair of democracy, and embrace totalitarianism. Yet, in the wake of World War II, a generation of political theorists sought to dispel the assumptions underlying totalitarian ideologies, advance timely defenses of liberal principles, and identify the conditions necessary to sustaining democracy.

Topics course. This course examines the processes and organizations that govern foreign policy decisions in the United States. We will view this topic through a variety of lenses, including theories of individual cognition and bias, small-group decision-making, bureaucratic politics, and organizational behavior. These different approaches will be applied to several in-depth case studies drawn from the last fifty years of U.S. foreign policy. Prerequisites: junior or senior standing; Gov 241 (International Politics) or equivalent; and one college-level course in American politics.

Topics course: This course examines the state. After considering what we mean by the state and exploring the bases of its authority and power, this course will turn to cases from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the United States. The themes addressed in this comparative examination of the state include how states form, the strength and weakness of states, the survival and collapse of states, and the contemporary challenges to the authority and power of states.

Topics Course. An examination of environmental policy making within the federal government, with special emphasis on how Congress deals with environmental policy issues. A variety of substantive policy areas from clean air to toxic waste will be covered. Students will complete research papers on an environmental policy topic of their choice. Prerequisite: a 200-level course in American Government.

This course examines some of the most theoretically interesting and influential variants of liberal political thought. Liberalism, as a broad tradition and orientation in political thinking, has tended to dominate both academic political theory, and much of the ?public philosophy? of Western, democratic countries, in recent history. This course seeks to underscore the rich variety?as well as the shared assumptions and recurrent tensions?that mark liberal thought from its ?pre-history? in the 17th and 18th centuries to the present.

This course will assess stresses in the international system arising from global competition over vital and valuable resources, especially oil, water, food, gems, and minerals. The course will begin by considering the status of world resource supplies and the pressures that are contributing to increased resource competition, such as globalization, climate change, population growth, and the rise of new economic dynamos like China and India.

In this course we ask and answer the following questions: Just what is "United States foreign policy?" By what processes does the U.S. define its interests in the global arena? What instruments does the U.S. possess to further those interests? Finally, what specific foreign policy questions are generating debate today? Prerequisite: 241 or permission of the instructor.

Before AIDS became the international priority it is today, local communities and national governments experiencing the AIDS pandemic firsthand responded in diverse ways. Why have some states been more active than others in responding to AIDS? What has been tried in the fight against AIDS in Africa, and more importantly, what, if anything, is working? What conditions are necessary for success? In this course, we aim to learn about politics and policy in resource-constrained settings using the case study of response to AIDS in Africa.