This course will examine the foreign policy of the Russian Federation of the past twenty years. As a successor state Russia has inherited both the Soviet Union's clout (nuclear arms, a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council) and Soviet debts—monetary, psychological, and historical. What are the conceptual foundations of Russian diplomacy? Can we deconstruct Russian nationalism so as to examine its different trends and their impact on foreign policy? Do Russian exports of oil and gas define Russian diplomacy, as it is often claimed?

This seminar examines how the digital age (the third industrial revolution) has transformed politics around the world, in democratic and non-democratic contexts. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) change how people, states, and non-state actors interact. Technology creates new access points and vulnerabilities, new windows of opportunity and new politically salient actors, new political behaviors and types of participation.

Nuclear activity is ridden with contradictions: nuclear power is one of the most environmentally friendly sources of energy, yet nuclear waste presents considerable health dangers. While nuclear energy is badly needed by many states for economic development, it can lay the foundations for the acquisition of the most powerful weapons in the world. Few countries embody the contradictions of nuclear power to the degree to which the United States does. The first country to detonate a nuclear device (and the only one to have used it in conflict), the U.S.

This course is a study of aspects of the canon of American political thought. While examining the roots of American thought in Puritanism and Quakerism, the primary focus will be on American transcendentalism and its impact on subsequent thought. Among those whose works we are likely to consider are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, W.E.B. DuBois, William James, Jane Addams, John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell.

Not open to first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Dumm.

Nationalist fervor seemed likely to diminish once so-called Third World nations achieved independence. However, the past few years have witnessed the resurgence and transformation of nationalism in the post-colonial world. Where anti-colonial nationalist movements appeared to be progressive forces of social change, many contemporary forms of nationalism appear to be reactionary. Did nationalist leaders and theoreticians fail to identify the exclusionary qualities of earlier incarnations of nationalism? Were they blind to its chauvinism? Or has nationalism become increasingly intolerant?

The Affective Interface explores a range of issues concerning the technologized body—though none more urgent than the political implications surrounding life itself. The course considers the relationship of the mind and body to technology in contemporary culture between 1990 and 2020.

The course investigates the connections between the politics of aging and political discourses surrounding seniors from an intersectional and interdisciplinary perspective. The premise of the course highlights the fact that prejudice, stereotyping, and othering based on age (both towards the young, but primarily against the old) are "the last acceptable prejudice" in democratic societies. While there are many international conventions about the rights of children or women, there is little in international law that seeks to protect seniors.

This is a modified version of POSC 232, The Political Economy of Development. The first half of the course is identical to 232, but the second half will have a different focus: the political economy of oil.

The United States is at a crossroads in its political history. Long thought of as the paradigmatic example of a stable, multiracial, multiethnic, constitutional democracy, today Americans are coming to terms with the fact that this country’s history is more complex than that imagining would suggest and the fact that survival of our democratic institutions can no longer be taken for granted. The questions that will guide this course are: How has the United States come to this point, and how did we reach the current crisis of democracy?

U.S. politics have been an object of fascination not only for American citizens but also for scholars, students, and observers from around the world. This course provides both an introduction to key scholarly arguments about American political institutions, development and participation as well as a chance to engage with the important question of how distinctive the politics of the U.S. actually are.