Why did North Korea’s Kim Jong Un kill his half-brother with chemical weapons in a Malaysian airport? Will President Trump's letters and summitry convince him to denuclearize? Why did Bashar al-Assad hold a presidential election in Syria during the middle of a civil war in 2014? Why did the Arab Spring happen, and what explains why some of those countries have since become democracies, while others have slid back into dictatorship? Will China survive and become the next world superpower, or will it collapse? Why did Ferdinand Marcos refer to the martial law era in the Philippines as a “constitutional dictatorship” – and what is a “constitutional dictatorship” exactly? What are the implications of right-leaning populism in Europe today for European democracy?
This course is an introduction to the causes and character of contemporary authoritarian and democratic regimes worldwide: how and why democracy and dictatorship are created, how the leaders of these two types of political systems rule, why they survive, why people resist dictatorship or don’t, and why certain regimes survive or fall. The course also includes an opportunity to examine how international and American foreign policy affect the answers to some of these questions.
We will use academic articles, news stories, case studies, and films to study the workings of democracy and dictatorship and think about how their operations affect foreign policy decisions. You should come away from this course with 1) comprehension of some major theoretical debates about dictatorship and democracy; 2) knowledge of how these debates apply to important countries and issues in the world today; and 3) an understanding of why questions of democratic and non-democratic governance matter for global policy.