Winter 2000
This information effective for Winter 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes..
Winter 2000
This information effective for Winter 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes..
Instructor: Isebill V. Gruhn
What are human rights? Where do they come from? In what laws, institutions and practices are human rights embedded? We will first consider the philosophic, historical and legal context of human rights and read International Human Rights by Jack Donnelly. We will then move on to empirical case studies on selected human rights issues to see how the issues arise, how they are framed by international actors and what policies are being pursued. What happens if a right is violated? What consequences do violations have? What policies to address violations have been undertaken.
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
Jonathan Moore, Hard Choices Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention
Alex De Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The State of the World Refugees
Regular attendance in lecture classes and discussion sections. Daily reading of the New York Times. Four take-home writing assignments
Bruce D. Larkin
Winter 2000
For information on this course, please go to:
http://www.learnworld.com/COURSES/P80X/P80X.Syllabus.html
Instructor: Ronnie Lipschutz
459-3275
260 Stevenson College
Winter 2000
This junior politics seminar addresses the problem of justice in a global context, and why contemporary practice in international politics is so ill-suited to dealing with the problem. Students will read a selection of novels and texts, and will be required to write a number of short papers on readings and in-class discussions.
George Von der Muhll
Winter 2000
tel: 427-0346
email: mozart@cats.ucsc.edu
Politics 140B has been designated as suitable for meeting the Upper Division Core Course distribution requirement for Politics majors. It has no prerequisites. Those who seek to meet the general Social Sciences distribution requirement for the campus or the Politics Department's Lower Division requirement through a course in comparative politics should consider, among others, Politics 50 ("Democratic Politics", a course combining discussion of general issues of democratic theory and moral principles with comparative institutional analysis of parliamentary and presidential democratic regimes in their traditional homelands of America and Western Europe and their breakdown and emergence in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South and East Asia), which I shall offer in the first Summer School. Although, at the request of the Politics Department, I agreed to come back to teach these courses one last time, neither will be taught in its present format after this coming year.
Since I am leaving at the beginning of October for Tibet, a trek in the Nepalese Himalayas, Burma, and Cambodia, I will be altogether out of reach of e-mail or phone calls until December and unable to answer questions about the course until then. For that reason, I shall describe the course in greater than usual detail.
As its title suggests, Politics 140B offers a broad overview of the dynamics of change in political systems extending from Latin America across sub-tropical Africa and the Middle East to the Asian Far East. Nearly 80% of humanity currently lives within this zone. That percentage is certain to increase sharply within a few decades. Most of the battles of the Cold War were fought by proxy in the Third World. Most of the social conflicts and political upheavals in the post-Cold War world have likewised occurred there. By all indications, this pattern will extend well into the next century.
Students of politics have therefore strong reason to familiarize themselves with the politics of the Third World. Yet most American citizens, tourists, media outlets, and politicians show little familiarity with "Third" World societies beyond a few highly selective aspects of their cultures. They likewise show little disposition to move beyond these stereotypes except during brief periods when the American military becomes drawn into Third World conflicts. If anything, survey evidence suggests that much of the Third World is now less well known to the American public than it was some thirty or forty years ago. This indifference persists despite the fact that this region encompasses the sites of nearly all the great civilizations of the past, much of the world's most remarkable architecture, all of its great religions. Its peoples have experimented with the full range of political regimes in this century; and its ecological, economic, and ethnic identity crises promise to set the agenda for much of the next. Amid general levels of squalor and misery most Americans most fortunately cannot imagine, some sectors of the Third World have experienced an almost equally unimaginable surge of sudden wealth; and communal tensions, radical inequalities, and civic violence have not precluded the rise in their midst of some of the most shining political leaders of this century.
The extraordinary variety of topographies, climates, ethnicities, languages, religions, social structures, and political traditions within the Third World makes generalizations concerning its politics inherently suspect. And this problem is compounded by an extreme instability of Third World political regimes such as render cross-sectional descriptions of many of its contemporary governments of little validity beyond the year in which they are offered. The very features that make the Third World of exceptional value as a laboratory for students of comparative politics thus create special challenges in an introductory presentation.
This course will attempt to overcome these problems in four ways. Since it does not presuppose familiarity with or previous courses on the region, I shall make extensive use of my own slides and those of the World History collection to provide a visual context for the readings. I shall also concentrate on certain "core" nations in each region--China and Japan in the Asian Far East; India in South Asia; Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East; Nigeria and Tanzania in Africa; Brazil and Mexico in Latin America--so as to permit an adequately complex tracing of the intertwining ecological constraints, cultural traditions, patterns of economic growth, religious values, leadership strata, and contrasting encounters with the West that together have shaped these countries' differing degrees of political stability and their differing political agendas. Systematic comparison--most often, as the above list may suggest, paired comparisons and eventual triangulations--will be used as controls on explanations that may appear to fit individual cases. They will also be used to generate new or reformulated propositions to try out in the next case. Finally, since this course focuses on societal change, institutional development, and the search for a viable political community in contexts where military coups, regime collapse, and revolutionary reorientations are not exceptional events but the norm, it will freely employ long-term perspectives to identify persisting parameters and profoundly conditioning historical memories amid the often quite evanescent state structures and policies that happen to characterize these countries' governments in any particular year.
The reading for this course has been chosen in light of these ends. Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies , with its explicit focus on the problems of constructing stable and effective governments in deeply divided societies in which the traditional foundations of social order have begun to shift, has long been recognized as the single most comprehensive, provocative, and analytically ambitious text in the field,. We shall use and criticize it in this course to develop an agenda of questions. Thereafter, we shall be looking at the cases listed above, always with emphasis on the formation and disintegration of political authority and community. However, we shall do so at three levels. In a course in comparative politics, it is appropriate to focus on the problems of constructing and maintaining collectively binding authority at the level of what are still the fundamental building blocks of international order--the nation states. We shall therefore begin with politically sophisticated histories by John K. Fairbank and Kenneth Pyle that emphasize the distinctive challenges of modernization and the contrasting responses thereto by the Chinese and Japanese imperial regimes and their successors. Thereafter, we shall make use of several explicitly comparative country studies in a collective volume edited by Larry Diamond et. al., The Politics of Developing Countries.
Concurrently, however, we shall be traveling with prize-winning reporter Robert D. Kaplan, whose The Ends of the Earth documents a world of the 1990s extending from West Africa through Anatolia, Central Asia, India, and Indo-China in which exploding populations, decaying public facilities, pervasive corruption, pullulating diseases, communal violence, and a collapsing public authority of road blocks and armed gangs suggest the unreality of national boundaries and capital cities in this region as symbols of political community. While Kaplan, from his position at the grass roots, sees anarchy--or at least the parcelized sovereignty of neo-feudalism--as the coming political disorder of the Third World, Samuel Huntington, whose theses in his recent Clash of Civilizations I found discussed in Riyadh, Tokyo, Prague, Shanghai, and Buenos Aires, now argues in that book that in the post-Cold-War era national authorities are becoming consolidated and polarized around the "core" states of eight civilizational blocs. Searching for possible reconciliation of these conflicting theses concerning the critical tiers of public authority in the Third World will provide the final organizing focus of this course.
In addition to attending the three scheduled M-W-F lectures a week, members of Politics 140B will be expected to participate regularly and actively in a weekly discussion section. The T.A. will be Hilde Becker, a graduate student in History with many years of residence in China and Japan, though another T.A. will be added if, as in past years, the enrollment after the opening class exceeds 60 students. Written requirements for the class will consist of an introductory exercise and mid-term and final take-home examination essays. Because I am ending my regular (and happy) teaching association with the Politics Department with this course and expect to be frequently out of town for prolonged periods thereafter, you would be unwise to take this course if you have a past history of failing to complete the required work for a course within the time frame of the Quarter in which it is offered.
Winter, 1999
Instructor: Michael Urban
e-mail: urban47@cats
tel. 3153
office hours: M., W., 2:00-3:30, 282 Stevenson
This course concerns a young nation-state that has emerged from a very old culture and civilization-Russia. Accordingly, the approach taken here includes the study of past patterns of political practices and state organization-both tsarist and Soviet-that represent antecedents of, and profound influences upon, Russian politics today. But the emphasis falls on the present, on the interaction among the country's political forces whose residues seem slowly to accrete to a recognizable-if not especially stable-governmental/political order.
Naturally, the texts selected for the course reflect this approach to the subject matter. That by Urban (with Igrunov and Mitrokhin) focuses on popular mobilization, beginning in the perestroika period, that succeeded in toppling the Communist regime. It argues that the forms of organization and communication exhibited by the popular forces, while adequate to that task, have been particularly ill-suited to achieving their other announced goals: a democratic government based on the rule of law. Ries's book contributes to an understanding of that disappointing outcome through an analysis of cultural forms that seem to sustain a number of self-defeating social and political practices. McAuley's study enlarges this frame by taking up the matter of regional politics during the transition period and examining how contests for power between old and new elites have been shaped by a number of issues-identity and interest formulation, organization and resource deployment, and state building -that are fundamental to politics anywhere. The articles from Current History, along with others available at the reserve reading desk, take the story of Russia's difficult and worsening situation into the present.
The progression of lecture topics and reading assignments is primarily oriented toward a chronological treatment but, in order to develop various aspects of certain topics, a number of departures from the strictly chronological scheme are unavoidable. It is therefore highly recommended that the books by Urban, McAuley and Ries be read soon and straight through, relying on the pagination appended to the various topics (below) for the purpose of review before lecture sessions.
Course requirements include sitting for two examinations -a mid-term and a final -and writing a term paper (10-15 pages in length) on a topic selected by the student and approved by the instructor. The paper is due on the final day of class, but each student is strongly encouraged to submit a draft of his or her work at least two weeks prior to that date. This will enable the instructor to comment on the work in progress and, assumedly, assist in the production of a final draft which would benefit from revisions inspired by these comments.
Michael Urban with Vyacheslav Igrunov and Sergei Mitrokhin, The Rebirth of Political in Russia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Mary McAuley, Russia's Politics of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Nancy Ries, Russian Talk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Current History , Vol.97 (October, 1998).
Johnson's Russia List.
There is an additional number of readings listed under the topics, below, that are available at the reserve desk in the library. Those marked with an asterisk are also part of the course's required reading. Those marked with two asterisks are recommended.
*a. Stephen White, "The USSR: Patterns of Autocracy and Industrialism", A. Brown (ed.), Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (New York: Holmes & Meter, 1977).
**b. V. Podoprigora and Tatiana Krasnopevtseva, "Russian... in Domestic and Foreign Policy", Demokratizatsiya, Vol.3 (Spring, 1995), pp.166-176.
*c. Iu.M. Lotman and B.A. Uspenskii, "Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture" (handout).
**d. Mary McAuley, Soviet Politics. 1917-1991, pp.1-25.
*a. Moshe Lewin, "The Immediate Background of Soviet Collectivization", Soviet Studies,
Vol.17 (no.2,1965).
*b. J. Arch Getty, "Party and Purge in Smolensk: 1933-1937", Slavic Review, Vol.42,
Spring, 1983).
**c. McAuley, Soviet Politics, pp.26-47.
*a. Hillel Ticktin, Origins of the Crisis in the USSR, pp.6-79.
b. Urban, pp.3-55.
c. McAuley, pp.13-20.
a. Urban, pp.57-118.
b. MeAuley, pp. 20-27.
C. Ries, pp.1-82.
a.McAuley, pp.27-37.
*b. Michael Burawoy and Kathryn Hendley, "Between Perestroika and Privatization'9, Soviet Studies, Vol.44 (No.3, 1992), pp. 371-402.
*C. Michael Eliman and Vladimir Kontorovich, The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, pp.12-29.
a. Urban, pp. 119-233.
*b. Alexander Lukin, "Interpretations of Soviet State and Social Structure", Demokratizatsiya, Vol.3 (Fall, 1995), pp. 365-391.
c. McAuley, pp. 27-37.
a. Urban, pp. 234-254.
b. McAuley, pp. 37-41.
c. Ries, pp.83-160.
a. McAuley, pp. 42-231.
a. Urban, pp.257-290.
b. McAuley. pp. 232-263.
c. Ries, pp. 161-188.
Politics:
a. Urban, pp. 291-310.
b. McAuley, pp. 264-316.
c. Articles by McFaul and Rutland in Current History, pp. 307-318.
**d. Maryanne Ozernoy and Tatiana Samsonova, "Political History of Russian Bureaucracy and Roots of Its Power", Demokratizatsiya, Vol.3 (Summer, 1995), pp. 275-284.
Economics:
a. Articles by Goldman, Kramer, and Powell, in Current History, pp.319-324; 329-341.
*b. Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, "Russia's Virtual Economy". Foreign Affairs, Vol.77 (No. 5,1998), pp.53-67.
Social Groups:
*a. Anna Rotkirch and Anna Temidna, "What Does the (Russian) Woman Want'?", A Rotkirch and E. Haavio-Mannila (eds.), Women's Voices in Russia Today (Brookfield, VT: Dartmouth, 1995), pp.49-68.
*b. Matt Taibbi, "Coal Fires Burning", Transitions, Vol.5 (Aug.1998).
**c. idem, "Down and Out in Moscow", Transitions, Vol.5 (Nov., 1998).
**d. Illarion Sergeev, "Surviving the Russian Apocalypse", Transitions, Vol.5 (Oct., 1998).
The Army
a. Herspring in Current History, pp. 325-328.
**b. Victor Kalashnikov, "Discharge of the Light Brigade", Transitions, Vol.5 (Nov., 1998).