As we briefly touch ground before going off for another long-ish holiday, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on the themes and grand motifs of the first half of the semester and contemplate what’s coming up in the next five weeks.
By and large, the first half of the semester centered around political-economy. That is, we looked at things like rights, representation, governance, trade, inequality, and such like. We looked at these topics through examination of Tunisia and Egypt, the two Arab countries that had the most notably coherent popular protest movements, and the two that succeeded in pressuring the resignations of their leaders. I suppose Yemen could be counted as a success in that sense too, given that its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, did agree to step down. We’ll leave that as an open question.
On Canvas I pegged this “half” of the semester to cover Libya, Syria, Yemen and the Egyptian counter-revolution. Inevitably, that means talking about Iraq, ISIS, the Gulf countries, Turkey, Iran, Russia, the EU and the United States as collateral topics.
Here we’re looking at countries whose leaders were forcibly deposed (Libya), resisted and endured (Syria), or were replaced by an “old guard” that worked to restore the previous political arrangement and system of governance (Egypt, and I suppose we’ll count Yemen here too with qualifications).
We’re also going to be looking a lot more closely at violence and armed conflict in this half of the semester. We’ll also be looking a lot at the idea of a clash of civilization and the rhetoric of Us versus Them. So, you can expect that we’ll focus a lot on analyzing three specific perspectives on globalization: political realism, radicalism and cosmopolitanism.
Agenda for Tuesday, March 22
- Review assignments for second half of semester.
- Signup for research project meetings.