2020-21 Academic Catalog

Seventy percent of the world’s population live in closed autocracies or electoral autocracies today. As the Taliban retook Afghanistan and Myanmar’s budding democracy fell to a military coup, there is an urgent need to better understand non-democratic regimes. This course takes a deep dive into dictatorships past and present, exploring key questions of who holds power, how power is monopolized, how controls and resistance interact, and how regimes transition to and from democracy. This course will also investigate the social and economic consequences of dictatorship, focusing primarily on how regime type interacts with economic development, the protection of rights, and inequality.