Erzen Oncel
Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in Political Science
Current and upcoming courses
Comparative Politics
POL2202
Introduction to the major principles, theories, and debates in the field of comparative politics. We explore critical questions such as: How are states created? What is the difference between state and nation? Why do states adopt different political and economic systems? How are democratic and authoritarian regimes different? What are the institutional designs of presidential versus parliamentary systems, and what are the trade-offs related to governance and people’s participation within those systems? How do societal organizations and identities based on geography, region, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender interact with one another and the state? We will study political systems, institutions, economic programs, political processes, and non-state actors as they affect change within countries and across different regions of the world. We will also examine the methods that scholars of comparative politics use to study politics and test hypotheses.
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Race and Ethnicity in Global Politics
POL2347
This course provides a comparative, global analysis of race and ethnicity, examining their political implications across regions and regime types. We begin by interrogating what ethnicity and race mean, how boundaries of membership are drawn, and how scholars measure these identifications. From there, we turn to the fraught relationship between ethnicity, the nation-state, and nationalism, paying particular attention to the conflicts that arise when efforts to align identity with state structures generate exclusion or violence. We will also examine how colonization, slavery, and the persistence of majority identity supremacy continue to shape contemporary politics, as well as the politics of minorities, indigenous peoples, and multiculturalism. In the final part of the course, we analyze how ethnicity and race structure politics across different political systems, asking: What is ethnic voting and where does it occur? Why do ethnic parties emerge in some countries but not in others? How do authoritarian regimes repress, co-opt, or mobilize ethnic identities? And what is the relationship between ethnic politics and political violence?